Joining Bru for an Audacy Check In, Gwen Stefani is here to fill us in on her forthcoming album Bouquet. From finding the right sound, to feeling inspired by the “group of amazing songwriters” she worked with, the “spiritual” recording process, and more.

Following Bru wishing Gwen a happy belated birthday, (it's October 3), Stefani shared some deets about this year’s memorable celebration, after feeling a bit lonely during her birthday last year.

“A year ago… I had a show in Hawaii on my birthday and I was like, oh, yeah, I'll go get a little pile of money and come home and I don't care about my birthday.” However, as Gwen revealed, “I went on my own and I, like, spiraled into this like place. I was like, everybody needs to have a birthday I think like a celebration.”

That being said, something good came out of it. “I ended up writing this song called ‘Swallow My Tears,’ which is on the new record,” Gwen offered. “But this birthday, I was like, OK, no, we got to do something,” she continued, sharing all about the Colorado trip her hubby Blake Shelton took her family on.

With Gwen’s upcoming fifth studio album, Bouquet, set to drop on November 15, the singer shared her current emotional state about everything as a whole, saying, “I feel so grateful… it was one of those like… all I can do is look back at all of the whole career and be like, wow, how did that happen?”

After 2020, Gwen felt the want to start writing again, but also felt that she had so many things going on. “I'm a mom… I felt guilty to even go to the studio and try to write music because a lot of times you go and nothing happens,” Gwen shared. “But I started working on it and I think I went down like a lot of like, weird cul-de-sacs musically, because I didn't really know what I wanted to be or who I was. I was trying to chase the old me like, okay, I want to do reggae or I'm gonna do this, and nothing was landing.”

After a few failed attempts, and less than stellar reviews when she’d play the material for people, Gwen came to the realization that, “it really just comes down to, you have to like it,  you as the person doing it.”

“I wanted to always be real and truthful and honest and I just had to find that real honest place.” Noting it also has a lot to do with “the people that I actually end up writing the songs with, like finding the right chemistry, the right everything to make it all come together.”

“Once I wrote ‘Purple Irises’… that was like, finally, okay, I landed in the spot, and then the record kind of happened pretty quick after that.”

Discussing the sound she landed on for the album, Gwen said, “I knew I wanted to make something that I wanted to listen to. The older I get, the more I go back to the songs that I grew up with as a kid. Which I think we kind of call it yacht-rock now, but at that time it was just the popular soft rock music, like anything from Steely Dan, The Eagles, Carly Simon, James Taylor. There was like a lot of singer-songwriters back then… there was no computers, it was just music, organic. So I really wanted to do something in that kind of world.” Going on to recall that after writing and demoing the songs, despite how out of her comfort zone it might have been, the next step was to “rerecord the whole thing with a live band in that style.”

“So we ended up going back and I got to work with this producer called Scott Hendrix, who’s actually a Country producer, which I knew through Blake,” and had just recently retired. “I wasn’t able to work with them until that happened,” adding, “so it just all lined up exactly.”

“Four days after he retired we were in the studio and we cut all the songs with live music," Gwen continued, expressing how “amazing” and “spiritual” the process was. “That’s what the record is… A bouquet of all these songs that are a collection… edited down to me kind of right now, and what I've been going through, healing, to get to this point in my life.”

Gwen also went on to chat about getting to work on her duet with Blake, what direction she thinks her music would have taken if she didn’t grow up in Orange County, and that Coachella performance with Olivia Rodrigo. Also discussing feeling inspired by her songwriting process with a “group of amazing songwriters,” two of which were “young girls that were like ‘oh my God, my mom used to listen to you’, it was just so inspiring for me, you know, to be with, to see these girls and try to think back to what I was at that age and like they were.”

The conversation continued from there, with Gwen listing off and expanding on some of the amazing collaborators she worked with, getting a star on the Walk of Fame, being a coach on The Voice, and so much more. To catch it all, check out the entire Audacy Check In above.

Words by Maia Kedem Interview by Bru