Gwen Stefani isn’t ready to finish working on her upcoming fifth solo album just yet.
The singer, who released her latest track, Slow Clap, on Thursday (March 11), “thought [she] was done” with the record but, as she was approached by more co-writers to work on the project, she decided to hold off setting a date for the LP.
“It’s weird because I was really aiming, I thought I was done,” Gwen tells Zane Lowe on Apple Music. “And then as I started listening through, I was like, ‘You know what? Jimmy always taught me, it’s not done til you’re done, til it comes out.’
“Jimmy Iovine was the guy that did all my music with me. And so I kind of was like, ‘What am I chasing? If I get to put singles out, why am I rushing to be done?'”
The Hollaback Girl hitmaker adds: “I’m just going to keep going in and see who will work with me more. Because every time I go in, it’s like I get to see somebody else that’s so talented, like a Ryan Tedder, just last week I worked with some incredible guys and it’s just so fun.”
Gwen goes on to tease she has “an idea what the title is” and confirms she “did actually shoot the artwork for it” – but insists she’s “not really going to really reveal it” yet.
“It’s basically off of a song that I had already written that for me was the one peaking moment of like, ‘Okay, this is what defines this phase of my life. What I’m trying to do’,” she says.
“[It’s] another song that I actually wrote with Ross [Golan] and Luke [Nikolai]. So we had this thing where it was like we were in a band together where we wrote nine songs in a row.”
New single Slow Clap was one of the tunes written with Ross and Luke, with Gwen explaining the track was influenced by the idea that “your weirdness actually is what makes you so special”.
“It was the second song I wrote with Ross Golan and Luke Nikolai right after I wrote Let Me Reintroduce Myself. So I don’t know if you can hear that they’re kind of in the same world,” explains the Cool singer.
“The story of the song is so crazy, because I had just had a meeting with Interscope,” she shares. “I wanted to write this sad love song. And he was like, ‘No, you don’t need to go back and talk about that anymore. Nobody wants to hear about that anymore.’
“So he was like, ‘I woke up at 5.44 am and I had this crazy weird idea, and I sang it into my phone and went back asleep, and it was this idea of the title, Slow Clap.’ And I was like, ‘You’re the weirdest guy ever.’
“He was like, ‘It’s kind of like all those movies from the ’80s where you get clapped back to life. Like yes, you’re not the underdog. You’re an awesome person.’
“I feel like it’s that thing that happens to us through our life. It starts in high school where you feel like you don’t fit in, and then sometimes your weirdness actually is what makes you so special, and so the song is kind of about that.”
The former No Doubt star returned to the charts in December with Let Me Reintroduce Myself – the lead track from her forthcoming fifth solo LP.
Gwen previously revealed her collaborations with co-writers, including Julia Michaels, Justin Tranter, Busby, Greg Kurstin – along with her brother, Eric Stefani – are a big part of the project.
“I ended up calling my brother who I wrote Don’t Speak with, who was in No Doubt for nine years,” recalled the hitmaker. “And he actually is playing on this record.
“So we all went to his house and get our masks on – There was just this incredible crazy moment to have him play on the record as well…
“It’s when it’s something’s meant to be and you just, like I said, open your heart and follow it. I feel like it was just meant to happen.”
Eric played keyboards, piano and guitar in No Doubt from 1986–1995 and appeared on the group’s first three albums: ‘No Doubt’, ‘The Beacon Street Collection’ and ‘Tragic Kingdom’.
