Legendary rocker Steve Miller recently chatted about collaborating with Eminem on the hit song “Houdini”.
Miller revealed to The San Diego Union-Tribune that Eminem reached out to him, wanting to use “Abracadabra” for a new track. After giving it a listen, Miller was all in and even sent Eminem the original stems to work with. That’s what he had to say in the interview:
I feel really great that Eminem used “Abracadabra.” It’s a good use of it! […]He called that he’d like to use “Abracadabra.” He said: “I’ve written a bunch of verses and we’ve done a track. I’ll send it to you.” I listened to it, called him back, and said: Yeah, that’s fine, man. It’s great! And if you want, I’ll send you the stems (individual audio files).” So, I sent him my actual recorded stems for “Abracadabra” so he could work with them.
What blew Miller away was how fast Eminem’s music reached people. It was a demonstration of the power of social media and streaming:
Then, I got a lesson about what social media has done to the record business. When I put out “Abracadabra” in 1982, it became the No. 1 record in the world and that took about 12 months. With Eminem, two days after we signed our agreement, he released “Houdini” at 12:01 a.m. on a Friday. Within 30 minutes, 60,000 people had watched the video on YouTube. By 10 a.m. it was 3 million. Nearly 50 million people streamed it, worldwide, in just the first week. I’d never seen anything like that. It was crazy, just instantly. So, that was a real lesson. And Eminem was very cool. I put out a little release (saying) I appreciated that it was legit. It feels good that a whole other group of people are listening to my music (through Eminem) and digging it.
Miller is totally cool with Eminem using his song, which was not the case when Ghetto Boys sampled his version of Johnny “Guitar” Watson’s “Gangster of Love” for their 1989 song. Back then, Miller went into a litigious process with a group that used a sample without permission or acknowledgement and in a song that Miller could not get behind. Since then, his songs have been sampled by N.W.A., Public Enemy, OutKast, and more. Still, none of them has such success as “Houdini” has right now.
