Kid Rock showed up when Eminem was nobody, and Eminem remembered

Detroit has produced a lot of loud men, and two of the loudest just recorded a song called "Heal My Faith." On October 17, Kid Rock released Halfway 2 Jesus, his first Christian album, and on track five Eminem turns up with a verse.

You can guess the trouble. Eminem endorsed Kamala Harris at a Detroit rally in 2024 and has gone after Donald Trump on record. Kid Rock may be Trump's best-known supporter in music, and he had dinner with him days before the release. The song drew some criticism from some of Eminem's fans, and he answered them within hours: "Not about choosing sides, just choosing to make music with my old friend. Praying for all of us."

The verse itself is mostly memory. The two met in 1990 at a record store, where an unknown kid challenged Kid Rock, who already had a record deal, to a rap battle. In 1997 Kid Rock came to the release show for the Slim Shady EP. "I was nobody," Eminem raps, and "he gave me hope, told me to keep going." That's the friend an old proverb has in mind. It sits in Proverbs, the short sayings Israel gathered under Solomon's name. A friend loves in every kind of weather, it says, and a brother is made for the storm.

In 1997 the storm was obscurity, and Kid Rock showed up for it. In 2026 it's politics, and this time the cost lands on the friendship itself. The criticism came from Eminem's side because those are his fans, and a friendship across this line would draw it from somebody either way. The album's foreword doesn't shrink the gap: "we differ politically and on other things, but we've stayed friends through it all." It hopes that helps "people who've lost friends or stopped talking to family because they think differently." A brother, in the proverb's sense, is the one who stays when staying costs something.

When Kid Rock heard Eminem's line "He's my brother, not my political enemy" on the finished mix, he said it "just sent these chills," and then, "grandpa was crying."

Two weeks before the midterms, a lot of people have a brother, an uncle or an old roommate they stopped calling around 2020. A call to one of them wouldn't settle a single argument, and it might cost an awkward hour. It would also mean someone showed up for the hard season, which is the one that counts.