New York, NY – 2009 marked the return of Eminem after literally 4 years on hiatus from the industry that he made respect him. Upon the release of the first ‘Relapse,’ the album was received with mixed reviews from many of his fans and critics across the globe, however, in the end his material still revisits the same Slim Shady that we all continue listening to since forth. Now no matter which side of the spectrum you may view it upon, Eminem has blown the dust off the mic and has returned.

With the first ‘Relapse’ already behind us and the sequel in the works, Em has become somewhat of a media magnet going into the next release. He recently spoke to Complex Magazine for their December/January issue about interesting subjects, the overcoming of his addiction, of course, the release of his next anticipated album to date, and comparisons to the late great King of Pop. Before he got into his album, Em discussed the comparison he had with Jackson’s struggle over pills and what reports to believe in the media when it focused on the King of Pop.

These were his comments:

“Oh, 100 percent,” Em said when asked about parallels between Jackson’s demise and his own hard times. “When you read things about Michael Jackson it’s hard to decipher what the fuck is true, but there’s the story of how he woke up at whatever time and he needed something to go back to sleep because he has this or that and it didn’t work — that’s exactly what used to happen to me, I would take a couple of pills and I would be up an hour later and I’d want more.

It’s one of the pitfalls of fame, I could just say, ‘Yo, I need this and this and this, and they’re going to give me whatever I want.”

It is no secret that Eminem has been in the studio lately working on the second installment to his ‘Relapse’ series and continuing to overcome his sleeping pill addiction. He states that the music and jogging has been helping him cope with the idea of wanting and needing. So far, he has recruited the heavyweight production of Just Blaze alongside the works of his mentor Dr. Dre. He states that this time around the album will be more hard-hitting:

“When I finished Relapse, I had a whole album of material that didn’t make it that I wasn’t ready to throw away, so that was going to be Relapse 2, but then I got with Dre in Hawaii and started recording more, and now the new material has knocked out all the old songs. But yeah, the new material is definitely different.

Making Relapse, I was still working the drugs out of my system, so there was a lot of … just jokey shit. It was a lot of punch line-y, funny, shock value — kind of going back to The Slim Shady LP. And that was cool, but I’ve kind of flipped the page. Now I’m going for songs instead of one-liners. I don’t want to make shit that you hear once and then the joke’s over — I want to make records that you could play a hundred times, a thousand times.”

At press time, Interscope is looking for an early 2010 release date for ‘Relapse 2,’ but before that, they have plans on releasing a re-release of the first Relapse entitled simply ‘Refill’ scheduled to be released on December 21. The official re-release will include seven new tracks including the recent smash ‘Forever’ featuring Drake, Kanye West, and Lil Wayne. He hopes that ‘Refill’ will tide the fans over until the release of the sequel sometime early next year.