The Globe & Mail (Dec. 11th 2006)
She's just a regular star
At 37, American pop star Gwen Stefani talks to Tralee Pearce about her new baby son, her second solo album -- and fame
A few days into a Toronto visit to promote her new album, Gwen Stefani is doing the unthinkable for a major celebrity: She's running early.
Past the bouncer outside her Four Seasons hotel-room door, the willowy new mom eagerly hands off her six-month-old baby boy, Kingston, to her gaggle of handlers and hair and makeup pros. They retreat behind French doors; she gets down to business.
"I just saw this for the first time two days ago!" says the skinny-jeans-clad platinum blonde, pointing to a copy of The Sweet Escape , out last week. "A month ago, they were mastering the record in Los Angeles, mixing the rest of it in London. We were working on the first video and the artwork. This was the fastest record I've done."
It doesn't hurt that she's been regularly releasing albums for more than a decade with her California band, No Doubt.
Still, she admits to being astonished at the pace she's kept on this, her second solo album, and attributes it in part to the paradoxical nature of motherhood. "I think because I'm nursing, too, it gives me superhero powers. I'm like a cat -- I love sleeping. I'm getting less sleep than I ever have in my life, and I'm doing more, but somehow it's okay. I don't know how it works. Everything just seems to work out."
Luckily, she had a few songs left over from her first disc, Love. Angel. Music. Baby. (L.A.M.B is also the name of her successful clothing line; and this week she announced she'll be debuting a L.A.M.B. perfume, in partnership with Coty, in 2007). And she had written a few more in September, 2005, including an addictive dance mash-up called Wind It Up that features her yodelling The Lonely Goatherd à la Maria von Trapp in The Sound of Music , which she debuted at a L.A.M.B. show during New York fashion week that same month.
"I had a fantasy of them coming out for Christmas. But it ended up I had Kingston in my belly and I didn't put the record out." After his birth, she went back to recording, with Kingston either in the next room or on her lap.
She describes becoming a mother with a disarming mix of wide-eyed girlishness and skateboarder-dude lingo. "It's such a miracle. You don't understand. It's so weird -- you can't even believe it's growing inside of you," she says, before getting into details. "I had a cesarean because he was breech. I totally wanted to have him naturally. Now I look back, I'd be scared to do it again. But even being in the hospital for four days, those were the favourite days of my life."
But as much as she's feeling superhuman these days, she's also built her musical persona on being a female Clark Kent.
The regular-girl-as-cool-outsider shtick started with 1995's hit, I'm Just a Girl , and spawned its own genre: Think of punky singer Pink's 2001 lyric "Tired of being compared to damn Britney Spears / She's so pretty, that just ain't me," or Avril Lavigne's 2002 Sk8er Boi lyric about the regular girl who gets the guy after the snobby girl dumps him: "He's just a boy. And I'm just a girl."
"I recognize that age, when I did that song -- I know that feeling," she says. "I was a little late. I was 26 when that record came out. I was still living at home. But what's so great about songwriting is you get to document these time periods. Everyone asks me if I'm embarrassed by certain things I wore or wrote, and I'm, like, no. I remember where I was at and what was my inspiration."
And despite selling millions of albums, marrying a rock star (Bush's Gavin Rossdale), and becoming a fashion icon beloved by Vogue readers, Parisian couturiers and teenage girls alike, Stefani returns to the theme in Orange County Girl , one of the songs on The Sweet Escape. She says she wrote the song after flying first class to Miami to work with superstar producer Pharrell Williams. "You are always just you," she says. "All of this weirdness is not real."
She says she realized some of the lyrics on that song came from her mother, during a family appearance on Oprah ("which is also a trip, by the way!").
"It was a this-is-your-life show, and she asked my mom, 'What do you think of your daughter?' And she said, 'My daughter is just an ordinary girl living in an extraordinary world.' "
A marketing wonk would use the currently fashionable word "relatable" to explain Stefani's gee-whiz appeal.
"The whole celebrity thing is weird, especially when you're on this side of it. I still look at the gossip magazines and want to know: 'How did she lose the weight? How did she get her skin looking so great?' When you're the one, it's like, 'Really? I'm the one?' "
At 37, though, she doesn't envy her teen and early-20s counterparts their often embarrassing run-ins with the paparazzi. "I had the benefit of becoming famous when I was already 26. For years I was famous in my own small pond. There's something about having to do it slowly and earn it and gradually climb the ladder. In some ways I feel lucky, and in other ways, yeah, I wouldn't mind being 20 again."
Really, that's the only way in which Stefani would like to put on the brakes. Although she says she's looking forward to getting back to her musical "home" with her No Doubt band mates after her two-album solo adventure, she'd like to rest on her laurels for a nanosecond.
"I'm so bored of the question, 'What are you doing next?' " she says. "The album's not even out yet. People are asking if I want another baby and I just had him! It sucks because it makes it go too quick. I want to enjoy where I'm at. Especially at this age, you are just, like: Slow it down."