She finally got her simple kind of life, but her ambition won’t quit. On the eve of No Doubt’s Coachella reunion, Gwen Stefani reflects on creative risks, balancing music and motherhood, and writing songs with husband Blake Shelton.Gwen Stefani cannot help herself. It just pours out of her. We’ve been talking for maybe 30 seconds when her eyes go glassy and something catches in her voice. “Why am I getting emotional?” she wonders.
She thinks she’s most creative when she collaborates, and she feels a tinge of jealousy when she hears about other artists who get sent hits tailor-made for them. But when Stefani, 54, has tried to make records the modern way, working with teams of hitmakers, she has sometimes felt like she was “going backward” — doing an impression of someone doing an impression of her 20 years ago. “A lot of the pop writers that I’d worked with started getting really different from the way I write.
She loves to talk about how her biggest dreams growing up in Anaheim, California, were doing KFC jingles or becoming a Disneyland hotel lounge singer; her earliest jobs included working makeup counters at the mall. She describes her older brother, Eric Stefani, who co-founded No Doubt in 1986, as the real musical genius in the family. Before she became the band’s impossibly energetic frontwoman, she was happy just to sing backup and hang out with her boyfriend, bassist Tony Kanal.
“Gwen’s ability to evolve and explore different styles of music, songwriting, and aesthetic while still remaining true to herself is incredibly inspiring,”tells me over email. “To me, she’s a prime example of an artist who defies stereotypes and preconceived boundaries and just makes stuff that she thinks is cool. If that’s not a true artist, I don’t know what is.
It became a cycle: Stefani returned to work sooner than she may have liked, ran herself into the ground, then felt guilty for not being more productive. When she came home from almost 100 shows of theworld tour — while nursing a baby and working on her L.A.M.B. fashion line, “which is a whole job in itself ” — “I was dead,” she says. Then she learned she was pregnant again with son Zuma. “I think everyone was disappointed,” she says, referring to No Doubt. “I don’t think they would say that.
Beyond Coachella, there are no concrete plans for touring or new music, although Stefani is “open to anything.” The two shows are “going to be a really nice bow to tie on the relationship, because we were kids ,” she says. “I already know what it’s going to feel like because we’re just so in sync when we’re onstage. It’s going to feel like riding a bike again.
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Source: EW - 🏆 713. / 51 Read more »