Gwen Stefani: A Rock Goddess With Major Issues
“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 really 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 going to Anaheim to play my first show by myself, I cried on the way, because I was like, This is surreal. Why does the first show have to be in Anaheim?'”
Gwen Stefani’s parents — Dad is a marketing exec and Mom quit her job as a dental assistant to stay 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 mom 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 still 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 Spence, 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 supercreative, and he was this high school cartoonist and he was in 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 getting 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 I do 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 sitting up writing all night. That whole jealousy 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 like a dare, and I don’t even remember writing the words after that,” Stefani says. “I just barfed them out.”
