Joining the Klein.Ally.Show today at the World Famous KROQ in Los Angeles, singer Gwen Stefani dropped by to talk about the upcoming No Doubt reunion scheduled for the 2024 Coachella season, her new single “Purple Irises” with Blake Shelton, and more.

"This is so wild, I mean, you have no idea. KROQ was, when we were kids, our life. That's how we discovered who we were through the music you guys were playing,” Stefani says of her connection to the station that her music has had since her earliest days in No Doubt. “So, the idea of being in the future right now and ‘Purple Irises’ -- I mean, none of it makes sense, but here we are!”

Looking back on those days, Gwen says, “I just remember every morning before school listening to whatever they had, these countdowns. It was like, ‘Here's the number one songs’ and [radio personality] Richard Blade and, I mean, we were fans of the DJs... that's where we found our identity, you know, that's it. It was KROQ.”

Stefani continues, “I was the one that showed up at the roller skate rink and [tried] to be a fan... just all the music that we learned on that station. It was just so cool. And then I can remember when ‘Just A Girl' got on this, not ‘finally’ because we never really dreamed it really would. We hoped, but we didn't think it would happen. I just remember getting that first Acoustic Christmas. That was huge because we had the 15-minute slot the first night, the first day, and the first band. It was 15 minutes that we played.”

Now, almost three decades later and enjoying worldwide success with her solo music and television career, Gwen admits she does get that same feeling these days as well. “I still get to play like a lot of weird little shows, like private shows, and I do like doing them because a lot of times it's like they're not your fans. For me, the idea of trying to win people over is, I don't know what it is... I just want you to like me.”

“Purple Irises,” Gwen’s latest single released as a collaboration with her husband, Blake Shelton, and performed this year for the first time during the Super Bowl LVIII TikTok Tailgate event in Las Vegas, was a track that she had kept in her pocket for a number of years, she explains.

“I honestly, I need to go back and look when I wrote this,” Stefani admits, “because I wrote it with this little Alternative girl called Niko who had written the first of ‘True Babe.’ She sent that to me and then we finished it together and then that song came out. It was just really cool to write with her because there's all these amazing songwriters out there, like back in the day with No Doubt. We were -- when I say No Doubt, it's weird because I am in No Doubt too but for some reason --- the guys and I would write songs like we didn't know what we were doing. We didn't have somebody that's professional, that's like, ‘OK, no, you can't do that many syllables. It won't rhyme,’ or whatever it was. We just did whatever we did, we just made it up ourselves."

“Later in life when I was doing ‘Love. Angel. Music. Baby.’ and ‘The Sweet Escape’ and all that, I got to go in with these professional-of-the-moment songwriters and it was so incredible," she says. "One of the first ones being Pharrell and being able to work with people outside of the genres that I knew. It was just like such an amazing-as-a-songwriter thing to learn and the collaborations have always been my favorite, best work I think.”

“In this instance,” she says, “I had been going down this whole road of, since 2020, [wanting] to make music again, and I had Kelly Clarkson, for example, because we work together on ‘The Voice.’ She was texting me during quarantine all these demos of her songs and that she'd been writing and I was like, ‘But wait a minute, we're in quarantine. I'm doing home school, I'm cleaning toilets. I'm trying to make three meals a day. I'm learning how to make sourdough, like everybody else. And what are you, writing these songs?’ I was so jealous and she was like, ‘I don't sleep,’ and she had younger kids than me! That was when I first was like, ‘I want to try.’”

After spending over 100 days in Oklahoma during the pandemic, Gwen made her move. “I went to the studio and it was like, the whole studio, the inside was wrapped with plastic... and the girl I wrote with, we were wearing masks. I still, if I saw her, I wouldn't recognize her. We had to have our feet sprayed when we walked in! Like it was a whole thing and I wrote the first song there and I was really about going backwards. I was like, ‘Oh, I want to do Reggae. I want it to be fun. The world needs fun.’ But it always felt like I was trying to chase myself or compete with myself in some way. I don't really think I knew that until I wrote ‘Purple Irises.’ It was like, ‘OK, now I feel like this is what the record is going to be.’”

The track’s energy, to Gwen, is “me in the back of the station wagon in Orange County on the way to church with my parents, listening to that seventies-like music that was the backdrop of my childhood. That's the inspiration it came from... and it was just a vulnerable week, and I just wrote this song about what was going on. After that is when I started writing the rest of the record.”

That’s right, you heard correctly. A full album is on the way. “It just happens that Blake is in a break,” she says. “He doesn't have anything out right now. It's weird though because they say ‘never work with the kids, animals, or your spouse,’ right?”

Also on the horizon for Stefani is the highly-anticipated reunion of No Doubt over two weekends during this year's Coachella festival.

Hearing those songs from the early days still ring very true to her all these years later she says. In fact, “I can't listen to a lot of songs because they speak so clearly to me,” Gwen admits. “You know, you have regrets, you have mistakes you've made, and most of the songs are about that. If I do ‘Ex-Girlfriend,' even when I say it, I almost throw up in my mouth because it's like, just know exactly where I was at in that moment to write that song. What I know now, it's just like, ‘Oh my God,’ it just brings you right back.”

“There's lots of times where you'd be on tour and you're doing the repetitive songs, but it's not really, it's not the songs, you're not in the songs, you're there with these new people every night and they're receiving the songs. That's where you get the energy, and you kind of relive that moment with them,” Stefani explains. “I can't believe that I was chosen to be able to have this life, because it's such an incredible way to, I don't know, just express yourself but also get to know yourself... and the songs do that. It's not just me because a lot of people are getting that from them as well.”

Don't miss the full chat with Gwen Stefani above -- and stay tuned for more conversations with your favorite artists on Audacy.com/live.

Words by Joe Cingrana Interview by Klein.Ally.Show