Ten years ago, at the 56^th Annual Grammy Awards on Jan. 26, 2014, Macklemore made history when he, his musical partner Ryan Lewis, “She Keeps Me Warm” singer-songwriter Mary Lambert, and special guest Madonna performed the gay rights anthem “Same Love,” mashed up with Madonna’s “Open Your Heart,” while Queen Latifah officiated a mass onstage wedding for 33 gay and heterosexual couples. (“I was really proud of that. That was really important,” Grammy producer Ken Ehrlich told me in 2017.)

Macklemore and Lewis also won four Grammys that evening, including Best New Artist (beating out Kendrick Lamar, Ed Sheeran, Kacey Musgraves, and James Blake) and — more controversially — Best Rap Album. It should have been one of the biggest and best moments of Macklemore’s career. But the backlash was vicious and immediate.

Amid social media protest that Lamar’s critically heralded good kid, m.A.A.d city should have won Best Rap Album over Macklemore & Ryan Lewis’s quintuple-platinum The Heist, Macklemore attempted to silence the haters — or, so  it seemed, perhaps silence his own inner voices of self-doubt and impostor syndrome — by posting a screenshot of private text he’d sent to Lamar on Grammy night agreeing that Lamar had been “robbed.” The move, however sincere or well-intentioned, backfired badly.

However, in 2022, while speaking with me about his work with CLEAN Cause, a yerba maté beverage company that supports individuals in addiction recovery, the alternative rapper and mental health advocate confessed that he barely even remembered the 2014 Grammys. The entire event was a “bit of a blur,” coming off a year-and-a-half whirlwind when The Heist took off on the strength of other hit singles like “Thrift Shop” and “Can’t Hold Us” — a time when Macklemore relapsed and then struggled to get back on track.

“Going into the Grammys, I wasn’t connected to it. I was in a place of fear, and I think that was a big part of why I responded to winning the Grammys in the way that I did,” Macklemore explained. “I got clean in ’08, and The Heist came out in 2012. I had a one-night relapse in those three and a half years of recovery, but I was prioritizing [my sobriety]. And then, The Heist came out. My world got really fast, really quickly. I stopped going to meetings. I stopped doing the steps. I stopped talking to a sponsor. I don’t even know if I had a sponsor at the time. All of these boxes you have to check to make sure that you stay clean, I wasn’t checking. And I lost it. It was a very weird time period. I look back on it, and there’s moments there when I’m just like, ‘I wish I would’ve been present for that. I wish that I wasn’t trying to escape during that time.’ Like, literally that [Grammy] night, I wanted to escape. I didn’t want to feel.

“That was a challenging time,” Macklemore, whose real name is Ben Haggerty, continued. “I remember right before the Grammys, I got clean and I detoxed, and I had maybe three days clean before the Grammys. Maybe it was a little more than that, maybe it was like five days, but it was fresh. I wasn’t, like, dopesick going into the Grammys, but I had been escaping, and there was so much fear when using, because I’m not connected to my higher power. There’s no faith. When I start using drugs, I lose my faith and fear takes over. And that was the place that I had been in.  … And then after that [Grammy backlash] happened, I went right back to using drugs.”

However, Macklemore clarified that he never felt guilty for winning so many Grammys in 2014, nor did he ever feel like he didn’t deserve the honors — despite the apologetic and somewhat cringey message he sent to Lamar that night.

“I’ve never felt imposter syndrome,” the rapper insisted. “I know I make really good music that resonates with people, and I know why it resonates with people. And I won four Grammys! … I think at the time, yes, I thought Kendrick should have won Best Rap Album. But I wasn’t apologizing for the other three that I won; I think that they’re well-deserved. That was a fear-based decision because of where I had been, in terms of how I handled it. But I don’t feel an imposter syndrome at all. I’ve worked my whole life on my craft, and there’s a reason why those Grammys are on my shelf. There’s a reason why I’ve been able to resonate with human beings around the world and have a career. It’s because I’ve put in the sweat equity into something that I’ve been passionate about since I was 7 years old. I just think that there was so much drama and built-up tension, and me coming off of a relapse, that I didn’t know how to handle it at the time.”

Macklemore eventually re-entered treatment and got clean again, and now when he reflects on that Grammy whirlwind, he realizes it “catapulted me back into the rooms of recovery. So, I see the silver lining of that moment in time. I was able to hit that rock-bottom place and really tap back into gratitude, to faith, and to connecting to a power much greater than myself. And the freedom that comes from that is like no other.”

Macklemore maintained a steady and solid career, solo and with Lewis, after the Grammy telecast that simultaneously marked one of the highest and lowest points of his life. He never did replicate the surprise success of the independently self-produced, self-recorded, and self-released The Heist, but he apparently views that development as a great blessing as well.

“I’m really grateful for the place that I ended up in. I don’t ever want to be that level of famous again,” Macklemore stressed. “For me, being at that level of fame where everything that I did became a TMZ story, where every time I landed at the airport there was a group of people wanting me to sign things for eBay, where thinkpieces were being written about me… it was insane. It’s just not healthy for me. It takes that thick skin to just keep creating art, and that’s the place that I got to. There was absolutely a moment there where I’m like, ‘I don’t know if this is worth it,’ but I got back to a place of like, ‘Dude, I’m going to continue to rap. I’m going to continue to make music.’ The album after The Heist was a challenging one to get started on, but once we started on it, it was beautiful, even if it wasn’t received the same in terms of numbers and sales and all that and wasn’t nearly as big as The Heist. I came out the next year with [the solo album] Gemini, which did do well commercially, but it still wasn’t the same level of fame. And you know what? That was perfect. It was perfect.”

Macklemore even chucklingly recalled to me the time he curiously Googled his name right after he and Lewis’s much-anticipated, supposedly make-or-break The Heist follow-up came out in 2016. The query not only revealed that the industry’s first-week sales projections for that album, This Unruly Mess I’ve Made, were an underwhelming 50,000 units, but pulled up a record review in USA Today that “had given the album like half a star out of five, or no star, something just like impossible!” Instead of panicking, Macklemore felt a sense of calm and relief.

“It was that moment when I felt the most free. I was like, ‘It’s over!’” he laughed. “That was a moment of freedom for me creatively, where I was reminded that at the end of the day, the critics actually don’t matter. I stopped Googling my name after that, and guess what happened? I got happier! I’m not thinking about USA Today. Like, who reads USA Today? Like, no one is going to usatoday.com to figure out what whoever wrote that article thinks about an album. And that’s a beautiful thing. It allowed me to get free.

“Now I’m just under the radar, but I’m able to do what I love and still get in front of arenas around the world filled with people that can sing these songs with me. And that’s what it’s all about.”

Macklemore & Ryan Lewis may be working separately for the time being — Macklemore’s solo album, Gemini, just came out, and Lewis is busying himself with production projects (he produced/co-wrote Kesha’s comeback single, “Praying”) and his own music — but the two are still best buddies, as evidenced by their adorable rapport while record shopping at Denver’s Wax Trax store.

It’s a bond they’ve shared since meeting on Myspace in 2006, after which Lewis became the rapper’s photographer and, later, his artistic partner. “We had nothing in common at that time,” admits Macklemore (real name: Ben Haggerty) with a laugh. “Ryan was like, ‘You like Jedi Mind Tricks? Oh, you’re not really that familiar? Well, we don’t have anything to talk about, then.’”

But the two ended up in each other’s top eight friends — and they still are, in real life.

“It was all so very dramatic, like, are you the first top friend or the second top friend? There was a hierarchy!” Lewis chuckles, remembering Myspace’s post-Friendster, pre-Facebook heyday. “And you would bump around, too. You’d wake up one day, you’d think you were friends with Jonathan, and then you dropped from No. 5 to No. 7. It was like everyone had their own little Billboard charts of friends, and you didn’t know where you were going to end up.”

Lewis gets even more nostalgic thinking about the mid-aughts, when music was taking over the internet like never before. “When we first started making music, you’re talking about, like, the pinnacle peak of mixtapes really emerging and becoming a thing. The emergence of blog reviews. So a whole shift, you know? And the beginnings of a lot of different people’s careers, like Wiz Khalifa coming out with a mixtape.

“I actually think we’re almost to the time that Myspace can now make a comeback. … Nobody has replaced what the Myspace music player really was. They truly put the music player side by side with social media in a way that Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, nobody else ever did. And for artists in particular, that was your real good gauge of where somebody was at in their career.”

So, are Lewis and Macklemore’s personal legacy Myspace pages still up and running? “God, I hope not,” groans Lewis.

Get even more nostalgic with the longtime friends and fellow music obsessives, as they go from digital to analog and dig through Wax Trax’s vinyl crates — reminiscing about Kanye West, Digital Underground, Queen, Master P, and more. 

Kanye West, The College Dropout 

Macklemore: This is a great album. I love this album. … This was an imperative album to hip-hop.

Lewis: What’s your favorite song on the album?

Macklemore: It might be “Jesus Walks.”

Lewis: It’s gotta be “Jesus Walks”!

Macklemore: Yeah, my favorite would be “Jesus Walks.” I really like “Get ’Em High.” “Family Business” was great. Although I was hip to Kanye before this came out, and he had a demo of “Family Business” that I had probably a year before. And then he rerecorded it and put it in on this.

Lewis: And you like the first one much better, right?

Macklemore: Yes, I liked the messed-up recording.

Lewis: That’s usually how it is.

Macklemore: This is a great album. It changed hip-hop. … I will say that up until this point, you have a 50 Cent, dominant gangster rap [style]. And then Kanye came out and he was this, like, liberal arts dude who was an artist, who wasn’t from the street, didn’t really rap about it, came out being vulnerable, talking about insecurities, talking about his shortcomings, putting that on a record and really opening up an emotional side of rap that hadn’t been there before. Like, it’s OK to be myself. It’s OK to talk about what I am and what I’m not, and I don’t need to have this persona in order to, for one, make successful music, and two, make good music that resonates with hip-hop.

Digital Underground, Sex Packets

Macklemore: This is the rap music that I fell in love with at the tender age of 7 years old. I got Sex Packets. My friend’s mom was very lenient in terms of any sort of rules. He got Sex Packets, and then I got to dub the tape. I was 7, and that changed my life. My next-door neighbor was super into rap music. I always think about this: Had it not been for my neighbor being super into rap, like if he was into heavy metal and that was the first thing that I heard at the age of 6 or 7, would I be into death metal?

Kesha, Rainbow

Lewis: She’s amazing. … She’s a powerful force in the studio, but she’s super-positive. She definitely has a bit of a hippie soul. She’s very fun, super-creative, and she works really, really hard. I’d never worked with her before. Obviously stepping in and meeting somebody brand-new with a really kind of intense emotional record — as opposed to, like, “Hey, nice to meet you, let’s make like a dance song!” — you kind of have to grow a relationship with somebody quickly to do it. Most people don’t have to have their big seasons of challenge on such public display.

Macklemore: I would echo everything Ryan said about Kesha. She was in Seattle, working with Ryan on some other records, and we got in the studio for a day, an evening [for a track on Macklemore’s Gemini album, “Good Old Days“]. She was late — which I’m still resentful about! [Laughs] But she showed up with a great spirit, just completely open. … And just a great person. I love her. I think she’s a great friend now, and it’s been great to see “Praying” take off and her album go to No. 1. You know, I’m rooting for her.

Outkast, Stankonia

Macklemore: I really love this album. There’s so many cuts off here. Such a great balance of André, Big Boi, singing, rapping, features … it’s the perfect amount of all of it. The production, Organized Noize — classic. What a duo. They are iconic. I mean, to come out with “Bombs Over Baghdad” ["B.O.B."] as their first single, when they had “Ms. Jackson” too? They had “Ms. Jackson” ready to go for radio, so to come out with “Bombs Over Baghdad” as their first single, with that video, was so forward-thinking. Like, you talk about Kanye always reinventing himself — Outkast always reinvented themselves. They always pushed the envelope of what was going to be the new sound. I mean, some stuff, like, took years for hip-hop to catch up to.

Kanye West, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

Lewis: I love this album. This is my favorite Kanye album — and I like all the Kanye albums. But like, “All of the Lights” features like 35 people, including Elton John, Fergie, Kid Cudi — and don’t forget his cousin Tony! That record is crazy for me, the production that I love. That record hit a certain bar of epic-ness. But you also have “Power,” whole different feel to it. You also have “Runaway.” You also have him basically breaking Nicki Minaj and her having the best verse over any dude in the album. One of the best verses probably of that year [on “Monster”]. … And then you also open up the album with Nicki Minaj speaking in a British accent, which is pretty hard too. I just love this album.

Macklemore: This is his most critically acclaimed album.

Lewis: The College Dropout, I would say, is the MC side of Kanye. Simultaneously, this dude is coming out and innovating the sound of hip-hop. And his original sound is, you know, everybody knows, is speeding up slow samples and having chipmunk vocals and this whole vibe that I don’t think anyone had quite done. And that was his first move. And this is what makes Kanye such an innovator in hip-hop, is that he wasn’t gonna do that forever. He was gonna figure out how to do that again and do that again. And you have Graduation flowing to this, flowing to 808, flowing to Yeezus — constantly trying to innovate and being dissatisfied with doing the same thing.

Master P, Ghetto D

Lewis: No Limit Records’ art was the most innovative album art! Not just their records, but their jewel cases that were straight thick orange or blue. That’s how you knew Snoop Dogg switched camps, because he comes out with a solid blue album. That was a big deal when he went over to No Limit, briefly. It was a whole different jewel case. It’s almost like they invented it. … but the use of diamonds and sparkles on albums? And pixelated JPEGs and drop shadows?

Macklemore: It was fire.

Lewis: Fire! But let me go back to what changed my life. So my introduction into hip-hop was very much, you know, Jay-Z, Eminem, DMX. But then when I got the Master P Ghetto D classic album, I fell in love with No Limit Records. Silkk the Shocker, C-Murder, Mercedes. Like, what I appreciate about that album, and about Master P in general, is that he seems like a real one-take Timmy. The dubs were never really lined up with the vocals.

Macklemore: Particularly with Silkk.

Lewis: Right. I mean, the No Limit camp, they came in tough, really doing ad-libs and dubbing all their vocals, but they were never always on, so it always had this loose feel, like, you feel like you’re just in a basement with people…

Macklemore: And the homies are drunk, right?

Lewis: It was purposely rough around the edges, and things are a little off-beat, but it doesn’t matter.

Queen, News of the World

Lewis: It’s very hard to not notice “We Will Rock You” and “We Are the Champions.” Queen usually have one life-changing worldwide banger on every album, but this particular album has two. I feel like Queen were the early masters of the “We” record. The records that you put on in arenas. The records that you put on when you’re going into a challenge. The records that inspire you. They make you feel larger-than-life, godly. I think Freddie Mercury was a genius. I think he had an unbelievable ability to bring people together through music. I think he had an unbelievable ability to go from one space in a song and then take you to a completely different space and then go back. Incredible performer. Queen has always been one of my main inspirations, especially when I’m trying to make anything big. They just knew how to do it.

Foxy Shazam, The Church of Rock and Roll

Lewis: The Foxy Shazam music videos are incredible. And [frontman] Eric Nally [who sang on Macklemore & Ryan Lewis’s track “Downtown”] not only has the sound, but he just is it.  Backstage he’s the gentlest, kindest, most tranquil human being, but then he gets onstage and he’s f***ing crazy. And he’s also super-inventive, like what he’s able to do with his body. His knees get bloody. He takes the pain for the people. Which is how you can compare him to a Freddie Mercury. They both go all-in. They’re committed. It’s just in their blood. It was amazing to work with him on “Downtown.”

John Williams, Star Wars score

Lewis: To me, John Williams is the Kanye of film. You’re talking about a guy that wrote the themes to Jaws, Indiana Jones, E.T., Harry Potter, Star Wars. I can keep going. John Williams wrote this soundtrack to Star Wars when Star Wars was not expected to be a massive production. It had a finite budget. A lot of people thought it would fail. And John Williams, who works nine to five, goes home at 5 o’clock, wrote this in 30 days. And forever he remains an inspiration to me because of what he does. I think he’s one of the greatest top-liners. He’s made some of the catchiest melodies that do not have words, but we can all hum it. … And we just don’t really do that in film anymore.

John Coltrane, Crescent 

Macklemore: My [favorite song] would be “Wise One” by John Coltrane. I’ve been asked the question of what is my favorite song too many times, where I had to come up with something. It is John Coltrane, “Wise One.” Final answer. Soundtrack to my life.

Kendrick Lamar, To Pimp a Butterfly

Macklemore: Very conceptual album. Very conceptual. Listening to this from front to back with the skits, it’s a movie.

Lewis: It’s like an intense movie.

Macklemore: And one that you should listen to all the way through.

Lewis: All the way through. Meant to be a singular piece.

Macklemore: I remember when we listened to this, it was just like, “F***, Kendrick did that?”

J Dilla, Donuts

Macklemore: J Dilla. One of the greatest producers of all time, in any genre. He is Detroit. He is the standard Detroit. He has potentially the best drums and was the most influential in drum programming in the history of hip-hop.

Jay-Z, The Black Album

Lewis: This, to me, is one of the best hip-hop albums of all time. There’s not a bad song on this album.

Macklemore: I would disagree with that, but yes. It’s very good. “Justify My Thug” is a skipper.

Lewis: You could be right, but bro, what more can I say? “Encore,” “Change Clothes,” “Dirt Off Your Shoulder,” “Moment of Clarity,” “99 Problems,” “Lucifer”? And “My 1st Song,” which is in 3/4! This is a classic. What I also appreciate about this album is that he put out the a cappellas, which allowed all his producers to have moments. Like Danger Mouse made The Grey Album, which was the Beatles and The Black Album vocals. And it was phenomenal.

Follow Lyndsey on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, Amazon, Tumblr, Spotify

This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.