Give Gwen Stefani her Bouquet, because the singer is back with her first new solo album in seven years.
Bouquet is Stefani's fifth full length album, following 2017's holiday album, You Make It Feel Like Christmas and 2016's This Is What The Truth Feels Like, and showcases ten new songs, including its first two singles, "Somebody Else's" and "Swallow My Tears," and a guest appearance from husband Blake Shelton on "Purple Irises."
Stefani says that Bouquet took a while to make because "it was a bit of a fight, a passionate fight though." She told iHeartRadio of her new album:
"Something that my heart saying, I want new music, I think I need to do new music, and just ended up kind of circling for a long time, because I kept trying to sort of compete with the old me. And it wasn't until I finally got in the room with the right people and that shifted me into the right direction. And after that, it kind of came fast. It wasn't until I finished writing the actual songs and getting out what I wanted to say, that I realized I needed one more reinvention, which was go in the studio with Scott Hendricks and cut this record live so it had a cohesive, organic genre, less sound to it, because I really wanted the songs to just be standing on their own and not really produced in a way that felt like a certain style."
With many of the songs on Bouquet relating to its floral title — "Empty Vase," Marigolds," "Late To Bloom," "Purple Irises" — she says she was "really on this flower metaphor for life theme" with the songs being "a direct reflection of what was going in her life at the time." She explained, "I got married three years ago and I was engaged the year before that, and I started writing that year." She added:
"I think that for this album, I just really wanted to send a message to myself, a message of healing, [and] really be thoughtful of what had gone on in my life. There was a lot of suffering after the family broke up, and a lot of picking up of pieces, and also finding love for the first time, which was just such an incredible shock and blessing. At the end of the day, I think that I can look back and see that there is a message. I think the message is that once you sow that seed, there's that hope that comes with that. You really can't get rid of it. All you can do is just nurture the seed hope, pray that you're going to get a blossom, and I feel like this is the blossom, this bouquet of music that kind of reflects the healing journey that I've been on in the last few years."
And it's all summed up in the album's title, which "symbolizes a bit of everything, a bit of hope from everywhere. She says, "When you have a dream and it crumbles, and you kind of can't get over that because it's the dream you had your whole life, that was the dream. It's like how do you pick up the pieces and create a new version, a new dream and bouquet is a metaphor for basically picking up those pieces, picking up a different dream and putting them together into this new bouquet."
Listen to Gwen Stefani's Bouquet on iHeartRadio.