Gwen Stefani has been out and about in recent weeks, promoting her latest studio album, Bouquet. Gwen really doesn’t have anything left to prove, nor does she really care about music categories and gatekeeping. She just keeps making music because she enjoys the process. I wonder if she’ll still tour, because I get the feeling that she and Blake Shelton can’t/don’t want to be apart for very long. Gwen recently chatted with the Guardian about her career, Blake, yacht rock and more. Some highlights:

On “Don’t Speak”: “I absolutely had no idea [it would be No Doubt’s biggest hit]. It didn’t even represent what we were doing, because No Doubt were such an uptempo, live-energy band. Even the guitar solo has no business being in that song. The original version was written by my brother [Eric, keyboards], who lived at my grandparents’ house; after they passed away, it became the band house. He’d stay up all night eating peanut butter sandwiches, drinking milk and smoking cigarettes and go: “Oh, I wrote this last night.” Then I ended up rewriting the lyrics and changing the whole song because Tony [Kanal, bass] broke up with me. It’s crazy, but that song really is the heartbeat of who I am and changed everything. After it came out, we were driving through Israel and these guards came up to the van with guns, which I’d never seen anywhere before. One of them looked in the van and started singing Don’t Speak to me. That soon became normal.

Whether she’s experienced wild & traumatic things in the industry: “I feel like I’ve had like a blessed experience. I was very naive and people say: “Oh, you were a female in the industry,” but I always had a voice and people wanted my opinions. Yes, they sent us back to the drawing board with an eight-track recorder and said: “Go back to your garage and write music.” But that just made us work harder. I have written a lot about my personal darkness. I have been through a lot of suffering, trying to find love, truth and an honest person.

Why flowers were such an inspiraction for her new album, Bouquet: “Meeting my husband [country singer Blake Shelton] felt like a second chance at life, because when my family fell apart [Stefani was married to Bush’s lead singer, Gavin Rossdale, for 12 years; they have three children] it was a catastrophe. How do you pick yourself up from that? But God put this other person there to love me. I know this sounds weird, but Blake and I came together in gardening. We have a house together in Oklahoma and during the pandemic we came across this very old building on the land and there were some purple irises, which someone must have planted centuries ago, but they’ve survived. I wrote the song Purple Irises about that and how it feels to find true love and the insecurities of not wanting to lose it.

On yacht rock: “The music that I grew up on as a child – going to church in the back of the station wagon in the 1970s – was I guess what you would call classic rock, but then somehow it got this label of yacht rock: late 70s singer-songwriters, the Doobie Brothers and so on. Live music with background vocals. I really wanted to put these new songs in that kind of an atmosphere, to make it feel like there was no genre and there was no time. But there was no yacht! This album’s songs were written with pop writers and we were initially writing in a pop zone. But I felt like the songs were me going back to high school and trying to put on my prom dress and saying: “Here I am again!” Like, no, you can’t – you have to evolve. I wanted the songs, sonically, to represent more of who I am today.

Whether she would do an album full of country duets with Blake: “I would love to. I never listened to country music, so while Blake was super successful, I never even knew he existed before I met him. When he heard Purple Irises, he loved it so much he ended up singing on it. I love singing with him. He’s very humble and doesn’t realise how good he is. There’s something so attractive about that.

[From The Guardian]

One of the reasons why I’m so surprised that Gwen continues to churn out new music is because Blake is halfway retired from music. He has businesses and he’s not totally “retired” but he’s definitely more focused on Gwen and his stepsons these days. That being said, I think Blake really gets a kick of sitting back and letting Gwen do her thing. He enjoys being the supportive husband in the background. Can I admit something? I like their duets. Their voices sound great together. “Nobody But You” is a great song. Let me look up “Purple Irises”… oh wait, the song sucks. Nevermind.

Photos courtesy of Cover Images.