The Tennessean (Dec. 16th 2005)

She’s just a girl having fun

Gwen Stefani shows off a different side on her high-energy solo tour

When Gwen Stefani sang about being "just a girl," it was clearly with tongue planted firmly in cheek. But the No Doubt singer and slam-dunk solo artist says she is plenty girlie . . . and proud to flaunt it.

"I love musicals and I love costume changes and I love the girlie side of me," she says. "So I really wanted to try and do a show that embraced that."

The show Stefani's doing is for her maiden tour as a solo artist, following the release of her first solo album, Love. Angel. Music. Baby., the disc that spawned inescapable single Hollaback Girl and just earned her a head-clogging run of Grammy nominations (including the two big ones: album of the year and record of the year).

And the big-spectacle show's make-up does indeed embrace Stefani's girlie side, with an Oscars-host-rivaling run of costume changes and a posse of heavily choreographed and heavily dolled-up Harajuku Girl dancers.

It's quite a leap from the long run of frenzied rock shows she's done with No Doubt, the band with which she made a monster hit single out of Just a Girl a decade back.

"We're a rock band," she says. "I go out there, put on my makeup and I don't change, and I just sweat through the show. It's just a totally different thing.

"This feels like a show -- not theater so much, but more showy. It's fun for me, (but) it was really hard to get it together. You can imagine doing a set list and having to work out the costume changes. If you've never done something like that before, it's really complicated, working out how you're going to reveal different outfits and how you're going to move into the next one and make all the changes with all the dancers at the right time and have the set flow."

Talk of choreography and costumes might make it look like Stefani's gone a bit Britney Spears for her Harajuku Lovers tour, but the singer still focuses on the singing and largely leaves the complicated shimmying to her crew of Harajuku Girls. And fashion's always been her thing, anyhow -- she even moonlights as a designer with her L.A.M.B. clothing line.

And for a fun, flashy dance record such as Love, she says, this kind of tour treatment just fits better.

"The whole point of the record was just to have fun, you know; there's nothing serious about it," she says. "The songs are ridiculous. So the show kind of echoes the same thing. It's not anything to be taken too seriously; it's just 'Come out and have a good time and sing along.' "

With only one solo disc in her discography, using every track on Love. Angel. Music. Baby. for Stefani's tour set list was a given. After planning a host of tours with No Doubt's ample cache of songs to pick through, Stefani says, working up a full show with just one record was a challenging task.

"Luckily, the record is like I wanted to make," she says. "A record that I love every single song on it."

If Love, which had her collaborating with A-list hip-hop talent such as The Neptunes' Pharrell Williams and Outkast's Andre Benjamin, is what Stefani expected in quality, it's still way beyond her expectations in response, she says.

"I was never going to be going on tour; this record was all about just kind of doing an experiment, like a side project," she says. "I just wanted to make a dance record. (But) it was just so incredibly successful in a very unexpected, amazing kind of way, so I felt tempted to just go out there and see the people that bought it and have them sing the songs back to me."

Making a dance record wasn't as easy as she expected, either.

"It was totally draining, and my ego was all over the place," Stefani says. "I mean, that was kinda the whole point, to explore trying to write with new people and see what it's like. It's like every time you work with someone new it brings something different out of you, and it's this huge challenge.

"Especially going in with people that you totally admire, someone like Andre. I mean, I was basically, you know, 'Who am I? I don't know how to write songs.' I was sitting next to this guy, drowning in his creativity, just hoping to God that something would come in my head.

"That was the biggest challenge of the whole project . . . to (figuratively) take off all your clothes and go in a room with someone you don't know and just try to be creative.

"And their expectations of you as a writer and your expectations of yourself, plus let's throw into the mix that I'm doing a completely different kind of music than I've ever done before.

"Dance music, I assumed, would be really easy, because you're not really trying to write about much, you're just writing. I wanted to make it, like, 'Let's go dancing,' literally that simple. But those kinds of songs are really hard to write and say in a fresh new way."

The fan response -- Hollaback Girl's ever-present drumline thump on radio and MTV, multiplatinum album sales, Grammy nods -- says Stefani and her co-conspirators were up to the challenge. But she says that didn't really hit home until this tour.

"For me, when I see the audience and it's there for me and I hear the songs, it makes it very real," she says. "Whereas when they say, 'Oh, you sold this many records, this happened, you're on the radio,' all that just doesn't even feel like anything. But when you do the concert, it's, like, 'Wow.' So for me, this has kind of completed the whole project."