Stan

The 45 King built the beat for "Stan" at home while watching the 1998 film Sliding Doors, in which Dido's "Thank You" appears. He switched the film off, went into his studio, and looped a sample of the song over a bassline he added on the spot. The production went to his contacts at Interscope Records and eventually reached Eminem through his manager, Paul Rosenberg, who sent him a tape of the 45 King's work. The line about a picture on a wall reminding the listener that things are not so bad struck Eminem immediately, and he knew the loop suited a song about an obsessed fan. Since releasing The Slim Shady LP in 1999, he had received many disturbing letters from fans who seemed to take the album's violent content seriously, and he wrote "Stan" as a fictionalized cautionary tale addressed to them. The third verse had to be entirely re-recorded after an engineer he had never worked with accidentally taped over the original take. Eminem claims the engineer was smoking cannabis during the session and rewound the 2-inch tape right back to the start. He believed the lost take was significantly better.

Released on November 20, 2000, as the third single from The Marshall Mathers LP, the song peaked at number 51 on the Billboard Hot 100 but topped the charts in twelve countries, including the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, and Ireland. It tells the story of Stanley "Stan" Mitchell, who writes Eminem several letters and grows increasingly angry when no reply comes. Rosenberg later said the popular idea that the name combined "stalker" and "fan" was a happy coincidence, since Eminem chose it simply because it rhymed with "fan".