Trivia

• “Stan” was released as the album’s third main single on November 20, 2000, following “The Real Slim Shady” and “The Way I Am.”
• The song peaked at No. 51 on the Billboard Hot 100 and topped the charts in twelve countries outside the United States, including the United Kingdom, Germany, Finland, and Australia.
• Although Dido is credited as a featured artist, she did not actually record any vocals for the song; her vocals were entirely sampled from “Thank You,” a song recorded for the soundtrack of the film Sliding Doors.
• Following the release of “Stan,” Dido included “Thank You” on her debut album, No Angel, on June 1, 2000. She later released the song as a single in September of that year. “The Radio Edit” was restructured to repeat the first verse — featured in the chorus of “Stan” — while omitting the song’s second verse, likely to capitalize on the popularity of Eminem’s hit.
• The song’s producer, The 45 King, discovered Dido’s track in the movie Sliding Doors and initially recorded it from a VCR. After creating the first version, he played it for Eminem, who approved it, and together they completed the track before seeking Dido’s permission. She later received the song on a CD, and thrilled with what she heard, she approved the sample.
• The “underground” track referenced by the character Stan in the song is “3hree6ix5ive” by OldWorlDisorder, while the Rawkus track he mentions is most likely “Any Man,” though it could also refer to “Watch Deez,” Eminem’s other recording for Rawkus Records, produced by DJ Spinna.
• Since the release of “Stan,” the term stan has become a widely used label for an obsessive or die-hard fan of an artist or celebrity. On June 1, 2017, the word was officially added to the English dictionary as both a noun — a stan — and a verb — to stan.
• In 2013, Eminem released a sequel titled “Bad Guy” on his eighth studio album, The Marshall Mathers LP 2.
• In 2025, to celebrate 25 years since the song’s release, “Stan” was reissued on 7-inch vinyl, with “Bad Guy” serving as the B-side.
• Eminem later sampled Dido a second time on “Don’t You Trust Me” by 2Pac, featured on his posthumous album Loyal To The Game in 2004.
• Dr. Dre later took a crack at sampling Dido’s “Thank You” for “Round Here” by Snoop Dogg, featured on his 2006 album Tha Blue Carpet Treatment.

Words from Eminem

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I get a lot of fan mail – some of it’s normal, and some of it’s crazy fan mail. I’m a crazy guy – not clinically insane, but crazy – so I attract a lot of weirdos. I wanted to make the song about an obsessed fan and base it on letters that I’ve got, showing the way people perceive me. […] I look at almost every letter I get, but I don’t have time to write back — I’m just too busy. The plot is that I don’t have time to write back to this guy, so he thinks I’m dissin’ him, and finally at the end of the song I write back not knowing that he’s killed himself.

“

It was a surreal moment for me to write a song like that from the perspective of “this is happening to me,” the way I feel about Dr. Dre or LL Cool J. […] It was crazy that that shit was happening to me. Trying to take it all in was really weird.

I was still living at Kim’s mom’s house on Charmers. I remember where I was at when I wrote the song. And it was just weird because we hadn’t moved and bought a house yet. My second album was out before I actually bought my first house. The fact that I was in that position to write a song from the perspective of an obsessed fan over me was crazy.

I was meeting fans and shit, after shows, standing in line. That kind of shit was just like, “These people are here to see me,” and it was fuckin’ blowing my mind. But it was also about how controversial my music was at that time — people taking the shit that I say so literally and thinking I’m really like this, the way I portray myself in my music, and shit, like walking around like Slim Shady all day. […]

It’s interesting because that song was one of the easier songs I wrote. And the reason why is because I was writing in a time frame when the shit was actually happening to me. So it was like I kind of knew the whole story and the way it was going to end before I actually finished writing the song. I just had to put it in rhyme form.