Gwen Cuts Loose

The lobby of New York's Mercer Hotel is a haven of downtown chic -- all angular furniture in shades of eggplant, with oblong oversize 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 Tam 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 everyone 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 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 little 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 out 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 her most private dilemmas in public. "Don't Speak," the song that put No Doubt over the top in 1996, was about the breakup 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 solo 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.