Platinum pop star Gwen Stefani talks about her hit addiction, yodeling fantasies, and how she kicked her Madonna habit. Now she prepares to conquer the world, with baby in tow. By Joseph Hooper.

You know the story: Blonde Italian-American pop diva, music video eminence, and all-round material girl marries a Brit artiste and moves to England. The relationship hits some bumps along the way, but a baby boy ensues and celebrity life keeps rolling. “It is weird that we have all these similarities,” Gwen Stefani allows as she nestles on a couch in one of the many rooms her entourage has taken in London’s Landmark hotel in mid-November. With a voice that hovers somewhere between sultry and Kewpie doll, the singer has a knack for sounding about seven years old: “Madonna’s had us over to dinner and stuff, and she’s always been very nice to me.”

Undeniably, there is a scale to Madge’s assault on the Old Country, everything from the horsey rural estate to the creeping mid-Atlantic accent. Stefani, by contrast, will lose her flat, half-swallowed Californian vowels when hell freezes over, and anyway, she hasn’t even truly relocated to England; she and Brit rocker husband Gavin Rossdale have for the past 10 years split their time between the house in London’s tony Primrose Hill (neighbors on either side are Jude Law and his ex, Sadie Frost) and a manse in LA. But if Madonna does it bigger, it is no longer heresy to suggest that musically, Stefani does it every bit as well. After 17 years of fronting the redoubtable rock/ska/reggae band No Doubt (she should make the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on the strength of one immortal break-up tune alone, “Don’t Speak”), Stefani took the solo plunge. Her 2004 giddy confession of dance tunes Love. Angel. Music. Baby went triple platinum. (“I remember telling Madonna I was going to do an ’80s dance record,” Stefani says, “and she rolled her eyes, because I think when you’ve lived through it like she did, she’s like ‘Whatever.’ But a lot of my influences came from her early work, like directly, like a Xerox.”) That album spawned one monster single, “Hollaback Girl,” a saucy cheerleader chant that taught teenage girls how to spell the word bananas and simultaneously established Stefani’s urban street cred as a white suburban rapper comfortable with the “S” word and with pop-hop notables the Neptunes’ marital beats.

“Gwen was always dope,” says Pharrell Williams, producer and one half of the Neptunes. “If there was an ill black record out there, she knew what is was.”

Linda Perry, the songwriter-producer who made Pink into Pink, says she barged her way onto the Stefani solo team by physically accosting the singer at the Grammy awards in 2004. “I was pokin’ her on the head,” Perry says, “and I was like, ‘Dude, you gotta give me a call for the new record.’ ”

Just last week, Stefani put the finishing touches on her new solo album, The Sweet Escape, which, if industry buzz and early radio play can be trusted, is poised to make a major impact. Less self-consciously retro than it’s prodecessor, The Sweet Escape employs the same working method as L.A.M.B; Lock Gwen up in the studio with a blurry succession of dream-team producers all vying for that one megahit (can you spell bananas?), tape everything, toss it up in the air, and see what sticks. A likely recipe for disaster (which No Doubt purists, partial to human beings playing actual drums and bass, may well judge), but it works, mostly due to Stefani’s feckless, reckless impulse to try anything that pops into her head. Nothing is more out there than the album’s first single and video, “Wind It Up” — typically sinister Neptunes beats and Stefani, backed by a symphony orchestra, singing fragments lifted from The Sound of Music’s “The Lonely Goatherd.” (Yes, that’s right: “High on the hill was the lonely goatherd/ Lay, odl ay odl ay hee hoo.”)

“Some people are freaked out by that yodel,” Stefani confides. “Either people get it or they don’t. But I’ve always had the fantasy of putting The Sound of Music to a beat. I used to quote all the songs like a geek!” (Pharrell, a famous musical minimalist, was less than convinced, but he tells me later, “I just rolled with her. I wanted her to be happy.”) Stefani’s term of art for a tune like “Wind It Up” is a “mash-up,” but, if you wanted to go all High Culture on Gwen, Dada would do as well. Marcel Duchamp has nothing on Stefani, whose brain is as adhesive as flypaper, a trap for pop-culture fragments that almost randomly catch and reassemble.

In her own mind, Gwen Stefani is the Cinderella of pop music. At any moment, it seems, the Landmark could turn into a pumpkin. “The hotel maid walked by today,” she says, “and she’s really pretty and she probably comes from Poland. And here I am about to spend a lot of money on room service and I was thinking, I could have been a maid.” Actually, Stefani grew up solidly middle-class in Anaheim, the second of four kids in a tight-knit family headed by folk-music-loving parents (dad Dennis was a Yamaha marketing executive; Patti was an accountant before becoming a full time mom.) Teenage Gwen was mad for clothes and jumped-up Jamaican-rooted ska music, then enjoying one of it’s periodic rivals. In 1987, her older brother, Eric, formed No Doubt and persuaded his bopping little sister to sing in the band and that, aside from a little college on the fly, would be her life; near-constant touring and a steady romance with the band’s bassist, Tony Kanal. The Cinderella theme kicked in big time with No Doubt’s hit third album, 1995’s Tragic Kingdom (Anaheim being home to Disney’s Magic Kingdom, after all), which transformed the Southern California party band into a pop/rock juggernaut. By then, Tony and Gwen had broken up (providing the raw material for “Don’t Speak) and Eric had decamped to become and animator with The Simpsons. But the band chugged on through 2001’s Rock Steady, by which all four No Doubt members were desperate for a break. (Kanal has since emerged as one of Stefani’s trusted solo collaborators.) As as to whether the success of solo Gwen means the end of No Doubt, Stefani says she hopes not: “I’m looking forward to going back to my little musical family and trying to write a song,” she says. But for the tween girls who are the core of her solo fan base, No Doubt, much beloved by young men, would fall squarely into the “No Clue” department.

With hubby Rossdale in LA recording with Pharrell, Stefani has turned over the London Primrose Hill house to her parents, visiting from Anaheim and eager, like the rest of the inner circle, to get some quality time with their six-month old grandson, Kingston. (“He’s pretty rad,” Kingston’s mom says.) For nine days, Stefani has moved in the Landmark with a small army of publicists and managers, transforming one of the city’s swankiest hotels into a field headquarters for the campaign of a global publicity push behind The Sweet Escape.

“I’m so exhausted,” Stefani announces as she walks into her personal assistant’s hotel room. But just because Cinderella is in a mood doesn’t mean she’s a diva. (“The ghastly thing about her is that she is a really decent human being,” says her pal Garbage frontwoman Shirley Manson.) Fame and talent aside, Stefani is the mall girl next door, one who’s very in touch with her emotions. When she’s up, she’s up, when she’s down, she cries easily, and she’s particularly sensitive in matters of personal appearance. Trailed from city to city by a retinue of hair and skin and clothes handlers who have become her intimate friends. (“They are as obsessive as I am and complete mad hatters,” Stefani says), she is still the last word on her high-glam platinum persona that evolved over a decade and a half’s worth of music videos. Today, and all-day photo shoot for another project has let her down. “I started with my hard look – my bangs – but the lighting was like Kmart – ‘Attention shoppers!’- so I had to revise.”

Post-photo-shoot debacle, Stefani has changed into a soothingly rich green tracksuit with the logo of her clothing line, L.A.M.B, running down one side in fancy gold script letters, (She has also launched a teen-friendly line, Harajuku Lovers, her homage to the style-conscious Tokyo girls who hang out in the Harajuku shopping district.) “People always say the same things,” she tells me. “That I’m smaller than they expected and that I look better in real like. Which is kind of a back-handed compliment.”

True enough. The early No Doubt Gwen, the adorable ska kid with a little baby fat, has been updated into a striking 37-year-old woman with angular features and a trim, honed physique. And then there’s the hair, which serves as a kind of Stefani mood ring, never more dramatically than in 2000 when she broke up with Rossdale (temporarily) and opted for the startling pink do that graced the cover of No Doubt’s Return of Saturn. She’s since gone back to Jean Harlow platinum, and over-the-top shade that can be seen to good effect in Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator, Stefani’s chance to play her Hollywood avatar for about three minutes of screen time, hanging off the arm of Leo DiCaprio’s Howard Hughes, (The movie experiences seems to have slacked her once-ardent film ambitions, but she says, “If Martin Scorsese called me again…”)

Hair color notwithstanding, the past four years have been anything but a cakewalk. After her 2002 marriage to her English rocker, she learned that Rossdale had fathered an illegitimate child, now a teenager, Stefani’s lyrics tend to read like blog entries from her own tumultuous Planet Relationship, so fans interpreted “Danger Zone,” off her first album, as a stinging retort: “Are your secrets where you’ve left them?/ Cause now your ghosts are mine as well.” (In this instance, the fans were wrong; the song was written before the revelation, but Stefani would be shocked by it’s prophetic resonance.)

As for the new album’s gorgeously bleak ballad “Early Winter” (“I can’t fix what you broke”), it turns out Tim Rice-Oxley from the band Keane wrote most of the lyrics and, by all accounts, Stefani and Rossdale are in a positive phase of the moon, thank you very much.) “But [that song] felt weird,” she says. “It felt like I could have lived it and I have lived it. I mean, of course me and Gavin have problems, sometimes. Everyone does. We’ve been together for over 10 years. This is, like, the real deal.” (For more on loving your man in spite of it all, consult “The Real Thing” off L.A.M.B)

In any event, she adds, it’s not like she’s going into the studio these days expressly for emotional catharsis. “I’ll never be as pure as I was when I wrote Tragic Kingdom,” she says. “Once you’ve had a hit, there’s no going back, because it’s so addictive. It’s a drug. I felt I was going back and getting more Pharrell, ‘Hollaback Girl Number 2.’” She giggles. “As you would! It’s not like being ambitious is a bad thing. And I wanted [this album] to be now, to be modern. I want it to be in the clubs. No Doubt was never in the clubs. I want to go out and hear that song pumping in the car next to me. I want bass! I want bump!”

Room service knocks and our tea arrives. “This is perfection,” Stefani says. She may be getting the hang of the England thing after all.

The next day I follow Stefani to the KISS radio station to watch her make nice over the English airwaves. It’s an entourage production, but in addition to the usual handlers we get an appearance by the beguiling Kingston Rossdale, who holds court in the waiting lounge under the watchful eyes of his grandparents. “Kingston is so chill,” Stefani says. “He goes with me everywhere, ’cause I’m still nursing. He’s been to every studio in LA, New York, London. He lives up to his name – total Rasta boy. He gives me real balance. You can go 100 miles an hour, but you still have to stop to hang out with him.” According to Manson, Stefani functions bafflingly well at top speed. “Sometimes you hang out with her and she says ‘Oh God, I had two hours of sleep last night. I was in the studio until 4 A.M. and then up with the baby at 6. Then she throws a big party at night.”

If motherhood is sweet, the pregnancy proved to be an unexpected bitch. “I thought I was going to be one of those Mother Nature girls. I figured, I’ll just squeeze it out,” she says, ” ’cause I’m really strong and I work out and stuff.” Instead, shortness of breath and a host of other physical ills made the latter part of her L.A.M.B tour a nightmare. “I would be seriously crying before I went on stage. I didn’t know how I was going to get through the tour, putting on nice costume changes on a stage in front of 12,000 people every night. And I didn’t want people to know [I was pregnant]. I didn’t want it to become the Gwen Freak Circus Show – ‘Watch it grow on stage.’ ”

Tonight, gearing up for her Sweet Escape tour, Stefani is looking the furthest thing from maternal, in a skintight sweater and clunky neck chain that I assume is a garden-variety hip-hop bling until she sets me straight. It’s a key, she says, formed by two back-to-back G’s, her “Wind It Up” key that’s featured prominently in the video with yodeling and the lonely goatherd and an allusively related Houdini subplot with a struggling Stefani shackled to a chain fence as if underwater. “In the video,” she says, “you can see the key coming out of my mouth. When Houdini used to do his tricks, his wife used to pass the key from her mouth to his mouth. It’s the sweet escape. And I was thinking, The key is the music. It all kind of ties up together.”

Whatever (as Stefani would say), it makes for a cool video. Her new fans are happy to follow her into the woolliest recesses of her imagination, entranced by the fabulous artifice, by the playful tug-of-war between her Jean Harlow and abs-of-steal personas, and by the evident fact that you can be a mega-pop star without the standard issue T & A pander (especially about a zillion preteen girls who take their uncomplaining dads to her concerts.) Something about Gwen Stefani seems to reconcile opposites – humble celebrity, femme jock, surrealist material girl – and has ever since the early No Doubt days when she was the girl in the guys’ band touring the rock dives of America in a van. “I would ‘go off’ in the mosh pit,” she says, “but I was always very glamorous before I dove in.”

The reigning queen of rock & roll is flying solo for the first time in her career, and life is pretty sweet. It’s also an emotional roller coaster.

The lobby of New York’s Mercer Hotel is a haven of downtown chic – all angular furniture in shades of eggplant, with oblong over-sized lampshades atop carved wooden posts. A wall lined with bookshelves displays volumes on Toulouse Lautrec, Robert Mapplethorpe and Andy Warhol alongside studies of designers Vivienne Ta, and Salvatore Ferragamo and anthologies on modernist architecture. The place is, as Gwen Stefani puts it, “super-frickin’ trendy cool,” the kind of hotel where everybody pretends not to notice when Nicky Hilton saunters past the reception desk.

But someone has taken notice of Stefani, lounging inconspicuously on a leather cafe chair on this late December evening. Stefani is is done up in the luxe street style that has made her an international fashion icon: dark-wash jeans from her own L.A.M.B label (“They look good whether I’m a bit fatter, or not,” she says), a L.A.M.B wife-beater, suede Christian Dior clogs that add three and a half inches to her height and platinum-blond hair extensions bubbling from under a blue knit ski cap. She slouches lower in her seat. “There’s this guy over there and he won’t stop staring at me,” she says.

I turn around and see a toddler – no more than a year old, big blue eyes, hair so fair it blends in almost completely with his scalp – gazing in our direction. Stefani giggles. “The little baby,” she says. “So cute.”

Stefani has always been the kind of songwriter who lives out most of her private dilemmas in public. “Don’t Speak,” the song that put No Doubt over the top in 1996, was about the break up of her seven-year relationship with bass player Tony Kanal. In 2000, after four years of dating Bush frontman Gavin Rossdale, she made a video for No Doubt’s “Simple Kind of Life,” where she ran wild in a wedding dress while singing, “I always thought I’d be a mom/ Sometimes I wish for a mistake.” True to form, the first single from her recent debut, “What You Waiting For?” chronicles her intense baby lust – the “tick-tock” refrain of the chorus, she says, was inspired in part by the sound of her biological clock.

During the three days I spent with her, her desire to have children is a continual theme, whether she’s talking about how she never planned on being a pop star (“Before that all I ever did was, like, look at Tony and pray that God would let me have a baby with him”) or the joy of marrying Rossdale (“It’s such a beautiful, magical feeling, I can’t explain it. It’s like having a baby. I can imagine what it might be like. But that love I’ve never experienced”) or her plans for the future (“I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I’ve always wanted to do the family thing”).

And like any successful woman on the mommy track, she worries about the conflicts of career and family, although most women don’t have to stress about the demands of dressing as fairy-tale characters in music videos. “At a certain point I’m going to want a family,” Stefani says, “and I’m not going to have time to be running around the world doing this shit and being greedy the way I have been. I can always write up songs. But can I always wear an Alice in Wonderland costume? I probably shouldn’t. I can be at home. I was thinking that when I have children, that I should always dress as a character for them, so they think their mom is Alice in Wonderland or Cinderella. It would be totally messed up!”

“I hope she chooses to do both things,” says Jimmy Iovine, the chairman of Stefani’s label, Interscope, of the star’s career and family ambitions. “She can handle both. I think she would really miss not fulfilling her potential as an artist, and she’d regret that. But her potential as a mom is equally as powerful.”

“This is the first time in a long time that I actually don’t know what’s gonna happen next,” Stefani finally says. “You think about it as a famous person. You think about how you’re gonna end it. How you’re gonna get away and have a normal life. I imagine my children are going to save me from my vanity and be my passion and fill whatever fears I have of the amazing time I’m having right now being gone. I don’t want to drop off and not be on the radio or not be able to talk about myself for hours. But at the same time, I never expected to be here in the first place.”

Disturbing but true: listen to rock radio these days and you’ll hear a women’s voice only if it belongs to Gwen Stefani or Evanescence’s Amy Lee. Lee sure sold a lot of records in the past few years, but Stefani is the only true female rock star left on radio or MTV. “She’s toured from when she was eighteen years old playing small clubs, to playing small theaters, then amphitheaters and then arenas,” says Iovine. “She is the only woman on pop radio right now who has toured with that vigor, and she’s the only one who could tour as easily with U2, Green Day and Outkast.”

Almost ten years after “Just a Girl” hit airwaves, Stefani has an instantly recognizable voice, and inimitable sense of style and an impact on popular culture on par with Madonna’s. “There will never be anyone else quite like her,” says Garbage singer Shirley Manson, who has known Stefani since the mid-Nineties and toured with No Doubt in 2002. “She’s like the perfect Trojan horse: She seems very benign and wholesome, but underneath lurks an incredible toughness and powerful directness. Nobody can copy her, because she’s this uniquely extraordinary contradiction.”

Indeed, Stefani is one of the only Nineties stars who has managed to hold the attention of the ever-churning teenage audience. Her solo debut, Love, Angel, Music, Baby, sold over half a million copies in its first two weeks. She recently scored a pair of Grammy nominations: one for “What You Waiting For?” and one with No Doubt for their cover of Talk Talk’s “It’s My Life.” (If she wins both, her Grammy collection will span to five.) In December, she made her big-screen debut – albeit in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it role – playing Jean Harlow in Martin Scorsese’s Howard Hughes biopic, The Aviator. And last night, she went to the holiday party for her clothing line, which is preparing its fourth collection for fall 2005.

Love, Angel, Music, Baby is the kind of Eighties-style electro dance album that Stefani grew up on in Orange County, California. It’s so Eighties, in fact that members of New Order are the backing band on “The Real Thing,” alongside collaborations with OutKast’s Andre 3000, Dr. Dre and Eve, the Neptunes, Dallas Austin and Linda Perry. “Right now in my life, I’m all about trying things I’ve never done.” Stefani says. “I’m a woman and I’m thirty-five. I don’t have that much time left to do this kind of a pop record. Let’s be real about it.”

The idea for the album, she says, came to her one morning during No Doubt’s Rock Steady tour two years ago. She heard one of her favourite dance tracks from the Eighties, Club Nouveau’s “Why You Treat Me So Bad,” turned to Kanal over breakfast and said, “I want to do that song.” It was Kanal, after all, who had introduced her to that kind of music when the two were teenage sweethearts, before she turned him onto ska, before No Doubt had a record deal.

I was super ska girl when I met Tony,” she says. “I wore only black and white and these hoop earrings. Tony went to Anaheim High School, which is a big cholo school. He came over here from Anaheim at eleven. He has Indian parents, and he was the first born, so he didn’t have any influences. He thought he was Prince. Because I had a crush on him, he turned me on to Prince and Lisa Lisa and Debbie Deb, and that stuff has always had a special place in my heart.”

Then No Doubt got to the end of the tour in late 2002, everyone in the band was ready for a break. Stefani had just married Rossdale, Kanal “had his first real girlfriend,” guitarist Tom Dumont was engaged, and drummer Adrian Young’s wife had given birth to their first baby. “Everyone started changing,” Stefani explains. “All those years we were only committed to each other, but then we grew up. You could tell certain people in the band needed a break.”

The night before she is scheduled to perform at the 2004 Billboard Music Awards, Stefani sits on the couch in a Las Vegas hotel room looking like Alice in Wonderland on casual Friday. Her hair is held off her face with a thick velvet headband, and she’s dressed in a black sweater, jeans and white sweat socks. A keyboard with colored tape marking specific keys sits next to the couch so that Stefani can rehearse the intro to “What You Waiting For?” in her spare time. She starts by showing me a big white blister on her thumb that she got after one of the candles in her hotel room tipped over and spilled hot wax on her. “I can’t stop playing with it,” she squeaks.

I was in such a shit mood before you came,” she says. “I’m really on my period right now, really bad. I’m so emotional. I’m gonna cry just talking about it.” Many of Stefani’s stories involve her either crying, or nearly crying. “I’m just emotional,” she says. “I don’t fight with people – like, I can barely fight with my husband because I’ll just start crying instead. I’ve learned not to do that so much. Period week, I cry a lot. And the week when I was to Anaheim to play my first show by myself, I cried all the way, because I was like, ‘This is surreal. Why does my first show have to be in Anaheim?’ ”

Gwen Stefani’s parents – Dad is marketing exec and Mom quit her job as a dental assistant to stay at home with the kids – still live in the same house in Anaheim where she grew up with her older brother, Eric, younger sister, Jill, and younger brother, Todd. “My mum and dad met at Anaheim High School,” she says. “After they got married, all they wanted to do was have four children, and they did.” When the kids were still small, their parents would take them to bluegrass and folk festivals; one of the first shows Gwen remembers seeing was Emmylou Harris. “She had just had a baby,” she says, “and she took a break in the middle of the show to go feed the baby. I couldn’t believe it.”

The Stefani kids all live relatively close to home, and though Gwen says she’s very close with Jill – the two call each other simply “sister” – it was Eric whom she idolized as a teenager. No Doubt was his band before he recruited Gwen to share singing duties with the late John Sinclair, who committed suicide in 1987. Eric quit the group before Tragic Kingdom came out and now works full-time as a cartoonist. “Everything Eric was into, I got into,” she says. “He’s super creative, and he was this high school cartoonist and he was in the marching band, and he had all these wild artist friends. I don’t know if he really was cool or not, but he seemed cool to me.”

By comparison, Stefani says she was “pretty lazy” and “passive.” She had trouble with her grades at Loara High School and didn’t even know if she was going to be able to graduate. By the time she got to Cypress College in 1987, she discovered that, even though she couldn’t spell to save her life, she was pretty good at writing song lyrics. “After Tony broke up with me, I realized I had something to say,” she says. “When I started writing songs, it was like ‘I’m a real human in this world, and I can do something.’ ”

Love, Angel, Music, Baby, though, proved a major challenge to Stefani’s confidence as a songwriter. her original idea was to make an old-school dance album “with Tony in his bedroom and the two of us singing in a microphone,” she says. Jimmy Iovine wanted something bigger and pushed Stefani to shoot for the moon, pairing her with producers such as Dallas Austin and Linda Perry in hopes of striking chart gold. “She was nervous about it,” says Iovine. “It was her first time doing something without her band, and it was a big step. I said, ‘Let’s just experiment and see what happens.’ ”

But when it came time to start work on the album in earnest, her insecurities kicked into high gear. “I cried before I went in the studio,” Stefani says. “I was just terrified.” Writing songs with her band of seventeen years seemed like a piece of cake compared with trying to be creative on cue, alongside Pharrell Williams or André 3000 or Dr. Dre. “It was very threatening to let these people into my world,” she says. “Because that’s what I define myself as – a songwriter. The hardest part was letting someone even suggest an idea and then my ego being able to take it if it was good.”

She got together with Perry, and on the first day they wrote a song called “Fine by You” that didn’t make it onto the album.”It was all about ‘I don’t want to be inspired. I don’t want to call anyone. I just want to sleep and wear the name you gave me. And everything is fine by you and you don’t judge me and you love me,’ ” Stefani says. “It was a stupid love song, but really good. I went home and felt good, like, ‘I did it. I wrote a song today.’ I was still really scared to go back, and when I got there the next day, Linda had been up writing all night. That whole jealousy thing happened, like, ‘You did that?’ ” The song Perry had written was “What You Waiting For?”; it was her way of telling Stefani to get off her ass and stop complaining. “It was a dare, and I don’t even remember writing the words after that,” Stefani says. “I just barfed them out.”

Once Stefani felt comfortable with the direction of the album, her quirky creative impulses took over. She became fixated on the idea of dedicating a song to the wildly dressed Japanese women she had admired ever since her first visit to the Harajuku section of Tokyo in 1996. “Everybody had this crazy personal style,” she says. “The last couple of times I was there, it had evolved into all these different things like the Gothic Lolitas and these girls with blond hair and dark tans and high-heel shoes, like they were from Hollywood. I was working with Linda, and I did a shout out to them: ‘Harajuku girls, you got the wicked style.’ That’s when the dream started.”

The dream, that is, of having four Harajuku girls follow her everywhere she went to promote her album. The four girls, whom Stefani named “Love,” “Angel,” “Music” and “Baby” are actually professional dancers whose main job – other than performing on stage with Stefani – is to stand behind her and look cute. But the idea also evolved into a running theme on the album: Not only did she write a song dedicated to them (“Harajuku Girls”), but two other songs on Love, Angel, Music, Baby reference the Japanese fashionistas. “I was thinking about calling the album Stolen Goods,” she jokes. “Or It Was Yours and Now It’s Mine.”

Maybe one day, she says, maybe after she’s started her family, maybe she will make a “real” solo album. “I would really love to learn to play something so I Don’t have to rely on someone to collaborate with,” she admits. “Like, I’ve written songs on guitar, but I don’t play guitar good enough to be free. If I could play every chord? I feel like I could write a million songs if I had that.”

But how will she know when it’s time to stop fighting the ticking in her head and start the family she’s always wanted? For a moment she seems at a loss for words. “I’ve been making a conscious effort not to think about the future,” she finally says. “I feel lucky to not have a real job, to be able to express myself, be creative and be relevant. I don’t know what I’ll be doing in ten years. How old will I be? Forty-five. I don’t want to think about it, to be honest, because it’s a waste of time. Tomorrow night I’ll be in bed with my husband again and it will be great. It’s all about right now.”

Blender joins the No Doubt singer’s court to find out about her solo album, movie career and love life. “Everything you could probably think up is true,” she says.

Gwen Stefani is dancing barefoot in her kitchen. One of the tracks she’s just finished for her first solo album is playing on her laptop, and she spinning around saying “I love this song!” while a small posse of assembled staff looks on: her publicist, her graphic designer and her British manservant Pete, who is juicing a lemon and preparing Stefani her light, fragrant lunch.

All around Stefani, in her Mediterranean-style Los Angeles mansion, are the lavish accumulations of the truly successful: a driveway crowded with Mercedes; huge vases of tall, perfect lilies on every table; two silent cleaning women fluffing every cushion and dusting every shiny surface; a parade of Herb Ritts photographs of Stefani with her shirtless husband, Bush frontman Gavin Rossdale; and drawings by couturier John Galliano of the dress he made for her wedding, framed with a card from the designer that reads: “Dearest Gwen, Thank you for the most amazing evening.” Stefani arrived here from London just last night, but Rossdale had to stay behind. “We’re trying to get his dog out here,” she explains, “but it’s hard to get a private plane to fly a person with a dog.”

Stefani sings along to her song “Harajuku Girls” in the kind of mock pop-star voice one might use to croon “Like a Virgin” into a hairbrush. “I’m your biggest fan!” she squeals in perfect unison with her recorded self. And if Blender didn’t know that the woman bouncing and twirling about was the queen of this castle, that she and Madonna have actually “hung out several times,” that the voice coming from the computer has sold 26 million records worldwide with her band No Doubt, we might think she was exactly what she just said: a fan, a starry-eyed hopeful bopping along to the beat.

Blender’s Woman of the Year still has the giddy enthusiasm of a person who is surprised by her luck, even after 17 years in music, three Grammys and the launch of her own fashion label L.A.M.B, which Gwen-ishly stands for “Love Angel Music Baby,” also the name of her new album. Love Angel Music Baby will not only bring her another car or manservant, it’s sure to brighten the celebrity spotlight, as happened to Justin Timberlake when he stepped out of ‘N Sync.

But going solo is still a risk, a move away from a proven formula and out into the unknown. Just ask Mick Jagger. Or david Lee Roth. Or Al Gore. Stepping out – at age 34, no less – of the protective cocoon of a band that she has been in half her life requires remarkable ambition, power, balls. Gwen Stefani doesn’t see it that way.

“Everyone keeps calling it a solo record and I keep calling it a dance record,” she says. “‘Cause if I was doing a solo record, that would be like, finally, me… finally this is the real Gwen Stefani. It’s not that. This album is actually less of me than ever before.”

Growing up, Gwen Stefani never fantasized about being a rock star. Never pictured living the brilliant transatlantic life of pop royalty. The Gwen Stefani story according to Gwen Stefani, goes like this: All her life, things just happened to her. She is an accidental rock star – or at least she likes to think so, maybe because it’s true or maybe because lusting after fame and fortune seems unladylike to her.

And to be sure, Stefani has been lucky in one crucial regard: The men in her life have buffeted her from many of the uphill struggles in her life.

Her brother Eric founded the band No Doubt when Gwen was still in high school in Anaheim, California, and herded her into the band. “Eric’s the one who brought the first Madness record home and got us all into ska,” she says. “I’d wake up because he’d be banging on the piano. He would always be trying to get me to sing, because he couldn’t sing very much himself, and I could sing along to the Annie soundtrack or Evita.”

Gwen’s first real boyfriend, Tony Kanal, was, and is, No Doubt’s bassist and co-songwriter. Kanal has always handled all the wheeling and dealing and planning that are crucial, tedious busy work of any successful band.

“Tony took care of everyone and he was on top of all business,” Stefani says. “Nothing went wrong – no stone unturned, every corner cleaned. The opposite of me. I’m a mess!” (She means literally as well as figuratively: Stefani says that of all her indulgences, the one she’s most hate to lose is her cleaning women. “I get home, I drop.” She mimes throughing things in every direction.)

Stefani entered the band that made her a star when she was 17 years old. “I was a very passive girl,” she says. Stefani is perched on an immaculate, overstuffed white sofa, her white hair pinned up in a glamorous puff.”I was completely satisfied with just being in love with my boyfriend and dreaming about getting married.” Stefani didn’t consider herself talented. “I always considered myself as really lazy because I was bad at school…. Not that I was a bad girl,” she says quickly. “just that it was hard for me to learn. I couldn’t even pay attention, I spent the whole fuckin’ time drawing pictures. The bell would ring and I would be like, ‘Gosh the period’s over?’ I would have just written my boyfriend’s name in really sketched out, really nice letters.”

Part of the fun of being a No Doubt fan has always been tracking Stefani’s crushes and heartaches through her unusually transparent, occasionally, artless lyrics. Listening to a No Doubt song can feel like peeking into high-school journal: finding out on 1995’s “Sunday Morning” how excruciating it was for her when Kanal ended their romance; hearing, on Rock Steady’s “Underneath It All,” about how happy she’s become with Rossdale (“You give me the most gorgeous sleep/ That I’ve ever had”); or how badly she wants a baby on “Simple Kind of Life” (“I always thought I’d be a mom/ Sometimes I wish for a mistake”).

Gwen Stefani wrote that song in 1999, a couple of years after No Doubt and Bush were pushed together on a tour by their label, Interscope Records. Initially, everyone in the band was dead-set against the pairing. “The label was always talking about Gavin and Bush,” she says in the whine of a kid talking about history and math. “We were just like, ‘Whatever. We are not going on tour with those guys; that’s not who we are.’ And then we went and it was love. It was magic.”

Well, maybe for her. The rest of No Doubt were furious.

“Everybody was against it,” Stefani says. “It was a very crazy time. There was already my breakup with Tony, and we were enjoying success for the first time and having outside things come in to to our little band, our little family. And then I met Gavin. It was really lonely, because I felt like nobody wanted me to go out with him. My ex-boyfriend and all of my, like, brothers in the band were saying ‘You are not gonna go out with that guy!’ ”

Why not? “Because I had never been out with anyone else! And other reasons. Everything you could probably think up in your brain is probably true.”

Gwen Stefani started thinking about making a solo album when No Doubt was on tour in 2002 to promote Rock Steady. This was just a few weeks after she married Rossdale in London, went on a quickie honeymoon to Capri, then had a second ceremony in Los Angeles at the home of Jimmy Iovine, her boss at Interscope records. (“That dress,” she says of her custom-designed Galliano with a giggle, “was the whole reason I had another wedding.”) All four members of No Doubt were planning to take a break after the triple platinum Rock Steady “because we hadn’t had one in so long and everyone was burned out,” Stefani says, “Me, first and foremost.”

But the girl who had always worried about being lazy wasn’t planning on taking it easy. “I had so many things I wanted to do: the baby, the movie, the whole list, and the clock was so loud in my head!” Stefani says making her solo album was actually a low priority, but that once she put it in motion, it was impossible to halt. An all-star group of musicians and producers from very different genres came forward to collaborate with her: André 3000, Dr. Dre, Linda Perry, Dallas Austin, the Neptunes and Nellee Hooper, to name a few. And once she told the label she was interested in doing her own “side-project,” you can imagine their reaction. Gwen Stefani, the billboard-ready blonde with the crazy voice and the mad style is finally going solo? Ka-ching!

“As soon as I told Jimmy Iovine that I wanted to do this record, it’s been, like, his record,” she says. “When someone believed in you more than you believe in yourself, you almost want to do it to please them.”

“I would literally back her on anything,” Iovine says from his L.A. office. “Her vision is that strong, I use her a lot in Interscope’s business, the way I would use Dr. Dre: ‘What do you think of this? What do you think of that?’ ”

But when Stefani first started working on Love Angel Music Baby, she found herself – or cast herself – in a familiar role, as the subordinate: dealing with other people’s time lines, striving to meet other people’s goals.

“This is how crazy it was,” she says, tapping her feet frantically as if still buzzing with the pressure and the adrenaline of the whole thing. “The record company called me and was like, ‘You’ve got to go work with Linda Perry. Now. She has only five days out of the whole year to work with you.’ And I’d just got off tour! I was tired, I was burned out, I’d just got married. I hadn’t even seen my husband! But then I thought, OK, if I don’t do this now…. I want to do great things, and I know that I’m super-lucky?” she says in perfect so-cal upspeak.

“So I should just take all the opportunities. It’s one to have ‘Just a Girl’ on the radio, but to have years of cake and ice cream?” She grins and makes eating noises. “It’s gonna end soon! So basically, I cried in my bed, like, for real.”

“When Stefani talks, she actually does sound very much like that teenager who sings into hairbrushes and spends 6th period tracing her boyfriends name in curlicues. But it’s confusing, hearing this animated, teenybopper voice come out of the crimson mouthed woman who is so outrageously glamorous. She doesn’t wear clothes so much as she does costumes. Even sitting around the house, she has gold high-heeled Mary Janes and a plaid Vivienne Westwood top with a cape-like piece that she throws dramatically over her shoulder every 20 minutes or so.

Her assistant brings out an exquisite china coffee service and she takes hers with honey and milk, raising a tiny teacup to her lips with a perfectly manicured hand. “I feel so ‘lady’ now!” she says, beaming. She is not unlike the cliché of the platinum-haired silent-movie star who opens her mouth and spoils the illusion of frosty allure with her Betty Boop voice.

Only in Gwen Stefani’s case, the tears and the eating noises and the “rads” that pepper her conversations are a large part of her Valley-girl-next-door appeal. You can’t be too fancy when you begin your career with a bindi glued to your forehead or decorate your backyard with two intersecting green street signs that read “Gwen Drive” and “Gavin Way.”

“I’m gaudy and cheesy and I always want to push it,” she admits. “Adrian [Young] was always the yang of the band if I was the yin. If I’m the cheese, he’s the cool. That’s what makes No Doubt.” She thinks about it for a minute. “We would be like the most not-best-friends.”

The down side of all this guileless, youthful charm is that Stefani sometimes seems on the verge of drowning in her own adolescent securities. “I think Gwen is over-critical of herself,” say Linda Perry, who was the first producer to work with Stefani on her solo tracks. (Perry was the lead singer of 4 Non Blondes and then went on to write and produce Pink hits like “Get The Party Started” and Christina Aguilera’s “Beautiful”) “There was one day where she had a little insecurity breakdown. But I found it very endearing: I loved seeing her that insecure. You meet a lot of people who have half her talent and the they think they’re God’s creative monster.”

Somehow, when Stefani tells it, she is, again the person who things are happening to, not the person in control. “At the Grammys, Linda Perry came up to me like a fucking bull dozer and basically put me in a headlock and was like, ‘We need to write some songs together,’ ” says Stefani. Gwen was accustomed to taking her time – sometimes years – to write songs with No Doubt. “It was always a long, hard process. So I was like, ‘I can’t sit next to you and pour my heart out. I don’t even know you!’ There was times I was just like, ‘Fuck you, dude, you’re totally stepping on my territory.’ Other times we were really inspired by each other. Linda and I had a meant-to-be thing that was magical. I get emotional about it,” Stefani says, and starts to cry a little.

It will probably come as no surprise that Stefani is big on emotion. She is also big on magic. With Pharrell Williams, she “wrote three songs in three days and they were all magic.” The Rock Steady tour was “so magic.” Shooting her cameo appearance as Jean Harlow in martin Scorsese’s upcoming biopic on Howard Hughes, her film debut, was “super-magical.” She had a “magical night” with Adrian Young at the MTV Video Music Awards in Miani. And recording with Andre 3000 was, you guessed it, “total magic!”

Despite all her breathless enthusiasm for the new pool of talent she’s been soaking in, Stefani claims she has no plans to stay solo. “No Doubt is definitely not broken up,” she says firmly. “I don’t even have plans to tour at this point; I don’t see myself putting out a bunch of Gwen Stefani records. Who knows? I might have a baby and just want to stare at it all day and quit everything.” She assesses her time with No Doubt thus far like so: “To be able to put that many years into one project? It was magic.”

Back in her capacious, green tiled kitchen Stefani plays a few more of her new tracks for Blender, and one in particular stands out: a heart-melting ’80s-ish pop song called “Cool” that she wrote with Dallas Austin. She sings “After all the obstacles/ It’s good to see you now with someone else/ It’s such a miracle that you and me are still good friends/ After all that we’ve been through/ I know we’re cool.”

Sounds personal. Is it about anyone in particular? Any bassist in particular?
“It reminds me of the ending of something… that place we are with the band. Like, how every thing’s cool no matter what and we all know it,” she says and looks at her feet. “And other things you can probably pick up on.”

Blender wonders if all this isn’t a little weird for her husband: having a super famous wife who’s till intensely enmeshed with an ex boyfriend, an ex she’s written whole records about, an ex who’s produced several tracks on her solo album, an ex on whom she still depends (“Doing this on my own there’s this whole pile of things where you go, ‘Frick! Where’s Tony?’ “).

Stefani won’t get specific about it. But she does admit that working out without No Doubt on this record has made it possible for Rossdale to contribute more to her music.

“It’s one thing to be in a band with all these guys, and obviously Gavin’s not gonna offer much of an opinion.” she says. “But when I’m on my own, we can talk even more, he can have more of an opinion. It’s been really… romantic.”

For the first time, Rossdale wrote some lyrics for one of Stefani’s songs, a track called “The Real Thing.” It’s so clear the lines that he wrote because they’re so visual and mine are always so obvious,” she says. “Like, just how you would talk it.”

Their second wedding anniversary, on September 14, just passed. “We haven’t done anything yet because he’s in London, but when he gets here I’m sure we’ll make out or something.”

For all her insecurities, Stefani is refreshingly proud of this album. She fully expects 7th graders to be slow dancing to “Cool” and requesting it – begging for it – at make-out parties.

“That,” she says, “would be so perfect! The thing about my record is you can try not to like it. You can try. But you know what? It’s gonna be your guilty pleasure. I just know it!”

All about my year: Gwen Stefani

No band mates were consulted in the answering of this questionnaire!

Best song I heard in 2004
OutKast’s “Hey Ya!”

Trend I’m most sick of
Reality television.

Sex symbol of 2004
Beyoncé

Most expensive purchase of 2004
A Vivienne Westwood shopping spree.

Most rock-star moment of 2004
Every day felt like a rock-star day.

Where I’ll spend New Year’s Eve
At my house in L.A. with 300 people dancing to my record.

What a Year! The best (and worst) of 2004

Introducing Gwen Stefani as our chick of the year. By Parker Ray.

It’s hard to believe that this is Gwen Stefani’s first gay press interview – especially considering how much we queer boys love our stylish, ballsy, independent, hard-working, trendsetting, pop star blondes (real or dyed). So much so they can all be addressed by their first names: Madonna, Debbie, Britney, Christina, Kylie.

But there is a difference between the ladies above and Gwen. She nails it when she tells Instinct, “I don’t feel like I’m very controversial, I don’t want to upset people. I just want to make them feel good.”

That pretty much sums up why Gwen Stefani is our Chick Of The Year. Not only would we switch for her in a heartbeat – just name the time, place and what kind of wine we should bring – but she embodies the type of female that gay men should be adoring. She doesn’t stir up controversy because, really, what does that accomplish other than killing trees to print copies of Us Weekly and Star?

No, instead Gwen inspires – and she doesn’t need to get hitched in Vegas while drunk or expose herself ina coffee table book to get attention. She just works her butt off. And she can’t get enough of creative people or the creative process, and vice versa. Just look at her list of collaborators: The Neptunes, Moby, Andre 3000, Linda Perry, Eve, New Order – among others.

By having Gwen as the first chick to appear solo on our cover, Instinct is officially proclaiming her the queen of the next wave of gay icons. She has all the ingredients we love without any of that lame tabloid baggage. And, even though she swears a lot (which we totally dig), in the end she’s what we all wish we could be: Classy, successful and respected.

INSTINCT: Before we get started, I just want to say happy belated birthday. Did you get to do anything fun?
GWEN STEFANI: Thank you! I did. My husband had a little barbecue party for me. I hadn’t seen anyone because I was in London or wherever I was. [Chuckles] So they all came over and we ate lots of food and caught up with each other.

You have two big “firsts” coming up: Your first film role, in The Aviator, and your first solo album. Obviously, they’re two very different experiences. What was the most thrilling aspect of being in a film, especially one with Leonardo and directed by Martin Scorsese?
I’ve been wanting to do film for a long time. One of the big reasons I took time away from the band is, at the end of the Rock Steady Tour, it was almost like we were married to each other for 18 years and we never took any breaks. We kept going out of pure passion.

It seems perfect that you are playing Jean Harlow in The Aviator.
[Laughs] When I read who they wanted me to play, my stomach was on the floor – oh my god, Jean Harlow! [Laughs] Howard Hughes basically gave Harlow her first movie role and the scene that I’m in is when they go to the premiere of the film, Hell’s Angels, at the Mann Chinese Theatre. I thought it was kind of ironic that it was my first movie role and I was playing Jean at the premiere of her first film. It’s actually Herb Ritts’ fault that I got the part.

His fault? How’s that?!
Herb Ritts was the one that had done this photo shoot for Teen Vogue with me. It was his idea to do this Marilyn [Monroe] on the beach thing. I was just happy to finally be working with Herb. Martin Scorsese saw that cover on the side of a bus station and thought, Hey, let’s get that girl to try out.

Is this the type of movie role you were hoping for?
There is no small part in that film, but it was only; like, five days of work. It was really incredible to start off playing someone like Jean Harlow. I haven’t done much acting but I have a feeling that it is something that I would enjoy. Not that it can compare to playing for 20,000 people and getting that immediate reaction being on stage.

And with the new record, Love. Angel. Music. Baby, you get to explore your inner dance diva.
I had a specific record I wanted to make. But it snowballed and became this really hard, ego-busting project. The clock was ticking in my ears; I thought writing dance songs was going to be easy. You don’t have to think about anything, you just have to write, “Get on the dance floor and boogie.” I wasn’t looking to have a theme, just a guilty pleasures record.

Guilty pleasures. We like those. And because you’re, well, Gwen Stefani, you had quite the opportunity to work with a bunch of great producers.
I had a list of people I wanted to work with that I thought I could get a certain sound with. Linda Perry came up to me at the Grammys and I was so happy for her because I had known her for years. We were the first two girls signed to Interscope and I was happy for her success because I knew her journey. She’s a very aggressive girl. [Laughs] She came up to me and basically put me in a headlock. She gave me this intense look right into my eyes and she said, “We’ve got to write songs together!” I’m just kind of thinking, Dude you’re not Prince, you know? [Laughs] How are we going to write my dance record?

She did write that get-your-bootie-to-the-dancefloor song for Pink.
I was looking to work with people like Prince and Andre 3000. Robert Smith. Anyone that I liked back in high school.

But, come on, this is Linda Perry.
I didn’t know how talented she was. That some girl could run the board and has all this equipment, tons of guitars, drums, as massive studio, it was all very impressive for me. I’ve done this for half my life and I’ve never gone in and had girls who were able to run the board. We ended up the writing a song that first day called “Fine By You” which was basically: I don’t want to be inspired, I just want to be lazy, but whatever I want to do is fine by you and you like me still. I came back the in the next day and [Linda] didn’t even look at me when I walked in; she had been up all night and pressed play and this crazy maniac track came out. What the fuck? You did not just pull that shit out! It was almost like a dare. She’s, like, “Gwen, what the fuck you waiting for? You gotta do this shit now.” We looked at each other that dat and there was definitely electricity and you could tell it was all meant to be. It still bugs me that she wrote “What You Waiting For?” She wrote that line. Nobody fucking cares, I know. Nobody cares but me.

In that single you mention that this “dance” record you’re making is going to bring you “brand new fans.” As if you needed to make a dance record to get the gay boys to like you anymore…
[Laughs] You know, my hairdresser, who’s gay – go figure – he was, like, “There’s a category for gay guys?” Like you all like the same type of music. I knwo that isn’t true. I’m not stupid. I understand that there’s a whole club scene. Trust me. I’m surrounded by gay guys.

We guess it’s just that this solo project, especially since it’s more dancy, is going to bring even more gay guys to worship at the Altar of Gwen.
The one thing I’d like to mention: I feel really uncomfortable when people say I’m going solo because I feel this is definitely not somewhere I’m going. I feel like if I was going solo I would be leaving the band and not compromising and writing this whole record on my own and it would be pure Gwen. This is simply just me going, Fuck, I wouldn’t mind trying something different before I die.

That makes sense. Do you ever get a chance to make it out to queer clubs and check out all the hot, unavailable men?
[Laughs] I’ve been out a little bit in New York. It’s not like I make a conscious effort to go to gay clubs. It’s just that a lot of creative people that are around me just happen to be gay. This one time, up in San Francisco, we went to this one club one night and watched all these performances. I just love all the creativity and self-expression and I think that’s what attracts me to the scene.

It’s funny to have you on the same label as Eminem and a lot of other homophobic rappers. Plus, with regards to No Doubt, you have a lot of reggae and Dancehall influences, and both of those are rather homophobic.
I don’t really think twice [about hanging out with gay people], that’s why it’s weird. A friend of mine, he’s this talented and successful guy, and he told me this rapper didn’t want to work with him because he is gay. I was, like, “What?!” People would pay anything to work with him, so I was shocked. And the Dancehall/reggae community, I love that music so much, but to have a connection to that intolerance is really embarassing.

But Rufus Wainwright is now on Geffen, which is, I think, a subsidiary of Interscope.
I know Rufus. My head designer at L.A.M.B, Zaldy, and Danilo (who does Gwen’s hair), they’re all friends with Rufus. Sophie Muller, a good friend, she filmed Rufus’ video [for "April Fool's"] at my house. He’s sweet. I emailed him a few times and he called me wanting to do something together, but I was already 20 songs into my record.

Have you ever fallen for a gay guy?
I’ve had dreams where I was making out with Danilo, he’s so handsome. If my husband went missing I would definitely ask Danilo to fill in. [Laughs] he’s a great friend, though. But no, I’ve been smart never falling for a gay guy because you’ll only get your heart broken. right?

Some girls never learn that.
[Laughs heartily] Your funny. *Some* girls…

So L.A.M.B just launched this past spring. That’s what, like, 20 gigs you have going now? Singer, songwriter, actress, designer, babe…
[Laughs] That last one is the the toughest one! Clothes are something I’ve done my whole life. I’ve been sewing my clothes since high school. My stylist, Andrea Lieberman, she’s the New York super way cool Jewish version of me. I’m from Orange County so I don’t know that much about high fashion. Andrea opened my eyes to that whole world. When I started I was, like, I can’t do it. Sitting in front of piles of faux fur trying to make decisions. It’s a full-time job that I’m trying to do as a part-time job. But I fucking love it so much, it fulfills me, it’s my passion, that I would die if someone took it away from me right now.

It’s all women’s clothes right now?
Yeah.

So we’re going to see a lot of drag queens wearing your stuff?
[Laughs] I hope so!

Okay. you’re in the spotlight a lot – so how have you avoided the scandal?
I think I’m a pretty good girl. I try to be a good girl. I don’t feel like I’m very controversial. I don’t want to upset people, I just want to make them feel good. At this point it’s all about sharing and hoping people get what I got out of this record. I made it for myself. I just want to share what I’m doing and if they get off on it, too, that makes me feel really good. I really, really wanted to make a record that was going to be played in the clubs, yet I have yet to hear it in any of the dance clubs. But I’m going to be going out a lot to see if I’m making people dance.

Okay, I’ll do my part to make sure the gay boys are shaking it to your songs.
You’re sweet! Thanks for talking to me, dude.

Gwen Stefani

Scared solo

When Gwen Stefani got the call that Linda Perry was ready to write with her, the first thing she did was bury her face in a pillow and cry. All she wanted to do was sleep. And now she was going to have to get up and get creative.

When she arrived at Perry’s house, nothing she did seemed fast enough. Stefani would go into another room to try to write some lyrics, and when she came back, Perry would already have the whole song nailed. “Dude, slow down. This is my record. Let me be a part of it,” Gwen thought.

This was no isolated incident — recording her solo album ended up being a largely terrifying, maddening and ego-shredding experience, no matter who she worked with. Not exactly what the No Doubt singer had initially envisioned.

Stefani had decided to do Love, Angel, Music, Baby — which she calls her “dance record” or her “collaborations record” — when she was on the Rock Steady tour with No Doubt. One day, she happened to hear the old Club Nouveau song “Why You Treat Me So Bad” and immediately was transported back to high school, when she used to go dancing at Knott’s Berry Farm in Buena Park, California. She turned to No Doubt bassist Tony Kanal and said, “Wouldn’t it be fun to do music like that?”

Or not. It looked like this ’80s flashback fantasy would have to happen outside of her band. So she made a list of influences she wanted to explore in an updated way — Prince, Lisa Lisa, Debbie Deb, the Time, New Order, Depeche Mode, early Madonna. And then she made another list of musical idols she’d like to do some exploring with. The game plan was simple, but strict: Love the ’80s, but make them modern. The concept for a solo record was born.

Sort of.

“If I was doing a solo record, it means basically pouring my heart out, the real Gwen,” she said. “Like the years with No Doubt, that was just No Doubt, this is me.” In some ways, the new album “is actually less of me, because I’m letting all these other people into my world and trying on their clothes, their music and melodies.”

The list of those people was long — Dr. Dre, the Neptunes, Andre 3000, New Order, Nellee Hooper, Dallas Austin, and Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis were among the producers and musicians with whom she collaborated. Perry made the cut primarily because she’d put Gwen in a headlock at the Grammys, looked her in the eye, and told her they could make beautiful music together.

That was a good start, but Stefani didn’t have a “huge game plan” for how she wanted to get there. “I know one thing,” she said. “You can try not to like this album, you can try real hard; but it will at least be your guilty pleasure. It’s like the ABCs — you can’t get them out of your brain. I wasn’t trying to go for an art record or a deep record. I just wanted to make you feel good for a moment and forget everything else.”

There was just one problem — she wasn’t feeling so good herself. Instead of the big cast of contributors helping to take some of the pressure off, it only made her feel worse. In fact, it scared her stiff.

“I think every record No Doubt’s made had its own challenges,” she said. “But this one, for me, was the hardest. When you’ve never really written with other people, you’re exposing yourself, taking your clothes off, saying, ‘All right, here we go, this is me, this is you.’ And then there’s the whole fan thing going on, when you’re a fan of the person you’re working with. It’s humiliating and intimidating even if they’re sweet and excited, because you’re drowning in their creativity.”

Stefani’s ego got a beatdown during her first writing sessions with Perry. The freelance songwriter/producer tried coaxing Stefani out of her shell, but it wasn’t until their second day and second song together that their sessions turned fruitful — by writing about Stefani’s very fear of writing (on “What You Waiting For?”).

“I’ve never been a creative writer,” Stefani explained. “I’ve been a writer from the heart, whatever’s happening at the time, usually a love thing. I wanted to be one of those writers who picks up a story or a theme. It doesn’t come to me naturally, but it was one of the things I wanted to conquer.”

Easier said than done. Soon after their initial success with “What You Waiting For?,” Stefani freaked out when she was trying to write “this deep song” about a friend who had passed away, and Perry came up with the lyrics before she could. “That’s my territory,” Stefani thought. Upset, she told Perry she had to leave. “I went in all glossy-eyed, and she’s like, ‘You’re a freak. Go.’ ”

So Stefani bolted from the studio and went to visit Kanal, who played her some new tracks he happened to be working on. This made her jealous at first, she said, until Kanal revealed that one of the tracks was for her. They turned that into the Salt-N-Pepa-inspired song “Crash” that very night. “I’m sitting there crying about my ego,” she said, “and I go from, ‘I feel so bad, I suck so bad, I’ll never write again,’ to writing a song, the exact song I wanted to write.”

Pumped up, Stefani canceled everything and locked in with Kanal instead — only to run into writer’s block. “We totally thought we were on to something,” she said. “But we didn’t write anything for two weeks straight. We thought, ‘We are the biggest a–holes ever in the world.’ It was just frustrating and embarrassing to sit there and think we could write songs.”

Six months later, she and Kanal took a second look at some of the earlier tracks they had tossed, and one of them, a “Lisa Lisa/ Prince wannabe song” called “Serious” pleasantly surprised them. This moment made her realize she was being way too hard on herself, letting her ego interfere with the songwriting process. She decided to change that.

“I don’t want somebody writing something better than me on my own record,” Stefani admitted. “But at the same time, it’s not about that. If I were to write the chorus of ‘Yesterday’ by the Beatles, and that’s all I wrote, that would be good enough to be part of that history. It’s like this whole thing with your ego: ‘No, I did that part,’ ‘No, I did this part.’ For the most part, people don’t care. And I wanted to take that away.”

She found that change freeing, and as she began working with other writers and producers, songs came more easily. She even started mixing things up a bit, turning one session with Dallas Austin into more of a party by inviting Linda Perry (whose studio was across the street) to join them.

“They both worked on the same records, Pink, Christina Aguilera, and they never knew each other! So when Linda called to say, ‘I have this mix for you,’ I was like, ‘Come over,’ ” Stefani recounted. “Dallas didn’t even know what she looked like. So she walks in, and immediately they start talking about all their stuff from the past, and everybody starts having a drink, and the next thing you know, we’re playing the tracks and Linda’s getting really excited. ‘Oh my god, you have to use my mellotron!’ And she’s punching Dallas in the arm, ‘Come on, dude, we have to write a song!’ ”

Within 45 minutes, the three wrote the new wave rocker “Danger Zone,” on which Stefani gets her Pat Benatar on, ripping her lover for trying to keep “all of your secrets, all of your lies.” Her session with Austin was even faster on the sweetly nostalgic “Cool,” a midtempo track he was trying to write about remaining friends with an ex — something she could relate to. This time, the lyrics took her all of 15 minutes to write.

“When he started to play it for me, I was like, ‘Wow, this is my song,’ ” she said. “I was never intending to do personal songs, you know? But when he told me about the track and where it came from for him, it just triggered something in me. It really captures a feeling and kind of puts an end to a chapter in a really nice way.”

The song “Long Way to Go,” which is about an interracial relationship, came courtesy of another collaborator who made Gwen feel insecure: Outkast’s Andre 3000.

“He’s crazy talented,” she gushed, “like totally get-down-on-yourself talented. I didn’t have a lot to offer. If I’m super honest, it makes me look stupid, that I’m sitting next to him, feeling all blank brain, hoping I can come up with something good. And meanwhile, he keeps writing away. But you’re in with Andre, so even if you don’t get all your ideas in there, you’re going to make something great.”

Later on, Stefani had an idea for a melody that evolved into the curiously catchy “Bubble Pop Electric,” in which Andre’s alter ego Johnny Vulture takes her out on a date. “It sounds so weird and it’s so Andre,” she said. “If I could be a boy, I would be him.”

Her confidence restored, Stefani, having co-written some 20 songs, figured the sessions were over — until she decided to give the Neptunes another chance. She hadn’t felt a spark the first time they got together for the project, but then she reconsidered and booked seven days with Pharrell Williams.

She decided during those sessions that she needed an “attitude song.” “I need something about how the [No Doubt] fans probably are like, ‘Why is she doing this record? She’s going to ruin everything.’ ” Her response is the b-girlish “Hollaback Girl” — the third song in three days she cooked up with Pharrell.

But her speedwriting streak ended when she tried to finish up the album with Dr. Dre. Stefani had previously worked with Dre, along with rapper Eve, on “Let Me Blow Ya Mind,” and she had been hoping to recapture a little of that track’s magic. But after she played Dre the songs she had been working on, he rolled his eyes.

“He was like, ‘You don’t want to go back there,’ and I’m like, ‘Yes, I want to,’ and he’s like, ‘No, you don’t.’ ”

Still, Dre found something for Stefani he thought would work — a dancehall reggae reworking of a song from “Fiddler on the Roof,” “If I Were a Rich Man,” which, transformed into “Rich Girl,” had already been a minor hit for Louchie Lou and Michie One in the early ’90s. All Gwen needed to do was update the track with Eve.

“I was helping with her rap, she was helping with my part, and we made the demo for Dre, and he basically told us to go rewrite the whole thing again. And I was like, ‘Oh, no, what am I going to do?’ ”

Eventually, during a brainstorm while running on her treadmill, Gwen got it. At a dinner party another night, Stefani ran into 50 Cent, and in swapping Dre stories, she discovered that the rapper/producer was strict with everybody, not just her. “You kinda go with him last,” she said. “You get the doctor in.” If she had gone in with Dre first, she realized, she might not have had the confidence to keep at it as long as she did — completing enough tracks for two albums over.

“What I learned is that you can get a lot done if you push yourself,” she said. “I made all my dreams come true of working with these people, even though I have so many insecurities. I still have this whole ego issue, and it’s all bruised up and messed up. But at the same time, the record is so spectacular, and I can say that without bragging because I worked with so many talented people.

“I totally feel like I am Alice in Wonderland right now,” she mused. “It’s been such a journey. It’s been so magical. I don’t even know how I got to this point, it’s been such a maze. I’ve been dropping down this hole for a year. But now, I’ve landed.”

Gwen Stefani has ditched No Doubt in a bid to be the next Madonna. Complete with English husband and questionable movie career.

“My album will probably end up being called Fuck You or something,” shrugs Gwen Stefani and then cackles for a while, shattering the silence of her floor-to-ceiling white suite in the sickly contemporary St Martin’s Lane Hotel.

The No Doubt singer is throwing around potential titles for her upcoming solo album, a supposed “side-project”, as would-be superstars put it when they’re still rather embarrassingly attached to the band that made them in the first place (see also Beyoncé Knowles, Justin Timberlake). But she’s being disingenuous. The album will eventually be called Love, Angel, Music, Baby, the final detail is a near military plan for world domination. Why else would the 35-year-old have already bagged a role as ’30s starlet Jean Harlow in Martin Scorcese’s new Howard Hughes biopic, The Aviator?

Naturally, Stefani already has the diva-like retinue of flunkies. She sits stiffly in her chair, trademark red lips blazing, while her over-eager PR, hair and make-up squad whisper in the adjoining room. The door is slightly ajar – in case of screams, gasps, hissy fits. And she’s still pretending that it all happened by accident. “I didn’t want to think of the idea of doing the record, it just came,” she says, her brown eyes wide.

Pull the other one. “No, I never thought of even doing this before. Why would I?” she shrugs. with faux naivety. “I didn’t even think about being in a band before I was in one. I don’t really feel it’s in my hands…”

She will continue to protest a little too much throughout the interview…

You’ve packed up and gone solo. Why now?
The idea was for me to do an ’80s-inspired record for fun, as a side project. Not a solo record, not like I’m going to suddenly reveal “The Real Gwen” [giggles]. Suddenly pour out my heart and soul! It was going to be a fun project and it turned into something super hard! [laughs]

On the first single, What You Waiting For?, you sing “You’re still a super-hot female.” Is that how you see yourself?
I’m not going to do it 10 years from now, am I? I want to do a sexy dance record. I have a list of things I want to do. You start running out of time at a certain point in your life – you’re like, “Fuck, what have I done?” Everyone’s like [whiny voice] “What does the band think about this?” This is my fucking life, OK? We’re not talking about what the band thinks!

What does the band think? Is there any ill-feeling?
As far as I know, no. I mean, who knows when it actually comes out what it will be like for everybody, I don’t know. But they know I’m a woman and I need to be able to do things for myself. I feel in some ways it’s not equal, because their clock is different to mine. Those guys can have babies whenever they feel like it. I want to do some projects but I also want a family.

You worked with Pharrell Williams, Andre 3000 and Linda Perry. Were they all your choices?
Linda Perry was not even on my list of people to work with. I’ve known her for years because we were the first two girls to be signed to Interscope, but I never wanted to work with her. She came up to me at the Grammys and said, “We are gonna do something together!” And I was thinking, “Oh great. You don’t understand the record I’m wanna make. I’m gonna work with Prince!”

So why did you have a change of heart?
The record company was putting pressure on me to work with her straight off the Rock Steady tour. I cried in my bed [laughs] and then I agreed. We did one song which wasn’t right, then the next day I came in and she’d been up all night – maniac – and had this track, What You Waiting For?, and I was so inspired. She’s so fast, I would come in and she’d written a song and I was like “Hey, wait for me! It’s my fuckin’ record!”

And you had a fight?
No, not like a fight, it was all me. I’d never worked with a girl before. I’ve always had the same boys, so it was a little weird. But there was one day when we were writing this track about my first boyfriend I kissed in high school and he actually… he died and I’d written this song for him and it was really personal. And then Linda gave me these lyrics and I was getting my period and you know when you’re ready to bust up? I started crying and I was like, “I can’t see her, I have to go home! I can’t write in front of her.” And that was that. I phoned up Tony [Kanal, No Doubt bassist and Gwen's ex] and he said, “Don’t worry, we’re going out tonight, come over here.”

After the Tragic Kingdom tour in ‘97, you and Tony had split up and your brother Eric had left the band to be an animator for The Simpsons. You went back to live at your family home. Did you think life was falling apart?
It wasn’t really like that. I went back and I was rich – you would think we’d have been a lot richer, but we really had a bad record deal. But I got to buy a beautiful house. And on that album I’d learnt I could write songs. Before, I never really had big ambitions, I was always in love, I just wanted to be girlfriend and a mom. But when I found out – “Fuck! I can write these songs and they sound like exactly how it feels” – I felt finally me. I took it so seriously…

How do you mean?
I got into Joni Mitchell and Sylvia Plath and reading and really trying to use words like [they were] colours. I think I wrote my best stuff on [2000 album] Return of Saturn, although I know it only sold four million – sorry and all that. But I was fucked in that time period. Maybe that was how I flipped out. I was depressed. If you look at my style then it shows.

You mean the pink hair?
The pink hair [raises eyebrows], it really reflected my needs at the time. When I look back at pictures now I’m like, “Wow, you were searchin’!” I was turning 30 and I didn’t know who I was.

What’s it like Mrs Gavin Rossdale?
You know I’m like, [sarky voice] “i just can’t wait to tell the world about my marriage!” Everybody wants to know. And up until I got married I never really had secrets. But when it comes to getting married, you have someone who you’re responsible for. You’re a team.

You got married in London – Gavin’s hometown. It’s hardly neutral territory…
In our lived it was the place. For me, London is like a magical, fairytale land. All the music I grew up loving came from here, all the style I love. This is London Town! So the idea of a wedding here seemed pretty good. I was a little bummed out that everybody couldn’t be there, but it was always going to be that way for us, so that’s why we had this huge reception in LA which turned into a second wedding.

Why did Gavin have his dog as his best man?
[Puts on baby voice]That’s Gavin’s little friend. He goes everywhere with him.

The best man usually makes a speech. Did he?
[Smiles stiffly] No.

You were brought up strict Roman Catholic…
I didn’t know any different. I was really happy about it in a way. It gave me a lot of security and a lot of morals and boundaries. I think it moulded who I am.

So, you don’t rebel?
No, I was very passive. I was the peacemaker in the family. I’m not a fighter. The person I fight with is my husband, poor thing… I hate that when you say something and you think about it and you’re like, “That was really bad”. But I feel like it [Catholicism] was really good for me. I had a lot of spiritual moments when I was a teenager and I want to get back there some day. People in rock ‘n’ roll or music, they always have that kind of bad past – “I was beaten down but that’s why I’m still here” kind a thing, but that’s not really me.

But weren’t your parents especially strict?
Crazy! Like, if you were walking to school in some outfit they’re like, “You’re not wearing that!” and make me go home and change. As soon as I could get away with cutting my shirt this short [points to midriff] I did. That was my rebellion. I pierced my nose when I was 25 years old and my mom didn’t talk to me for two months.

You’re about to appear in Martin Scorcese’s new movie, The Aviator…
I’m, like, one minute in it, but it was so fun. The attention to detail, though! I got this call recently saying, “Martin couldn’t understand one of the words you said and he wants you to re-do it.” So they sent a car for me, brought me in, we have one day of recording for that one line. I was like “Whoa, this is tedious work you guys and girls do.”

What were you expecting? Glamour?
Yeah. But I guess that’s what it’s like in the studio, too. The only difference is, I’m not in charge, Martin Scorsese was in charge.

Are you a control freak?
Control is everything. On this album, I’ve let people in a lot but it’s been great. Like the song Cool. [Madonna, TLC and Pink producer] Dallas Austin heard my song Underneath It All and got inspired to write a new song called Cool which he could never finish about his ex-girlfriend and all the bullshit of breaking up and how he wanted to be OK. We finished the thing in 15 minutes. I didn’t write all of the melody – I’m ashamed, I want to say that I did – but I also know how magical it is that somebody could be so inspired by my song that they write one.

You claim things “just happen” to you without planning. That’s pretty hard to swallow…
I don’t know, I always thought of myself as a pretty lazy girl. I hate work. So I don’t really understand how I get things done. But I guess I’m not the person I used to be. The passion takes over. When you create things and they happen, it’s addictive.

Gwen Stefani uncrosses her legs and gets up quickly, clearly relieved to be back off duty again. She thinks the record is almost there – she’s almost nailed the track she’s been recording with Dr Dre. “So I hope you like it all,” she says sweetly. It’s a rare moment of self-doubt, her guard dropping for a split-second. Then she pauses and her diva persona kicks in again.
“What am I talking about?” she says, stamping her foot. “Of course you’ll love it. It’s, like, the fucking wickedest!”

With Madonna lost in Kabbalah-land, Gwen Stefani, who is releasing her dance-pop solo debut, Love Angel Music Baby, looks set to take over as Top Blonde. Here, the No Doubt frontwoman and fashion icon talks marriage, movies, motherhood, and the future of her band.

She used to be just a girl. Now she’s just “Gwen.” Thanks to megahits with Eve and Moby, a hot clothing line (L.A.M.B), a fantasy wedding to longtime boyfriend Gavin Rossdale, and her film debut (as ’30s movie star Jean Harlow, opposite Leo DiCaprio, in Martin Scorsese’s Howard Hughes biopic The Aviator), the No Doubt singer has transformed into a one-name pop icon and multimedia brand – the kind you read about in supermarket tabloids, fashion bibles and rock magazines alike. With every door in the music industry open to her as she plotted her solo debut, Love Angel Music Baby, Stefani went shopping for producer (Dr. Dre, Andre 3000, and Linda Perry among them) and emerged with a truly eclectic homage to the ’80s pop disco of her adolescence. With a potential motherhood and a film career ahead, this may be the last time the 35-year-old will be able to stay in the groove for very long, and she’’s determined to dance for inspiration.

How are you Gwen?
I’m fucking great. I’m really, really, really great. I finished my album yesterday. Like, literally finished it. Like, it’s a wrap, you know? It’s so exciting. I feel like I’ve been running this marathon and I’m still breathing really hard, but I know I won.

Why did you decide to release a solo album? No Doubt are as big, if not bigger, than they were in 1996.
People don’t do the same thing their whole life, do they? I mean, I’ve been doing this since I was 17. You get to a certain point in your life when you’re like, “Oh my gosh. I wanna do something else, ’cause I’m gonna die.” Your life starts to go really quick.

Did you always want to make a dance record?
Yeah, I first got the idea while on tour in 2002. I’d heard that old Debbie Deb song [1983's club classic "When I Hear Music"] on the radio: [sings] “When I hear music/ It makes me dance.” And then Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam. Those songs were the backdrop of my life. They were what [No Doubt bassist] Tony [Kanal] was super into when we met; he was 16 and I was 17. [Drummer] Adrian [Young] was like, punk-rock bad boy, and [guitarist] Tom [Dumont] was heavy-metal guy, so they didn’t really like that music. But I said to Tony, “I want to do a record like this. A dance record.”

Recently a pattern has emerged of artists making emotional, singer/songwriter statements in their 20s. Then, in their 30s, they’re like, “Let’s Dance!”
Right. For me, this was coming from my heart. I don’t know if people are gonna like my record, but it’s exactly what I wanted to make. It has such a theme to it – a concept that was never really intended, but it just kind of happened.

Can you explain the concept?
I can’t really. But it definitely has more substance to it than I wanted. I wanted it to be like Madonna’s “Into the Groove.” I didn’t think it was gonna be so hard. I thought I’d work with a couple of talented people, and it would be a side project. But it snowballed and took over my life. It was a whole year of hell.

You collaborated with loads of people on the album. Was it hard not to have your bandmates around to weigh in on what worked and what didn’t?
Yeah. It was a really big deal for No Doubt. It was always, “We write the songs. That’s the point of the band.” But after all those years, it’s fun to go in with super-talented people and do something fresh. All you have to lose is time, and if you write a shitty song, who cares? Going into this record, I had a very specific sound I wanted to make, so I made a wish list of people I thought could get me there.

Anyone you wanted but couldn’t get?
I didn’t get Robert Smith, who said he wanted to, but he was making his own record. Same with Prince, because he was on tour. Missy Elliot and I didn’t hook up either. We did at the very beginning and she was like, “Gwen, you gotta write some songs first and then I’ll know what you wanna do!” I was like, “Okay,” and then it just never happened. [Pause] And one of the people who was not on the list – she’s gonna kill me, but… Linda Perry.

How did you end up with her?
When I got off tour, the record company said, “Linda Perry wants to work with you!” They were all excited. I was sceptical because I didn’t think I was gonna get my dance record out of Linda Perry. [Laughs] But I didn’t want to miss an opportunity, either. So I went to her studio and we wrote this song together the first day. It was a sweet little song that was ni my dance hit. The next day I came back, kind of dreading it, and she had been up all night [finishing the song]. I was like, “You did not just do this!”" It was really inspiring. But by the last day of our session, I was really dried out. I had no ideas, and everytime I’d leave the room, she’d be writing shit and I’d be like “You gotta slow down. You’re writing my record!” I was getting pissed off. She’s writing these lyrics, and that’s when it really crossed the line. It was my insecurities, but I couldn’t take it. I was like, “Call the manager! I need to go home! I need to write on my own.” I told Linda, “It’s nothing against you.” And she was like, “You are fucking crazy.”

Isn’t it a risk working with strong, creative artists like that because they can’t help but influence you? The song you did with Andre 3000, “Bubble Pop Electric,” is unmistakably OutKast-like.
Well, I always felt like if I were a boy, I’d definitely be Andre. He really did bring a lot to the table, and I was trying to keep above water with how talented that guy is. But by the ens, it felt like a collaboration. The good part about working with all these people is that I’m not fully responsible. And I can brag about them and be like, “It’s fucking good. I don’t care if you hate me and think it’s gonna be shit. I will definitely be your guilty pleasure.”

Tony plays on the record, too. How did it feel to work with him on material outside of the band?
It was really cool. After the Linda thing, Tony called me and I was like, “Dude, I suck.” And he was like, “Dude, come over.” So I went to his house and a bunch of our friends were playing these tracks that Tony was doing that were, like, stupid. I was like, “You did not do these.” And he’s like, “Yep, you wanna hear your tracks?” And I was like, “Nuh uh, you did not.” So he pulls out this one and I’m like, “Oh my God, that’s my song.” In the next couple of days, we wrote “Crash.” I basically went from “I hate myself” to “I just wrote a song!” And the songs were exactly what we wanted to do in the first place: Lisa Lisa meets Salt-N-Pepa meets Bell Biv DeVoe!

Will you return to the band if you sell 50 million records?
[Laughs] That would be fantastic, and I hope I do. I think the guys would probably hope I do too. You know, when I called Tony and Adrian and Tom to say I was doing this record, we’d already decided we were gonna take time off. You gotta understand that these are our lives and, like, lives are short. We put everything into each other for years. Now Adrian has a baby and I got married and Tom got engaged. Our priorities have changed. We’ve had our cake for a long time now. We’re fulfilled like we never thought we’d be.

You’ve reached a new level of fame in your own right. You’re not just a girl in the band anymore.
But everything that I’ve done has been a really natural progression. Like high fashion was always something that I’d been passionate about, but was shy to talk about because I thought it was cheesy. The music comes first, but fashion was my guilty pleasure.

You’ve always had a lot of style, but it’s definitely got more elaborate.
That’s ’cause I got richer.

But what about the 16-year-old girl who works at the ice cream parlor who can’t afford to look like you anymore? Do you worry about losing that fan base?
Well no, because I’m not gonna go backward. I wore Doc. Martens for 12 years and my feet were ruined from those shoes! [Laughs] I can wear high heels now. I’m a woman. So, no. I don’t wanna go backward, but I don’t really wanna go forward, either. I mean, I’m really vain and I don’t wanna get old. But at the same time, I don’t want to be that stupid person who tries to hang on. It’s hard. It definitely sucks getting older, but you always feel like the best version of yourself because you’re more experienced and confident. I hope maybe my children will save me from my vanity.

Are you and Gavin planning a family?
We talked about it, and I’ve wanted a baby ever since I was a baby. [Laughs] It’s weird, though. I go in and out of wanting to and then being scared. My life is so spectacular, I don’t want it to change. I don’t want to miss any opportunities. But I think after doing this album, I kind of got it out of my system. So it’s gonna happen when it’s supposed to happen. I mena, my life is nothing like I thought it was gonna be. It’s so much better! Wooo!

And your film career is finally beginning. What was it like to make your first movie with Martin Scorsese?
I only have a couple of lines, but, like, there’s really no small part in a Scorsese movie. To be able to play someone like Jean Harlow is just… come on, dude. I don’t care if I’m walking around looking like her – it’s still a pretty big deal. Scorsese is so warm and welcoming and smart and passionate, and Leo was so helpful. He’s incredible. It was a really good experience. I got my feet wet [in movies] and I want to go swimming. I’d love to do the breaststroke for a while on that one, but I don’t know. It’s also very tedious.

How so?
It’s nothing that’s ever gonna compare to being on stage and playing for 20,000 people. You don’t get that immediate response to a performance. It’s more like, “Okay, now do it again 14 more times.” And it’s very competitive. I’ve tried out for loads of movie that I didn’t get, like Fight Club and Girl, interrupted, but I never thought any of the parts were really my part. You get caught up in it because it’s like a race. And it’s really humiliating because people know who you are. Like, even trying out for the Scorsese movie, I had to go to the Hotel BelAir and there were all these other girls there. It’s a casting call! Which, for me, was weird because I’m like -

An icon.
Yeah! [Laughs] I’m an icon!

Thanks to a radical hip hop reinvention and a series of credible creative hook-ups, Gwen Stefani has emerged in recent times as a major music player. Now, on the eve of her solo launch, the iconic blonde talks about boys, girls, celluloid dreams and making “a little dance record of her own”. Pop goes the superstar!

Somewhere within Gwen Stefani there must be an element of sadness, dourly gestating, imprisoned, waiting to break free. Not that you’d know it from the woman herself. You won’t get so much as a breath of negativity from eight straight hours in her company. Spending time with Gwen is like mainlining a curious, buoyant cocktail of Sunny D and liquid seratonin; it’s as if helium has magically found it’s way into the air-conditioning. She oozes essence of zesty, goofball, feelgood California. She’s got a succession of quickfire, cheerful punchlines beamed straight in from The OC script office on some delirious repeat edit and raises an iconic eyebrow by way of saucy punctuation for each one. If I had a dollar bill for every time I heard the word ‘dude’ coming from her big, smiley, slasher Hollywood mouth, I’d most probably have a couple of hundred bucks by the day’s end.

Everyone’s jaw drops when Gwen enters the room, but she magnanimously deflects this awed reception, partly by running around on vertiginous, clip-clop Westwood heels, showering ‘hello’ kisses all round by way of introducing herself – as if she needs to – and partly by ‘yo, duding’ anyone that will listen. Which is mostly everyone. She breezes into the photographers studio at 12:30pm. By 5 o’clock in the afternoon I figure that the whole room has fallen in love with her. Not bad, given that half of them are women, gay or variants of both.

When God was dishing out the good looks, it is fair to say that Gwen Stefani was somewhere near the front of the queue (she skipped the semester when he was alloting angst). She bagged the bright, starry eyes, the Jessica Rabbit waistline, the stretch-to-infinity legs, the neat, cherubic and suddenly explosive pout and added her own bleach later to blend into a perfectly fitting state of white blonde.

Thus, the camera loves her. And, boy, can she work it. Whether paddling down the backstreets of Kentish Town, stopping traffic by flashing her Dior Couture hooped underskirt, handing out balloons to local kids with whom she is causing an evident stir – at any given point she draws an audience of somewhere between ten and thirty gobsmacked onlookers from nowhere – or reclining on her back in the middle of a busy road, she seems preternaturally hotwired to stardom. “Loving your work, Gwen,” shouts some itinerant laddo from an open window. Is he referring to her records? Or the fact that she has just strutted starrily down his street, mostly in her underwear? It’s never quite established. But Gwen’s an expert at this game. She plays it right back to him. “Loving yours, too” she says, blowing the lucky chap a kiss.

Later she will says that this is her work, that “I want to be at the centre of something incredible.” She can play the loveable ditz better than anyone you’d care to imagine. But underneath it all, one suspects, is a steely determination to turn her brand into something approaching legend. The eve of her solo launch for world domination – or as she, somewhat disingenuously put it “just making a fun little dance record of my own” – is a fascinating moment to watch Stefani. Gwen, you see, is that oddest of breeds. She is a joyful celebrity. She appears to have been born to it. If only they cut all of them from this mould.

What was little Gwen like?
I was always, um, a little… [dithers a while, stirring soya milk and honey into her tea]

Was she going to be a superstar?
No! Dude! The only fantasy I ever had about that was after I was already in the band. When I was in High School I thought that a really cool job would be to sing jingles. I do physically like singing. I thought I could do it. So that was where my ambition was at. I thought ‘dude, you can sing. Hey, you could do Kentucky Fried Chicken commercials.’ That sounded like fun.

Before she acquired the illusive status of being famous for simply being Gwen Stefani, Gwen was famous for fronting No Doubt, an unusual, ska-inflected poprock operation. I had always, wrongly assumed No Doubt to be named with a knowing wink to the obviousness of their English musical heritage, a nod to the whole ska thing. In fact, the explanation seems far more literal. It is because they, and their startling front woman, appear to have no doubt. Even in their fallow periods, No Doubt have exuded a unique and singular, can-do confidence. I’ll be honest, the first time I heard tell of the group I winced. Then I saw them and gasped. They looked like they’d been assembled by an angry marketing meeting of chunky, godless businessmen clutching phallic cigars and mopping sweat from their thickset brows with fancy Hermes hankies in a Bel Air production office. The foxy chick and the almost Bennetton-ad racial assortment of backup dudes. Mohawks, skaters, punks, babes, Ragga, pop, rock, ska, even a short sharp brace of metal and the odd hip hop inflection. This cacophony was surely dreamed up to appeal on every level, at every single junction of the record-buying demographic. It was as if ’80s MTV had imagined the group into life, willed them into being.

Yet for two partially flunking albums – their self-titled debut in 1992 and Beacon Street Collection in ‘95 – they managed to keep only heads above water. LA college kids with piercings and Acupuncture bootees kept them just about in business. There were tours with The Red Hot Chili Peppers and Ziggy Marley, but still Gwen would only get stopped while shopping at Tower Records on Sunset Strip and asked about the band. She was approaching huge in her native LA, a bona fide sensation in Anaheim – unbelievably appropriately, CA’s feeder town for Disneyworld that was her childhood home. But in most of the speaking world she couldn’t get arrested. Then came along Don’t Speak, the first of two monumental, turnaround, upward swings in the imperial curve of being Gwen Stefani.

Gwen was 26 when Don’t Speak gave her her first international smash nine years ago. She toured its parent album Tragic Kingdom in support to the then-huge Bush, where she met her husband their handsome, English rake of a singer, Gavin Rossdale. If for a while they had appeared to be wipe-clean, parent friendly Kurt and Courtney, her inflating success bubble put Gwen in the bridesmaid’s role of a direct run of iconic pop blonds from the previous two decades. Exactly where Courtney always threatened yet never quite managed to be. Debbie Harry was approaching 30 and three albums old when she first cut through to circuit-dominating pop supremacy. Madonna – that other Catholic, Italian-American bleached pop goddess that Stefani is so often compared with – was 27 by the time of Holiday. It is suggested to Gwen that the ’70s gave us Harry, the ’80s Madonna, and the ’90s Gwen. She looks aghast.

“That’s crazy, dude. That’s crazy. Don’t even say that shit. Listen, I’m having a freaking fun time and I love what I do but to even talk about me in the same breath, you know?” Three days before we meet, Gwen had been to see Madonna on the London leg of her career-defining Reinvention tour. “It was amazing. It was actually quite embarrassing how close I was to her. It was so fun. people were so happy. I was so elated. I haven’t been to a concert like that in years.”

Beneath the wonder, there is a serious consideration here, as to how far Gwen can go. If Gwen is gently cautious about voicing it, Madonna herself, ever a champion of the young bucks biting at her ankles, spotted it. They have socialised together. “She’s been really nice. It’s something not a lot of people know about Madonna – how supportive she is to other female artists.” Gwen has a theory on their connection: “My mom’s Irish/Scottish and my dad’s pure Italian, but his dad came from Rome to Detroit, so I tease Madonna that me and her are related. Because my grandma’s sister’s husband is Ciccone. But I don’t think so. Maybe.” The thought is clearly a thrill, however far-fetched.

Twelve million copies of Tragic Kingdom, and its follow-up Return of Saturn later, a brace of Grammies collected, and the second pivotal moment in the making of a modern icon occurred. Gwen had been experimenting with solo vocal work, already, and had bagged an American smash with Moby on the single Southside. But it was her duet with crop-headed Dr Dre prodigy, rapper and impecunious scion of all things street Eve on Let Me Blow Your Mind that upped Stefani’s ante into being something other than a pretty frontwoman of the American record industry’s favourite globe-trotters.

Did she feel the shift? “Aha! Sure I did. Just like everybody else did. I am under no illusions that the record turned me around. being able to rock into Eve’s world and get lost in all that coolness. I mean, I dreamt of Dre. He’s always been on my label and I always dropped things to people that knew him, like, ‘dude, if you ever want me to do any vocal thing, anything. I’ll do it’. So I got the call about the Eve track, but I didn’t have much to do with that track. I went in. He beat up my vocal, I left and I remember I was really liking walking into another, completely different world. But it turned out so incredible and it was such an incredible thing to be part of. It really opened our world up to all these other people. We had a whole opportunity out there of people that would work with us. It was awesome. That’s how I met Andrea, too.”

Andrea is a crucial figure in the Gwen operation. They share a closeness amongst singers and their stylists probably only rivalled in the celebrity cannon by Kylie and her creative directing shoulder, William Baker. Andrea, a Bronx girl by both nature and nurture also looks after Jennifer Lopez – it was she that selected the olive green heavy print, Versace/tit tape Oscar ensemble that was to redefine red carpet attire forever – but Gwen is more than her client.

“She’s my girlfriend first,” says Andrea, “I love working with her and hanging out withe her.” Gwen puts it even more succinctly “She’s the East Coast me,” she declares. Their bond was instant and thus their working synchronicity was nailed instantly too. A fashion plate was beginning to weld itself onto the public conscious. Stefani became eternally prefaced in print by the seldom scientifically or precisely used words ’style icon’. And she earned the plaudit with glowing ribbons.

By her own admission, coolness is not Gwen’s forte. She blanches when I ask her to rate how cool she is on a sliding scale of one to ten. “No way. That is so mean. I could never do that. I just don’t think like that.” Nevertheless, she has become a benchmark for the scintillating ambitions of the coolerati since her seismic shift. No Doubt’s first and, thus far only post-Eve album, the most perfect pop/rock configuration Rock Steady, attracted a new elite into the fold. Nellee Hooper, William Orbit and Sly & Robbie joined in the production credits. Just to prove the band itself was one step ahead of the fashion curve, they invited Ric Ocasek, frontman of The Cars and new wave renaissance man par excellence, out of retirement to harness a couple of moodier rock moments. The result was astounding. If Don’t Speak had been both blight and blessing for No Doubt – who really wants to be a one-hit wonder, however wondrous the one hit? – Rock Steady established them as one of the late-blooming giants of the world stage, both commercially and creatively. It was their belated tipping point moment. They achieved heat.

By the time it’s come to a full blown solo foray, everyone wants a piece of Gwen. The cast list of collaborators on her debut is dizzying. Andre 3000, Wendy & Lisa, Pharrell, New Order, Linda Perry, Dr Dre, Dallas Austin and long-time No Doubt co-writer and one-time boyfriend Tony Kanal are all along for the ride. Outside of her currently enviable musical predicament – Stefani’s solo album is the most hotly anticipated of the season, and not without reason: it’s dynamite – she has been directed by Martin Scorsese in the Howard Hughes biopic The Aviator, opposite Leonardo DiCaprio. Her and Andrea’s fashion line, L.A.M.B, is finally reaching its full potential (“Look at my cardigan,” says Gwen, showing off a piece of her own work “it looks like camouflage, but look closer. It’s lambouflage”). Multi-tasking is in Gwen’s DNA. She is rocking so hard now, a free-wheeling boulder couldn’t interrupt her progress. Thus her opening gambit as we sit down to talk properly comes as something of a surprise…

Do I smell? I’m so sorry. I mean, I have all this crap on me and I’ve not showered and I’ve been running around and, um, I’d stay away from me if I was you.

You smell fine.
Just stay over there dude.

Honestly, there’s nothing! Why do the solo thing now? Is this it for No Doubt? Has it run its course?
People for years have always been saying ‘oh, she’ll go solo.’ Listen, I am not going anywhere. My fears are the same as any No Doubt fan’s fears. I really do not want to fuck that up. I’ve been doing No Doubt for 17 years now. I talked to Tony about it and said I didn’t want to threaten anybody or anyone’s situation here, but I wanted to try something else. He was really into it. They were all supercool about it. I already said that I wanted to make a family… oops. I wanted to make a movie, and I did want to make a family, too, by the way. All these things that I wanted to do and, lets face it, I’m on time check here. They understand that. It’s different for them because they’re guys so they’re all cool. I was thinking if I don’t get this thing done now then when’s the No Doubt record going to get done? When am I going to have a baby? Fricking hell, this clock is going quicksville.

It’s a pop record, right? A proper pop record?
Sure. Me and Tony come from totally different backgrounds, musically, to Adrian and Tom. They’re really into punk and heavy metal and ska and Tony and I didn’t really listen to that stuff when we were growing up. We listened to all the ’80s stuff. When I met Tony I was 17. He turned me onto Prince, The Family, Time, Club Nouveau, Debbie Deb, Lisa Lisa, all that stuff that was totally a huge part of our childhood. Early Madonna really figures here. White Lines. I had all that shit, and even though you didn’t necessarily admit it, it was a totally huge part of our musical upbringing. It felt right to go there again, Cyndi Lauper, Duran Duran. I graduated Sixth Grade in ‘87, you know?

Have you only ever had two boyfriends in your life?
Yes, I had one boyfriend in high school who was my kissing boyfriend who I was completely in love with. We went out for six months. The thing about him that’s weird to talk about is that he actually died. Recently, you know. Just two years ago. I didn’t know him for years, though I actually wrote a song for him on this record called Wonderful Life. He was one of those guys that was the naughty, naughty boy who had total character but was always getting into trouble. He was in and out of high school all the time.

So the boy that all the girls wanted to date?
Yeah. One time he was back in high school and he just turned into Robert Smith overnight, which I obviously found very attractive. I was obsessed with him for years, then he broke up with me. It wasn’t like… It was Ninth Grade, he was the second boy I kissed. But Tony was my real boyfriend for eight years. We broke up then I met my husband and we’ve known each other for almost nine years.

What attracted you to Gavin?
Probably physical stuff, you know. It was very physical to start with.

What were your initial impressions?
We got to meet the guys and we went into the room and all I’d ever heard was ‘Gavin this’ and ‘Gavin that’ and I saw this guy and it just hi me like something out of the blue. I was like ‘whooo!’ He is shockingly handsome. We went out for dinner last night and I was thinking ‘gee, you are hot’ and then I thought ‘and I’m married to you! Whoa!’ It’s really good. Then he was on tour with us and it was kinda weird. All my band are my friends and none of them wanted me to go out with him. He had a little reputation for being the typical rock star guy.

But he’s a nice boy?
He’s an amazing person. He’s such a nice guy. Obviously, I wouldn’t have gone out with him if he wasn’t.

There was a little rock’n'roll mythologising around him though?
Sure. I mean, probably some of that shit was true but he was a guy like anyone is. It’s not like you’re born a rock star.

Why do all these people want to work with you now?
Linda Perry had come up to me. She approached me, which is wild. She came up to me at the Grammys and put me in a headlock. We were the first girls to sign to Interscope, so I’ve kinda known her for years and we were always drawn to each other.

Is she not a little scary?
She is, dude! She was right up in my face telling me ‘we’re gonna write songs together’. She totally confronted me about working together and she’s the hottest hit maker. You have to remember that I’ve never worked with a woman before and this girl can play any instrument she picks up, she can run the board, she produces, she writes, this is the coolest, most awesome person to be around. She’s on fricking fire from the moment we walk into the studio. My ego was already curled up and in the corner by the time she’s pounding out these tunes but it just clicked. There were times during the process of doing this that I hated myself because whoever I was sitting next to was so incredible.

Are you aware when you’re in the presence of genius?
To be able to sit next to Andre 3000 and see how he writes lyrics and comes up with shit is amazing, let me tell you. For me coming in as a fan, it can be horrifying.

Aren’t you aware that those people are fans of yours too? That’s why they’re there?
Everybody that I’ve worked with seems to be really into it, which is very flattering. I can’t believe it. I didn’t want to put something out unless it was incredible. I said that from the beginning and at any point I could have just pulled it.

Jean Harlow, lets talk…
I just saw it in New York. I saw my clips. It’s sick.

What was Scorsese like?
Magical.

Not frightening?
The exact opposite. I was obviously scared out of my mid, but he’s the most welcoming, comforting kind of guy. Almost to the point where you think ‘have you got to make me feel this nice – haven’t you got a film to direct here? He basically saw my picture from a Teen Vogue shoot on the side of a bus stop by Herb Ritts. It’s all Herb’s fault! I’d done the whole Marilyn on the beach kinda thing and Martin saw it and asked me to try out for the Jean Harlow part and I tried out and got it. The thing that’s crazy about this… I mean, it’s a small part but I’m not calling it a small part. I’m with Leonardo DiCaprio, directed by Martin Scorsese, playing Jean Harlow. I can be on screen for, like, one second and that is not a small part. That is huge, dude.

Are you pleased with it?
Oh boy, am I?

Is this the first time you’ve acted?
Yep. You know what’s crazy about it is I’m playing Jean Harlow just after Howard Hughes has given her her first major movie role, right? And I thank Howard for giving me this amazing part. So I sent Marty some flowers when he cast me with the exact same words on it. It’s kinda symbiotic, you know?

How many people will you be thanking in your first Oscar speech?
Dude, the list will be endless…

One last thing. How happy are you right now?
Ecstatic, basically.

For the past 17 years, she has stood as the punky siren of the band No Doubt. But there is more to Gwen Stefani’s platinum-blonde life than meets the eye. There’s her fashion line, her acting career, and her first solo dance album with a little help from some music-industry heavies. Christopher Bollen meets the girl underneath it all.

When a certain then-unknown pop star landed for the first time in the New York and climbed into the back seat of a cab, she spoke those immortal words that have now become firmly cemented in rock-music legend: “Take me to the center of everything.” The driver dropped her off in Times Square. Whatever your feelings may be about this particular pop icon, the anecdote does offer a profound lesson: It is relatively easy to stand for a few seconds at the heart of the universe (in 1978, according to this cab driver, that would be the corner of 42nd and Broadway). The tough part is being able to stay there.

Gwen Stefani is one star that has managed to stand pretty much in the center of everyone’s heart since she first drilled hit after hit through the mid-’90s as the gorgeous peroxided lead of No Doubt. A rundown of her songs – “Just A Girl,” “Hey Baby,” “Don’t Speak,” “Rock Steady,” “Hella Good” – plays like the soundtrack of the last ten years, and anyone who has turned on a radio or television knows the wildly excitable voice or the mismatched punk-with-a-perfect-body look as signature Stefani. What most don’t know, however, is that she didn’t just appear out of thin air when the band’s album “Tragic Kingdom” hit big in 1995. Today she and her band (all originally from Anaheim, CA) can count seventeen years of practicing, playing, and touring together. That kind of longevity explains why Stefani has continued to own the spotlight, while so many others have had their Times Square moment and faded out.

In 2004, this California rock star runs her own designer label L.A.M.B, guest designs a bag line for Le Sportsac, is wife to Brit musician Gavin Rossdale, and has a burgeoning film career – as evidenced this winter when Martin Scorsese’s biopic The Aviator opens with Stefani in the role of Jean Harlow. And while No Doubt takes a short hiatus from its hit parade (only to book a greatest-hits summer tour), Stefani shows her prowess in the recording studio with her own solo dance album in the works. I visited Stefani in her Los Feliz mansion right before she was to embark on tour. It was a little before noon, 74 degrees and slightly overcast, and there was a fire blazing in the living room. It was also Bob Dylan’s birthday. I waited twenty minutes before this lanky body bound down the spiral staircase and introduced herself with a teenager’s SoCal accent and biggest brown eyes humanly possible. Here is one final thing that makes Gwen Stefani a permanent fixture in the pop solar system: she is so honest, kind, and sincere about her motivations in life, it is virtually impossible not to fall for her.

CHRISTOPHER BOLLEN You’re getting ready for a tour this summer. That’s all of a sudden.
GWEN STEFANI It is. Anything with No Doubt is sudden because we were planning to take a year off.

Why?
First, I wanted to concentrate on film. I want to do a movie. It’s impossible to get a role because it’s so competitive and you’ve got to have your whole passion in it. In the past, I would be on tour and come home for a weekend and try out for something. So, I wanted to take a year off and focus on that. Then I got this idea to do a dance record. I don’t know where the idea came from originally, but I got excited and that overwhelmed everything else.

Was it your part in The Aviator that gave you the acting bug?
No. I’ve been trying out for movies for years but was never really finding the right thing. And every time I would find a small part I never really had time to go for it.

You must be used to being up in front of thousands by now singing on stage. How different was it to be on set delivering lines with Martin Scorsese behind the camera?
I was so nervous, I didn’t know what to expect with Aviator. Doing music videos, you get a little feel for it. I think that dialogue, though, is in such a different category than singing. It’s a lot subtler. But when I got on the set with Leo – there are five hundred extras in my scene – it felt very familiar. First of all, I’m walking on a red carpet, which is something I’ve done before. [Laughs] But in a way, it’s easier than you think because you get so many tries. That makes you even more confident because you can say, “Okay, I’d do it this way this time.”

Five hundred extras is no small scene.
It’s a huge movie but I have a very small part. They recreated the Mann Chinese Theater from scratch. It’s pretty incredible.

How did it feel to play a legend like Jean Harlow?
I mean imagine, the original blonde blombshell! I’m clearly a great admirer and copier. Ever since I was a teenager I’ve loved Marilyn Monroe and James Dean. I always used to watch old musicals and movies and was just a big fan of Old Hollywood. So when my agent told me about the movie, he said, “Don’t get excited, they want all non-brand name people”-you know, unknowns-and then a couple of months later they said they were sending me the Jean Harlow script and my stomach fell to the floor. When I got the script, I couldn’t find the part. It has like three lines. But I went in and they were so cool to me. It’s always awkward when people know the band, too, because there are all these expectations and it’s all weird and humiliating. But they were amazing.

Have you tried out for other roles since?
Yes, but it is hard to find parts I want to do. What’s really taken over my life now is this solo album.

How did this dance record come about?
I wanted to do an album in the style of music that I grew up on-the dance music of the ’80s like Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam, Debbie Deb, Club Nouveau, The Time, Prince-all the stuff that makes me so happy. So my idea was to do a silly dance record that had that kind of vibe. Having been in my group for seventeen years, I knew if I didn’t do it now, I wasn’t going to do it.

Were the other member of No Doubt worried? “Uh oh, Gwen’s making her own album now.” I mean, isn’t this the first step to band breakup?
I remember on the Rock Steady tour sitting with Tony [Kanal] and being like, “I don’t want to ruin the tour or anything, but I have this idea.” I wanted Tony to be involved because he was the one who turned me on to most of that music. We as No Doubt didn’t know what we were going to do next anyway. We had such an incredible record with Rock Steady, making it and putting it out. Who would have known? It was magic. But where do you go from there? If we got together right away and did another album, it might not be so inspired. It might sound like it was riding the coattails of Rock Steady. And we had never taken a break, not in seventeen years. I’m not exaggerating. We made so many sacrifices on a personal level for each other for the music out of pure passion. It just felt like the right time for everybody to do something for themselves. I called everyone and told them, and they said, “Do whatever you want to do,” just as you’d imagine your best friends would say.

Did you write most of the songs on your new dance album?
Yes, but it’s not quite my own. That was the whole point of the project. I get a lot of opportunities to work with people who are so talented. The idea was I’d do a song with anyone who came along that I thought was great. There was a wish list of people and others who came to me. One of the people who came to me was Linda Perry, who I’ve known for years. We were the first two girls signed to Interscope and I knew her when she was in 4 Non-Blondes. I didn’t think, “Okay, rock girl, she’ll make my dance record.” But I saw her at the Grammy’s and she put me in a headlock and said, “We’re going to do a record together. We’re going to write some songs.” She was very aggressive. But I had just gotten off of tour and her record company said, “If you’re going to work with Linda, you’ve got to do it this week because she’s only got five days off out of the year.” That first day, I literally didn’t want to go in at all. I was in bed and I cried that morning. I wanted to be lazy and hang out with my husband, not start writing a new record. I was scared, too. I had never worked with another girl before. I got there and on the first day we wrote a song together, which I didn’t think was very good. The next day, I came in and we wrote, “What You Waiting For.” It’s such a good song. Linda and I ended up working on a bunch of songs together. Later, I took those tracks to Nellie Hooper to produce them.

Clearly writing is a different process when you are collaborating with some pretty established songwriters. It must have been a war of personalities sometimes.
The challenge was not to get overwhelmed by my ego and to let myself accompany what Linda had to offer and be part of something that was great even if I didn’t do the whole thing. Like if she wrote the lyrics to “Yesterday” by the Beatles and all I did was write the chorus, I’d be pretty stoked, you know what I mean? There was actually a point at the end when we were in the studio together and I left crying, again [laughs], and I said, “I’ve had enough.” We were working on a track that was very personal to me, and she had written a lyric. I was like, “I don’t want to do this.” I ended up rediscovering the song six months later and going, “Oh my god, this song is great.” It was a song I wrote for this boy I went out with in high school, who meant a lot to me – like my first kissing boyfriend – and he actually died a year ago. I haven’t known him all of those years, but he was a huge part of my life. He gave me a huge thing, which is the first time you love someone. Even if it’s high school. So I wrote this song called “Wonderful Life for Him” with Linda. But the amazing thing about that song was that that guy was the first person to turn me on to Depeche Mode and the Cure. So I got one of his heroes to play on that song.

Who else did you work with?
I did some tracks with Andre 3000, who I’ve been a fan of forever. One song we did is about interracial relationships. It’s such a special song that whatever I did contribute is enough. It’s like having a baby. You have this thing that’s alive and it’s never going to go away, it’s a song, and it captures a moment. So yeah, I really enjoyed it. But sometimes it’s been really painful in not being able to claim all of it as your own.

It’s impressive that you get to play around with your style and your sound, but you still always seem to return to your roots. And you write the songs yourself! I have to be honest, so much pop music right now sounds absolutely soulless and phony, like it has nothing to do with the person singing the lyrics.
I think there is room for everything. I worked with one of the writers that wrote “Like A Virgin,” which you would think Madonna had written, because it is so her. Actually from what I understand the song was written two years before, just nobody else would do it because it was so out there. But with a song like that, you don’t go, “Oh, she didn’t write it.” She made it. Take someone like Liza Manelli who was in Cabaret. She didn’t write it. She played it. But then you go, Joni Mitchell. And she did the whole thing. There is room for everything and it’s all inspiring. So for someone to wear someone else’s music and make it what it’s going to be is very important as well. I feel like I’ve proved myself as a writer. I’ve done it for seventeen years. I’ve been true to my own unit. I’ve never gone outside. We thought if we’re not about making the music, what’s the point. The whole record is about collaboration and being inspired and stealing from everything I’ve ever loved and trying to make it mine. I’m going to make the record that feels like those records make me feel no matter what it takes. I’m not done yet either. I have about nineteen songs but I’m not putting this thing out until it’s fucking the greatest record ever.

Will that be soon?
I want it to come out this year, but it’s going to come out when it’s meant to come out. It’s going to come out when it’s great. I could put out a great record right now with the songs that I have but part of me wants to go to the Doctor, as in Dr. Dre, and see where I can get with that, which is just going to be the biggest challenge so far. And I probably want to go with one more artist, I’m not going to say who. And I have all my new wave songs. I want to get my dirty, modern, club dance attitude songs.

It’s weird you mention Joni Mitchell. It’s Bob Dylan’s birthday today. I found that out on the radio coming here. And I was thinking about how fans are so hard on Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan for continuing to make music arguably after their prime. It’s as if fans wish they would stop making music or stick with the old stuff. Your career is hardly on a downward spiral, but do you think there will come a moment when you say, “Okay, that’s that.”
The band always talks about, “When will it be over?” We never dreamed we’d do it this long. We never even thought we’d get on the radio. We did the band because we were in Anaheim. What else was there to do, go to Disneyland? We were all going to college. We weren’t lazy stoner kids who weren’t going to do anything with our lives. There are all these different rules for what a musician should be like: they should be a drug addict and come from a really bad family. A lot of time that does fuel a creative outlet. But my dad’s idol was Bob Dylan. At ten years old, I was in the back of the station wagon saying, “Dad not this again.” My parents were very creative and their children were their creative outlet and everything they did was about playing things for us, teaching us about art and music. I feel very blessed for that. I don’t know what is going to happen with us. We could do music for the rest of our lives. At a certain point whatever people might think or say, or whatever perspective people have on me or my band, it’s never going to be true or real. What does it matter as long as I’m happy? I feel like I’m the most blessed person in the world. I’m sitting in a beautiful house. I have an unbelievable husband and family, and I get to do music. That’s my job. People pay me to dance around!

Not to mention you have your own fashion line, L.A.M.B. Zaldy helps design it, doesn’t he?
Yes! I know Zaldy through his friend Matthu, and I know Matthu because he was the first makeup artist I ever let do my makeup. I had always done my own makeup and when I was told I should work with him, I thought, hmm, a guy doing my makeup I’m not sure about. But he ended up doing my makeup for a year after that. I did some crazy makeup that year. It was a wild time. And then I met Zaldy and he started helping with some of my designs. Collaboration is everything when it comes to design. I hired him and the guys from Nice Collective. It was like college, we all came together and showed what we did, and I think we created an amazing second collection. So I asked Zaldy to stay on because I never want him to go. I love him. He’s so talented. My guitar player’s fiancé is getting married in October, so L.A.M.B is doing her wedding dress. Of everything I do, it’s probably the easiest and most greedily fulfilling. What do I want to wear? It’s like a girl’s dream come true.

Aren’t you also doing a bag line?
The bags are totally separate. I got sent one of the LeSportsac bags. I used that bag so much and I guess they saw me with it and said, “Hey do you want to make your own bag for yourself?” I said, “Hell yeah dude,” and made this leopard bag with green trim and I had that on tour and I loved it. And they called me back and said, “Hey what would you think about being a guest designer?” I never collaborated with a corporation. I get asked all the time to be the shampoo girl or the makeup girl or the cola girl. I don’t want to sell things. I’d feel too guilty. I’m Catholic. But with Sportsac as guest designer, the title sounded so nice and I am a designer.

It’s a bit different than selling Pepsi on a TV commercial.
It’s totally different. And I learned so much. Also, it’s fun to see the bags take on a whole new life. When I saw people wear it I thought, yeah, that’s them now. But wait that’s mine! I got jealous, like, don’t wear my bag! I saw this girl walking down the street with that bag, and that was her bag. It was a good feeling. I enjoyed doing it so much I decided to sign on for the fall season.

If you could pick a dream movie to star in, what would it be?
I am doing a movie.

Wait, you’re going to make your own?
I said, “Dude, I want to do my own.” I’m not sure I’m supposed to talk about it yet. I want to do a movie that goes with my record. But because it’s not developed yet it would be stupid to talk about it. It is going to happen. I will make that shit happen. I’m convinced.

You’ve spent a great deal of your life in California. You were born here. Can you imagine living anywhere else?
I was never a Hollywood kid. I grew up in Orange County. Nowadays, the two have merged, but back then it was like living behind the Orange Curtain. They were definitely two different worlds. But we started playing at all the clubs here. I remember my parents would drive me to these shows because they were strict. I’m glad they were and would probably be the same with my kids. So LA wasn’t part of my early life except for the fantasy of Old Hollywood and that kind of thing. California for me was more about being able to get on the bus and go down to the beach. I was a lifeguard at a pool for a couple of years. I taught kids how to swim. I worked at a sportswear shop helping older ladies pick out polyester outfits. I actually got a lot of fulfillment out of that. Otherwise I just went to school to try to be something when I grew up. The biggest regret about California would be that I put baby oil all over my body and baked in the sun every day on the beach.

I think LA has this surreal quality to it.
That’s how we feel about New York. We’d be like, New York’s so cool, so much buzz, creative people. But LA is the same way. People come here to be creative. There’s also all these weird scary people but I don’t deal with them too much. I moved up here six years ago, but I live in this beautiful place and have my friends around me. There’s not a lot of places to go out and you can’t stay out until three in the morning. But I’m just lucky that I got to travel the world and I also live in London, so I have this English life too. It makes my life so much richer. From Orange Country to get to live in London! It makes me so cool, huh?

Yeah. It does.

With thanks to Anne at JustNoDoubt.net