“I’ve been waiting and wanting to, but it’s just not that easy.” Gwen Stefani is talking to me about making new music: Aside from a holiday offering, You Make It Feel Like Christmas, in 2017, Stefani hasn’t debuted a full album in nearly a decade. All that time has cloaked Bouquet—her new record, out today—in a lot of mystery, and more than a little anticipation. “That makes me scared when you say it like that,” she says. In many ways, she’s just as excited and curious about this next chapter in her career as her fans are. “I feel so good to finally have a record that reflects the truth of who I am right this second.”
That truth involved a lot of healing, a major theme of her new music. Stefani has been through it since her last pop release—notably titled This Is What the Truth Feels Like—came out in 2016, ending her 13-year marriage to musician Gavin Rossdale, with whom she shares three sons, and beginning a very public romance with country star Blake Shelton, one of her fellow judges on NBC’s popular music-competition show The Voice. She and Shelton then married in Oklahoma in 2021.
Stefani had planned to put out her fifth studio album the same year—teasing it with a single, “Let Me Reintroduce Myself,” in December 2020—but the project was scrapped. “I describe it like being in a cul-de-sac,” Stefani says now. “You’re driving and then you just hit this circle and you’re like, something’s not right.”
What has since risen from its ashes is Bouquet, an album that combines bold pop songwriting and major hooks with a little yacht rock flare. (Stefani is the queen of genre shapeshifting, after all, having launched her career with the ska-inflected pop-punk of No Doubt in the 1990s before going solo in the aughts, and helping to define that decade’s earworm-y bubblegum pop.)
“But in reality, it doesn’t matter the genre, because at the end of the day it’s all about the lyric,” she reflects. “What’s the song supposed to say and how will the music support that?” For better or worse, she had a lot to write about.
Photo: Ellen von Unwerth