Fergie Dances With Herself

In her early twenties, she and two girls from Kids Incorporated formed a band called Wild Orchid and released two albums on RCA that went nowhere. She wanted to quit to do a solo album but didn't know how to tell the girls because people-pleasing had been burned into her personality.

At one of Wild Orchid's last shows, they opened up for the Peas. "I got my grind on in the hallway," she says. "I approached Will.i.am and I said, 'I'm leaving this group soon, and I'm doing my solo album.' " The seed was planted, but as Wild Orchid continued to die slowly, she grew depressed and ended up seeking refuge in the club scene. She did a little Ecstasy, then a lot. "It started on the weekends and graduated to all the time," she says. "Me and my girlfriends would get ready, go out to the club, come home, change into my faux-fur coats and my sunglasses and rent a limo -- spending all my child-actor money -- and go to the club Garage that would start at 6 a.m. and dance till 12. Then I graduated to crystal, and it started being more about going to Home Depot at four in the morning and getting crafty at home. It became less of a fun thing and more of a habit." Her mom saw her get thinner and thinner as addiction set in. "I noticed her losing a lot of weight," her mother says. "I was like, 'Wow. Good for you. Wish I could do that.' And then it started to be more and more, and it was, 'Are you OK?' "

One night Fergie pulled her car to the side of the road and in a few minutes wrote a song called "Losing My Ground": "I woke up short of breath but I've still got a long day ahead of me/I don't know what day it is but tell me 'cause I gotta know who to be/Is this me up in the mirror?" She brought it to the girls in Wild Orchid. They took one look and arranged an intervention. "So I lied," she says. "I came up with the quickest explanation I could: bulimia. Everyone around me knew, and I didn't care. I just didn't want them to ask me questions. I became more and more isolated, and it became more and more dark. One day I started not knowing who I was, and there was this little voice inside of me -- God or my conscience -- and I had a conversation with me: 'Either go this way or that way. Which road do you wanna choose?' " She called her mother and said, "I'm in trouble, and I need to get out of this place."

For two weeks she lived with an ex-boyfriend who helped her detox and then, at twenty-five, moved back in with her parents. "I came clean with everybody and started my life over," she says. Nowadays she doesn't do hard drugs but still drinks. (She blames an infamous incident when she peed her pants during a San Diego concert last year on "being buzzed" and having no time to use the restroom. At her album-release party in New York in September, she was teetering on her heels all night.)

After a year of drug abuse and decadence, she had collection agencies after her. "The trust fund of money I'd made as a child actor, I had to use that to pay off all my credit-card debts. Tens of thousands of dollars." She had to scrape like never before. "I started living off of unemployment and hustling, getting my grind on, seeing if there were any writers I could work with, any home studios I could get into."

After a year, she hooked up with the Black Eyed Peas. The Peas' third album, Elephunk, was nearly complete. The group's mastermind, Will.i.am, had only to finish a song called "Shut Up." "I said, 'I need a girl on this who sings hard,' " he recalls, " 'that isn't a girly girl but is raw. Not raw like ghetto, but like some Pat Benatar.' " A friend suggested Stacy Ferguson. Will remembered her pitching her solo album to him and invited her up to the studio. "She sang, and I was like, 'Wow, that was dope. You wanna put a harmony on it?' " he says. "She was like, 'You want a third or a fifth?' I was like, 'Whoa! You know that knowledge shit! Why don't you put a third on it and we'll put the fifth on it later, 'cause that'll make it sound dissonant.' She said, 'Well, I could put the fifth on bar two, and on bar three I could go in unison.' I was like, 'Wow! I'm fuckin' wit' you!' "