- 2024-11-20
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MUSIC
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Gwen Stefani Releases New Album “Bouquet”
American singer-songwriter Gwen Stefani released her fifth studio album “Bouquet” on November 15, 2024 via Interscope Records.
The album comprises 10 songs, including pre-release songs "Somebody Else's” and “Swallow My Tears”, and features a guest appearance from her husband and American country music singer-songwriter Blake Shelton.
She worked with producer Scott Hendricks on the album.
She started making the album in 2020. It was inspired by the '70s music, which she called yacht rock, that she listened to as a child in the station wagon on the way to church.
Gwen Stefani told Rolling Stone about the album, “It's not a country record. It's all the stuff I listened to in the station wagon on the way to church. Yacht rock, though it wasn't called yacht rock then. The music I listen to now, I wanted this album to reflect that. I wanted it to be one big statement, and that's why I feel Bouquet is a really perfect title. Like each song was handpicked with meaning.”- Gwen Stefani said of the album, “My mother, like I have all these things going on, trying to find those stolen moments to get the studio and try to be like, I feel guilty to even leave and go try to do art. It's like, but I've always been like, fulfilled and feel like that's what I'm good at. So I kind of made the time to do it, but I kept trying to chase the past a little bit, I think, with musically, and went down some different roads, that weren't right. Like, I wanted to be really honest and try to find something that felt really reflective and true to who I am as a human being right now. Like I have nothing to prove, like I'm just doing it purely to like receive it from God, and just be like, this is my statement for myself, for my heart for my soul, for my healing for everything that I need to do why I write songs.”
- The album title has a “flower motif”, evident in song titles like “Marigolds”, “Empty Vase”, and “Late to Bloom”.
She told Zane Lowe of Apple Music, “During COVID, we were there so much that we actually got to see the seasons. We started seeing the wildflowers, seeing what was in Oklahoma that we never saw before.”
She added, “Every time you plant that seed, you have this hope, but you don't know if it's going to bloom. You don't really have control. All you can do is everything you can to help.”
Gwen Stefani explained some tracks for the album.
“Somebody Else's”
“I get a text from Madison with a start of a song called 'Somebody Else's,' after a bunch of sessions that we'd done, and in those sessions there's a lot of confession and just talk about life and where we're at now, where we were. She came with the idea of this song, and I was like, 'Uh oh, I don't even know if I want to give that any energy. What I kind of realized was, after writing the rest of the songs, it felt you needed to see a little bit of the dark to see the light and see where I'd just come from originally. It seems like eight years probably feels like a long time for a lot of people, but for me, it was eight years of healing, eight years of transitioning, it went really fast. It's interesting that this song rose [to become to the new single], because the rest of the record has nothing to do with that subject.”
“Swallow My Tears”
“'Swallow My Tears', which was written in Oklahoma at the Ranch. And I had this like whim where I had been on this writing kind of like flow with some incredible songwriters. I would have this fantasy that we would go to Oklahoma, they'd fly over there with me and spend the night. And we would write some songs and we did it. We ended up just like, writing this song. It was like, the first thing that we wrote. And we got inside my Jeep there, and it was raining, pouring rain. And we were just driving through the Ranch and just going like, it was like, I always say this, these songs are just handed down, and they're like, so precious. It's like you sit there and you go, did this just happen, like this was not there like a second ago, now we have this song. And it just captures so much of my story. And I love this song so much.”
“Purple Irises” with Blake Shelton
“When 'Purple Irises' was written, I was like, Okay, I landed. This is where I am. And then the sort of like, just even the idea of talking about the purple irises, which was such a huge, like, it just symbolized so much mine and Blake. Like where we got to like as our love grew, which we had found these irises on the ranch during 2020, and we like pulled them all out and we've transplanted them. I mean hundreds of them like it took it was like something you would never do if you weren't in COVID. And we were as a family we did it and then they just years later, like we're picking them together like, wow, we really are we really found love like this is it.” - source : Apple Music
