Gwen Stefani has been busy, from appearing on The Voice to releasing standalone singles to a Las Vegas residency to performing with husband Blake Shelton to even reuniting with No Doubt. However, the one thing that’s been missing these past eight years was a new album, but that changes on Nov. 15 when Stefani finally releases her fifth solo LP, Bouquet.
Ahead of the album’s arrival in less than two months time, Stefani has shared Bouquet‘s second single and opening track “Somebody Else’s,” a catchy slice of Seventies AM Gold contrasted by biting lyrics about past mistakes: “Everyday with you is rock bottom/Leavin’ you saved me, my God/Look at me blossom/You’re somebody else’s problem.”
As Stefani tells Rolling Stone during an interview before a taping of The Voice, “Somebody Else’s” was “never intended to be on this record.” The subject matter — an almost eff-you aimed at an ex, similar to the breakup songs on her last (non-Christmas) LP, 2016’s This Is What the Truth Feels Like — didn’t fit with the rest of Bouquet, a collection of songs about flourishing love.
However, after work on Bouquet had begun, Stefani was drawn to an “idea of this song” by co-writer Madison Love, a veteran songwriter with credits on tracks by Lady Gaga, Camila Cabello, and Selena Gomez.
“I get a text from Madison with a start of a song called ‘Somebody Else’s,’ after a bunch of sessions that we’d done, and in those sessions there’s a lot of confession and just talk about life and where we’re at now, where we were,” Stefani says. “She came with the idea of this song, and I was like, ‘Uh oh, I don’t even know if I want to give that any energy.’ What I kind of realized was, after writing the rest of the songs, it felt you needed to see a little bit of the dark to see the light and see where I’d just come from originally.”
In addition to serving as Bouquet’s second single, “Somebody Else’s” also serves as the album’s opening track, and a perfect segue from her last album — “The Truth record was in the middle of my hell,” Stefani says of the 2016 post-divorce LP — to her new lease on life with Blake Shelton.
“It seems like eight years probably feels like a long time for a lot of people, but for me, it was eight years of healing, eight years of transitioning, it went really fast,” she said. “It’s interesting that this song rose [to become to the new single], because the rest of the record has nothing to do with that subject.”
The new single isn’t the only thing deceptive about Bouquet: Despite the cowboy hat on the cover, and the fact that the album was recorded in Nashville by an A-list producer (Scott Hendricks) with an all-star band of Music Row musicians, Stefani is insistent that she has not gone country. “It’s not a country record,” she says.
Instead, Bouquet is packed with Seventies pop-rock radio gems, channeled through the prism of Nashville, but still authentically Gwen. “It’s all the stuff I listened to in the station wagon on the way to church,” Stefani says of the album. “Yacht rock, though it wasn’t called yacht rock then. The music I listen to now, I wanted this album to reflect that.”
That desire to make a cohesive — and with just 10 songs, focused — album also inspired its title. “I wanted it to be one big statement, and that’s why I feel Bouquet is a really perfect title,” Stefani said. “Like each song was handpicked with meaning.”
The flower motif — long a frequent theme in Stefani’s music, going back to the lyric “Born to blossom, bloom to perish” in her debut solo single, “What You Waiting For?” — extends into the music, with song titles like “Marigolds,” “Empty Vase,” “Late to Bloom,” and “Purple Irises,” the first track Stefani wrote for the album and a duet with Shelton inspired by their shared love of gardening.
“Obviously, he has some hobbies that are so far from what I am — I’m like makeup girl — so opposite in so many ways, but we find so much joy in gardening together,” she says.
“Purple Irises” also liberated Stefani from a creative rut, one where she found herself attempting to “compete a little bit with my past and going backwards” — alluding to one-off singles like “Slow Clap” and “Let Me Reintroduce Myself” — which, along with “life being so crazy busy and the pandemic,” was responsible for the long wait between albums.
“It felt like I was repeating myself a lot,” Stefani said of the false starts. “It just never landed, and it didn’t even inspire me, so at a certain point I just wrote a song called ‘Purple Irises,’ and it felt like, ‘I’m on now.’ I felt like I’m in the zone, this is it.”
Years ago, on a walk in Oklahoma, Stefani saw a bunch of purple irises growing on a nearby long-abandoned property. “We picked them and transplanted them, and then all these years later, you can see they’ve taken over our garden,” she says. “They survived so much without any care. It’s interesting to see how something so beautiful can survive through crazy weather and being pulled and transplanted. It symbolized so much what we were going through in our lives, and that’s how that song was written.”
It’s been a year of reflection for Stefani: Her debut solo album Love. Angel. Music. Baby. celebrates its 20th anniversary this year with a new reissue, and — for the first time in nine years — Stefani reunited onstage with her No Doubt band mates for two acclaimed, triumphant gigs at Coachella.
“It was magic, it was beyond what you could imagine it felt like. It felt like a big wave of love crashing on me,” Stefani says of the reunion gigs. “It felt like riding a bike as well with the guys. We hadn’t really spent that much time together in the last nine years, and it felt like the olden days, getting back together. There was so much love, and it marked how much impact that we’ve had.”
It’s an impact that has inspired a younger generation of fans like Olivia Rodrigo, who guested with No Doubt at Coachella. “It felt really validating and inspiring. It was incredible,” Stefani adds.
However, it hasn’t been a perfect year for Stefani: Her and Shelton’s home garden had a “really bad year” where “everything failed.” The irony is not lost on the singer: “I’m blooming an album,” she quips, “but my actual garden sucked so bad this year.”
