Bad Meets Evil – Welcome 2 Hell Lyrics

Eminem: I think that might have been one of the beats that Havoc sent for Recovery Somehow I got a CD of a couple more of his beats. I brought that one in one day, and we just started fucking with it. I think I laid the first verse and was like, ‘Yo!’ I think Royce was up in the studio or something and we started doing the record and decided to trade-off.

Royce da 5’9”: I remember you had an idea for a melodic hook, and in the hook, you wanted to say something about ‘oxygen’. And that’s why I said something like, ‘Emcees, they want to breathe our air.’ Because I thought we were going to have a hook saying something about ‘oxygen.’

Eminem: Oh yeah. And then we decided, ‘Fuck that hook, that’s just wrong.’ [Laughs.] The back and forth started getting too fun.

Royce da 5’9”: No bars got counted.

Eminem: After it was done, I thought about it working as the intro. It might have been the next day or something, coming back we decided what we were going to do with it and I went and recorded the part about, ‘Welcome to the album.’

Havoc: Being involved with Eminem’s Recovery made it possible for me to be involved with the Bad Meets Evil. I’m always constantly hitting Em with tracks. I would say I sent him that beat a while ago. [Laughs.] Those were tracks that I sent trying to get on Relapse.

Then—during the Jay-Z and Eminem concert—I was told that they were interested in a track that I had sent them. I told them that it was still available. They told me it wasn’t a definite, but Eminem was highly interested in the track. I didn’t really think too much of it because I didn’t wanna get my hopes up. Just as easy as it can make it, it can easily not make it.

I made the beat in NYC in my crib. I’m always digging for samples, weird-sounding things that people never used before. Things that might make you go, ‘What the fuck is that? That shit is wack,’ or, ‘That shit is dope.’ I just fuck with all ends of the spectrum when it comes to samples.

I was fucking with some Gregorian chants because no one ever fucked with it. It sounds real eerie, hard, and dark, and it just stuck. I’ll be working on a lot of native instruments. It’s like when I sampled ‘It’s Mine’ from Scarface. I was like, ‘Why the fuck hasn’t anybody tried to sample that yet?’ Like, that’s a no-brainer.