Songfacts®:

• Eminem opens his The Marshall Mathers LP 2 album with this seven minute epic where he revisits the original Marshall Mathers LP character "Stan" via his vengeful little brother Matthew. Em told Rolling Stone regarding the LP: "It's not necessarily a sequel... As much as it is a revisitation — like this is a different time period in my life. So there's not gonna be like, continuations of every song or anything like that. To me, it's more about the vibe and the nostalgia."
• The song was produced by:
  
  Dallas-based producer S1, (also known as Symbolyc One), who supplied the beats for Kanye West's "Power" and "Guilt Trip."
  
  Australian hip-hop producer and artist M-Phazes, whose debut solo long player, Good Gracious, reached the Top 20 of the ARIA album charts in 2010. The Gold Coast native has worked with a huge range of artists throughout his career, including Talib Kweli, Xzibit, Kimbra and Eminem touring partner 360.
  
  Miami-based record producer StreetRunner, who is best known for his work with Lil Wayne, which includes the Drake collaboration, "With You" and the single "My Homies Still."
• The chorus is sung by Texas singer-songwriter Sarah Jaffe, who is one half of S1's duo The Dividends.
• Eminem was asked during a Facebook Q&A session if he considered working with Dido on this "Stan" sequel? "Yes, was considering her for bad guy but thought it might give it away," he revealed.
• Eminem told MTV News that when he recorded this song he wanted to make sure he made something that tied in with The Marshall Mathers LP. "The way I was thinking when I wrote the song was... What if this nightmare just happened?" he added. "I decided to do this album and then everything started coming back on me — Matthew came back, Stan's little brother and he came back to kill me, just all this s--- started happening."
  
  "'Bad Guy' to me is more like an introduction to the album," Eminem added. "Like, OK, this is what's about to happen, here it is. And then it picks up from the 'Criminal' skit where The Marshall Mathers LP left off. I don't know if anyone caught that, but that's kind of where the continuation starts, because 'Criminal' left off with that."
• The song is broken into two parts,with the latter half being produced by Streetrunner with Vinny Venditto. Streetrunner told MTV News the story of how the pair ended up working on the cut. "The whole thing starts back in '08," he said. "I started working with Royce da 5'9″ and we started building our relationship. He rebuilt his relationship with Eminem, and I eventually did a record with him called 'Writer's Block,' which featured Eminem. Eventually, I did a co-production on the Slaughterhouse album with Eminem."
  
  "Through dealing with his people at the time on that record, I said, 'Can I send some beats to Eminem?' and luckily they said yes," he continued. "I just started building tracks. Randomly sending tracks that I thought were dope for Em."
  
  Then it was this record, when I got in the studio with Vinny, we put this together from scratch," Streetrunner added. "I had a sample, I thought it was super stupid, and then Vinny played ridiculous keys on it, then I took it back to my studio. I put the drums down, formulated it into a song. I knew this was it. I sent it to Eminem's right hand, and literally two weeks later, got the call."