VH1 (Jan. 5th 2005)

Gwen Stefani: The Solo Express

Dancing with Eve in the laundry room, listening to Fiddler On the Roof with Dre. The love angel explains her music, baby.

It started out with a Club Nouveau record, and grew into a monster. At first, No Doubt front-woman Gwen Stefani just wanted to make some dance music. Then the Neptunes got involved. And Dr. Dre. And Andre 3000. And Love.Angel.Music.Baby, named after the blonde singer's clothing line, crashed into the chart at No. 3. It's one of the friskiest pop albums of 2004, no question, but could Tokyo's Harajuku Girls ever replace that naked drummer? Read on.

VH1: So you've gone solo. 

Gwen Stefani: I'm not really calling this a solo record, because my ego's too big. It's very much a collaboration. I wish I could claim it as my own, but it's less of me than I've ever been. With No Doubt I'm doing all the melodies, the lyrics. This is like opening up my writing world to other people. It's like, "Oh, you have a lyrical idea? Well, that's very threatening, but OK." [Laughs] It's like it was kind of that whole game. 

VH1: For a long time fans speculated that you'd release a solo album. When did you decide you were going to make it? 

GS: I heard a Club Nouveau song and that's what ticked me off. I was like, "God, I want to make a dance record! I want to sing 'Rumours'!" So I had said something to Tony, our bass player. He's the one that turned me onto a lot of music that I never really listened to in high school because I was so into ska music. He was really into Prince, the Time, Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam, and Club Nouveau. So it seemed like a fun side project for us to do. 

VH1: How did the others get involved? 

GS: I wanted to make a record like those early Madonna or Cyndi Lauper records, but I wanted it to be modern. So I tried to get the people that were in the club today, like the Neptunes and [Dr.] Dre and Andre [3000]. I was like, "Hey, do you want to write a song?" And here we are! 

VH1: What was supposed to be side project didn't stay very quiet, though. 

GS: Exactly. I intended to put it out only if it was great, but I never intended for it to take as long as it took. That year off that we were going to take from the band, ended up being the year that we put our greatest hits out. We ended up doing a video, going to the Grammys, going to the MTV Awards; we went on tour for like seven weeks and then on top of it, [at] the same time I started writing this record.

VH1: You also started your own clothing line, which has the same name as your album. 

GS: I'm super-passionate about LAMB. It's beyond a dream come true for me, because I've always made clothes. My mom made my clothes. Her mom made all her clothes. It's in my blood, y'know? So I was just starting that and spending a lot of time working on designing and stuff like that. Then I made The Aviatoras well. Also I had to find my inspiration, you know? I had to find my Harajuku Girls and get inspired and think about things to write about after being on the Rock Steady tour and working so hard on that. Sometimes it takes a minute to recharge. 

VH1: I've read that you didn't know if you wanted to work with hitmaker-for-hire Linda Perry when the label suggested it. 

GS: Things get mixed around in whatever you read. Everything was purely, totally up to me. I've known Linda for years but when I thought about this record, I didn't think, "Oh, Linda!" I was thinking Prince, Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis.

VH1: So what happened? 

GS: She came up to me at the Grammys right when Pink and Christina [were happening] and she was getting of her rewards of all her hard work. I was so happy for her, because I know her whole story. We were the first two girls signed to Interscope. She put me in a choke hold and said, "We're gonna write songs together!" I was kind of like, "Okay." And then, when I came off the tour, that's when the label called and said, "She's ready to go." And I'm like, "I'm not ready to go yet. I've been sleeping. I'm tired and I'm not ready." 

VH1: What made you change your mind and get out of bed? 

GS: I said, "Just go. What are you going to lose? You're gonna lose a couple of hours sleep. You've never worked with a woman before. She had the eye of the tiger and she was looking at you and believed in it so much." Thank God I went that day. I knew she was talented, but I didn't know how amazingly inspiring she was and how versatile she is! I learned the lesson that things just happen and they happen for a reason. My first initial thought was, "I'm not going there." But it was exactly where I was going. We wrote my first single "What You Waiting For?" and it was the whole inspiration for everything.

VH1: I never would have guessed it was written by the woman behind "Beautiful." 

GS: I hear everybody that I work with in the songs I did with them. "What You Waiting For?" sounds so like much like Linda, but it also sounds totally like me. It's so weird to not be sitting here with them, explaining it. Usually I write with Tony and Adrian and Tom, and we sit and we discuss the songs for six months on tour. It's been a bizarre trip to go into the studio with people you barely know and be so intimate and write a song that's going to be there forever and then go off on my own talking about them behind their backs! 

VH1: How did you corral the talent you ended up working with? 

GS: I don't have my little black book with Dr. Dre's number in it or anything like that. But Dre was one of the first people I met with. Years before I did the Eve thing ["Let Me Blow Ya Mind"], I would always be like, "Hey, if you ever need the chorus girl to sing the hook, call me." It was such a scary thing working with him, because it was like Gwen from Anaheim and Dre from Compton. It was an honor, but it was really outside of my world. 

VH1: Now you, Eve and Dre are back together on "Rich Girl." 

GS: Recently I had a party and Eve came over and we danced the night away. It was one of those nights where we ended up in the laundry-room of my house and we were like, "We got to do it again." Dre actually came to me with the idea of doing "Rich Girl" from Fiddler on the Roof. I was like, "OK. It's a cover. The lyric is pretty much there. How am I gonna make that work?" He's like, "You got to play a character. You go work it out." So me and Eve went into the studio together and we wrote it together. 

VH1: It's hard to imagine Dre sitting at home listening to the Fiddler on the Roof soundtrack. 

GH: There's actually like a kind of underground dancehall version from the late '70s. I ended up panicking, like, What am I gonna make this about? I got to write the verses! I ended up going to see the musical on Broadway, just to get inspired. It was incredible, because it had an incredible message - if you don't have love, you don't have anything. Even if you're poor and you have love, you're rich. So the weight was really on my shoulders, because the song has so much history, y'know? I was like, Oh God, how am I going to make all this work? It was the last song I ended up doing on the record, and it was kind of like, Oh my God, when I get this done, I'm done with the record. I was on the treadmill in London and I finally came up with the verses and I was like, "Yes!!! I know what I'm going to do." 

VH1: Will you alternate between band and solo projects from now on? 

GS: I don't really see the future at all right now. For the first time in a while, I just don't even know what's going to happen next. I went and did this surprise show at the Jingle Ball the other day. The first live thing that I do happens to be in Anaheim, where I'm from. So it was very nostalgic driving down the five lane! One good thing about getting outside of the comfort zone of the No Doubt family is that it sounds very appealing to me to go back into that little nest and flirt around about writing some songs.