Trivia

• “The Way I Am” was released as the album’s second single on October 3, 2000, following “The Real Slim Shady.”
• The song peaked at No. 58 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 8 on the UK Singles Chart.
• This was the first beat Eminem produced himself; it was built using Dr. Dre’s drum samples and featured contributions from Dre’s team of musicians.

Words from Eminem

“

The first record I ever produced while Dre was in the room was “The Way I Am.” I had a piano loop in my head and I didn’t want to forget it, so I recorded on a little handheld recorder. And the whole flight to L.A., I had it in my head and wrote the lyrics. I didn’t even have a drum beat in my head. So when I got there, I asked his keyboard player to play the lick. Then I had to figure out how the beat would go, so I picked out the drums I wanted and asked Dre to turn the click on. So I started making a pattern using Dre’s sounds and it was like night and day from anything we had ever produced.

“

The funny thing about this is that when I wrote this song I had already turned in the whole album. Problem was my label felt that I didn’t have a lead-off single yet. I thought either “I’m Back” or “Who Knew” was gonna be the single, but they nixed both of ’em. So I got frustrated and I said, “What do you want? Another ‘My Name Is’?” They said, “Not exactly, it doesn’t have to be that,” but they were beating around the bush, because that’s exactly what they really wanted.

[…] I stayed in hotels for a month just tryin’ to come up with a single. This is the song I wrote right before “The Real Slim Shady.” I was about to explode. I was getting sued by my mother. My father was coming out of the woodwork trying to make amends and all kinds of crazy shit. Adding to the fire was the fact that I was getting shit about the Columbine reference on “I’m Back,” and the label was telling me that I wasn’t gonna be able to say it. […]

Anyway, the label wanted a single, so I gave ’em “The Way I Am,” which was the complete opposite of what they requested; I was kinda rebelling against the label by letting them know they couldn’t force me to do something that I didn’t want to do.