In 2012, Gwen Stefani and No Doubt released the album Push and Shove. It was the band’s first album in over a decade, and it served as a comeback for the group. While it debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard 200 and received generally positive reviews, Stefani had hoped for more. She admitted that the album’s performance came as a significant blow to her confidence.
Gwen Stefani said one album’s lack of success made her lose confidence
When Pharrell Williams was a judge on The Voice, he brought a song to Stefani. She said this was the first song she had worked on in a long time.
“[W]hen we were on the show, he came to my dressing room and was like, ‘I got a beat! I got a track!’” she told NPR. “That was ‘Spark the Fire,’ the song that we wrote together, and it was the first bit of writing that I had done in a long time.”
She explained that she stepped away from songwriting after the release of Push and Shove. She wished it would have been more of a success, and its performance made her lose confidence in her abilities.
“I think after doing Push and Shove and having it not be successful, I lost a lot of confidence,” she said. “Songwriting, for me, has always been traumatic, and I’ve always made all these excuses. But I’ve realized that you have to just accept that it was a gift: ‘I don’t know where it came from, I don’t know how I did it, but I did write all those songs, and I gotta do it again.’”
Gwen Stefani shared why putting an album together could be traumatic
Stefani said that when she writes a good song, she feels an immense sense of gravity.
“[W]hen you write a great song, it just blows you away,” she said. “When you write a song that connects with people around the world — I mean like it actually transcends language barriers — you see how it can affect people, and it’s quite a tall order to follow up on.”
She did not feel this way when she first began writing. Then, she just wanted an outlet for her heartbreak following her split from No Doubt’s Tony Kanal.
“I think when I first started discovering I could write songs, I was so naive,” she said. “And it was after I got broken up with and had my heart sliced up into a bunch of little pieces that I was like, ‘I’m going to say this.’ I didn’t even know how to play guitar.”
She felt pleasantly surprised by how one song performed
Nearly a decade after the release of Push and Shove, Stefani released the song “Let Me Reintroduce Myself.” She admitted that she didn’t have high expectations for its performance. Therefore, when Blake Shelton showed her how well it was charting, she burst into tears.
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Source:: Showbiz Cheat Sheet
