Gwen Stefani | The Thread

[Franch Toast PronounsShe/her/hers]

Introducing "Slow Clap"

At least it's not country. What do y'all think? I'm on a Zoom call so need to wait till after to give it a proper listen. 

[nynj nights Pronounsshe/her]

51 minutes ago, Franch Toast said:

Introducing "Slow Clap"

At least it's not country. What do y'all think? I'm on a Zoom call so need to wait till after to give it a proper listen. 

Just had a listen. 

When I saw 2:31 as the length time, I was like not another sub-3min song (I don’t like the direction the music industry is heading into with shorter songs)

I agree, glad it isn’t country.  I feel like the sound is very reminiscent of her early solo days. I got a “Hollaback Girl” vibe and I like some of the lyrics but I think the “clap” repetition is a bit over done and a little cheesy. Although I need to listen to the song more before I come to a consensus.  

[Franch Toast PronounsShe/her/hers]

1 minute ago, NYNJ Nights said:

Just had a listen. 

When I saw 2:31 as the length time, I was like not another sub-3min song (I don’t like the direction the music industry is heading into with shorter songs)

I agree, glad it isn’t country.  I feel like the sound is very reminiscent of her early solo days. I got a “Hollaback Girl” vibe and I like some of the lyrics but I think the “clap” repetition is a bit over done and a little cheesy. Although I need to listen to the song more before I come to a consensus.  

So far, I feel like it's something that she could sing at one of her kid's birthday parties.  It *is* reminiscent of ND and some of her early solo stuff, but more like a decaffeinated version, and the "clap" was way too repetitive. I think she really needs to reunite with the ND boys if she wants to go in this direction. 

Honestly, I think Gwen does her best work when she's unlucky in love. She writes fab break-up songs (Tony, Gavin) and great songs about being in a dysfunctional relationship with a cheating douchebag (Gavin), but now that she's seemingly happy with ol' Blakey, her creative juices are a tad lackluster. 

To be clear, she does have it in her to do great work on her own –– I'm thinking of how she wrote "Simple Kind of Life" completely by herself –– but I feel like she's so happy right now that her music is lacking in depth. But who knows, this could grow on me like Let Me Reintroduce Myself did. 

[nynj nights Pronounsshe/her]

4 minutes ago, Franch Toast said:

decaffeinated version

 but exactly the creative way I would describe the more toned down nature of the song. I appreciate her wanting to return to her roots but from a different point in her life. I don’t follow Gwen closely but is she planning to come out with an album? It would be great if she teamed back up with the other ND members but I feel like it could be Gaga-RedOne situation 

[HeavyMetalLover]

1 hour ago, Franch Toast said:

Introducing "Slow Clap"

At least it's not country. What do y'all think? I'm on a Zoom call so need to wait till after to give it a proper listen. 

It's really bad.

[blankpaper Pronounsshe/her]

23 minutes ago, Franch Toast said:

Honestly, I think Gwen does her best work when she's unlucky in love. She writes fab break-up songs (Tony, Gavin) and great songs about being in a dysfunctional relationship with a cheating douchebag (Gavin), but now that she's seemingly happy with ol' Blakey, her creative juices are a tad lackluster. 

I wonder if any of this is due to age or how long she’s been in the industry. She’s 51 and seems like she’s trying too hard to be 20 still, and while that worked fine in her 30s (LAMB, Sweet Escape), there seems to be more of a disconnect now. She doesn’t really have a voice that could transition into more “mature” genres, so she’s kind of stuck in pop/ska. If she’s going to go back to her roots to play into everyone’s nostalgia, she needs to do it right with ND. Or she could stay in the This Is What The Truth Feels Like lane, but it feels like she’s trying to straddle the two sounds and it’s not working as well as committing to one would 

[Franch Toast PronounsShe/her/hers]

1 minute ago, blankpaper said:

I wonder if any of this is due to age or how long she’s been in the industry. She’s 51 and seems like she’s trying too hard to be 20 still, and while that worked fine in her 30s (LAMB, Sweet Escape), there seems to be more of a disconnect now. She doesn’t really have a voice that could transition into more “mature” genres, so she’s kind of stuck in pop/ska. If she’s going to go back to her roots to play into everyone’s nostalgia, she needs to do it right with ND. Or she could stay in the This Is What The Truth Feels Like lane, but it feels like she’s trying to straddle the two sounds and it’s not working as well as committing to one would 

I agree. I feel like she's trying to recapture her early sound, but she really needs the boys to do that right. 

13 minutes ago, NYNJ Nights said:

 but exactly the creative way I would describe the more toned down nature of the song. I appreciate her wanting to return to her roots but from a different point in her life. I don’t follow Gwen closely but is she planning to come out with an album? It would be great if she teamed back up with the other ND members but I feel like it could be Gaga-RedOne situation 

I think she might be planning to come out with another solo album. She said she wrote a bunch of songs over Zoom during lockdown. 

I still hold out hope that post-pandemic she & ND will do a tour to celebrate (belatedly) Tragic Kingdom's 25th anniversary and Return of Saturn's belated 30th anniversary and that this will spark their creative juices and encourage them to reunite again to make new music. Rumor has it that one reason Push & Shove took so long was because Gavin wasn't a supportive partner and thus child-rearing duties still mainly fell on her (though she had a nanny/nannies, but maybe the fact that Gavin was screwing one of them didn't help), but now that she has a better partner, plus doesn't even have the kids half the time, maybe things would work out better. *Let me cling to my fantasy* 

[blankpaper Pronounsshe/her]

1 minute ago, Franch Toast said:

plus doesn't even have the kids half the time

Wait does Gavin have over 50%?! How the hell did that happen 

[Elvira]

What... is... this... song? 

[Franch Toast PronounsShe/her/hers]

12 minutes ago, blankpaper said:

Wait does Gavin have over 50%?! How the hell did that happen 

I think they split them fifty-fifty. In an interview somewhere she said it sucks that she did nothing wrong but has to be separated from her kids half the time. I feel like she was a pushover and let him off way too easy. If my husband had been forking the nanny for three years, including while I was pregnant, I don't think I'd be that generous. 

(And if my memory serves me correctly, it was Tony who remarked that Gwen didn't have the same support that the guys did while making Push & Shove, which contributed to the delay.)

Edited March 11, 2021 by Franch Toast

[HeavyMetalLover]

1 minute ago, Elvira said:

What... is... this... song? 

An ode to gonorrhea.

[Elvira]

Just now, HeavyMetalLover said:

An ode to gonorrhea.

Oh lord Satan I laughed out loud.

Honestly, this is one of her worst songs I've heard so far and that's something considering her third album is... something 

[HeavyMetalLover]

1 minute ago, Elvira said:

Oh lord Satan I laughed out loud.

Honestly, this is one of her worst songs I've heard so far and that's something considering her third album is... something 

Let's just blame it all on Blakey.

[Dirkje PronounsShe/her/hers]

I just listened to the song and meh. LMRM >>>>>

[HeavyMetalLover]

I just feel like I can really relate to these lyrics - like they’re really deep when you think about it. She really is a genius. Chills every time I hear this part.

[blankpaper Pronounsshe/her]

I finally listened to this song and I actually don’t hate it? Like after you listen to it a few times the cringiness of the clap-clap-clap part wears off

[Franch Toast PronounsShe/her/hers]

1 hour ago, blankpaper said:

I finally listened to this song and I actually don’t hate it? Like after you listen to it a few times the cringiness of the clap-clap-clap part wears off

I agree. I listened a few times, and it’s grown on me. 

[Franch Toast PronounsShe/her/hers]

Gwen was on Kimmel last night. She performed Slow Clap, but we won't talk about that because all the clapping and the way she tried to strut "like a boss" had me cringing. 

It makes me sad how she avoids Jimmy's question about whether she stays in touch with the No Doubt boys. 

 

[Franch Toast PronounsShe/her/hers]

Today is the 25th(!) anniversary of "Don't Speak," so feel free to stream it in between your ARTPOP streams. I read this interview Gwen gave today in conjunction with the anniversary, and it made me sad (highly recommend reading the whole piece, as long as it is, but I'll excerpt it below).

https://variety.com/2021/music/news/gwen-stefani-dont-speak-no-doubt-25th-anniversary-1234949114/

“Don’t Speak,” which would go on to spend 16 weeks as the most-played song on U.S. radio and be nominated for song of the year at the 1998 Grammys, paints a different picture of the uber-confident TV and music star you see today. And even back then, compared to “Tragic Kingdom’s” mostly uptempo, attitudinal singles (like “Just a Girl” and “Spiderwebs”), “Don’t Speak” was, essentially, a power ballad that lamented two break ups — Stefani from bassist Tony Kanal, her boyfriend of seven years, and from her brother and No Doubt cofounder Eric Stefani, who objected to the band’s commercial ambitions and left before the album’s release in October 1995.

[ . . .]

But the success of “Don’t Speak” and “Tragic Kingdom” was a double-edged sword for Stefani. While No Doubt was catapulted to mainstream popularity, she was still nursing a broken heart.

“Tony was my first real boyfriend and I was tragically obsessed with him,” says Stefani. “When my brother quit the band and then Tony quit me… it was a really hard time. I lived at home until I was 26, I was quite sheltered and innocent you know, I just was. So I depended on Tony for so many things, like to help me with my homework, everything just to survive and live. … Once the song came out, it went from a nine-year hobby that was our passion while we went to college, to all of a sudden it’s like we do the ‘Just a Girl’ video, we go from that video set to the airport and go on tour and don’t come home for two and a half years. It was a huge thing to be there with your ex who you love still who doesn’t want to be with you.”

Meanwhile, tensions were rising within the band in another way. As No Doubt’s star rose, so did Stefani’s — and seemingly, no one else’s. No Doubt played up this factor within the “Don’t Speak” music video instead of making it about a romantic relationship, but Stefani says they didn’t have to do too much acting to make it look like the band might also be breaking up.

“I was the voice of the song so that was my story. I wrote those lyrics, people were relating to me as the lead singer, and I was the girl in the band,” Stefani says of the “Don’t Speak” video. “But the band was becoming the shadow of me and that was really hard for them. There was a lot of tension between us with the band feeling like I was being put in the spotlight more than them — that competition that they felt. We couldn’t really enjoy the success.”

Stefani maintains that it wasn’t all bad and the band still managed to have fun on tour and mend some of their wounds. “The shows were so incredible and Tony and I were still best friends and we still had a lot of fun together,” Stefani says. “It’s just that there was also a lot of stuff happening, a lot of layers to it. At the end of the day, we all agreed that we were so passionate about what we did that we made it work.”

To this day, Stefani continues to perform “Don’t Speak,” as she did recently during a Pandora Live event on March 31.

“I’ve been performing it without them for probably seven years,” she says. “I love performing that song. It never gets old to me. It’s like, you know you’re giving [the fans] what makes them so happy when you do it, and it brings people right back to that place where they first heard that song or related to that song for whatever pain they were going through. [I’m] really lucky to have that one.”

But will she ever perform “Don’t Speak” with No Doubt again? Stefani isn’t so sure.

“I don’t know about No Doubt,” Stefani demurs. “We had so many years together and we all have families now and that’s just our priority. I can’t really imagine what the future holds with that. We had done some big shows together, a bunch of festivals probably six years ago, and we knew that was kind of the last thing we were going to do together.”

Stefani feels that she has finally grown up, and intends to focus on being a mom to her three boys, planning a wedding to Shelton and her solo career.

“It’s like we’re in real life now, and we were so lucky,” she adds. “I always think about how we never really had to grow up. Like I literally left my parents’ house, went on a tour bus, and when I came home, I was a millionaire. It was such a weird existence.”

******

I was hoping we might get a mini-reunion tour post-pandemic, but Gwen has gone and squashed those hopes. It's like what they predicted in the "Don't Speak" video is actually happening. It's so different from L.A.M.B. and Sweet Escape eras when she insisted that these albums were just detours from No Doubt and that the band was always meant to get back together. I'm glad she's happy, but this makes me really sad, and I wonder what the reason is for this.  @blankpaper , didn't you mention before that the change in management may have had something to do with it, plus the boys not telling her about DREAMCAR, and then her performing ND songs in Vegas? I can't help but feel there's something more to it, however. 

Also, check out the original version of "Don't Speak":

Album version: 

 

[blankpaper Pronounsshe/her]

14 minutes ago, Franch Toast said:

.  @blankpaper , didn't you mention before that the change in management may have had something to do with it, plus the boys not telling her about DREAMCAR, and then her performing ND songs in Vegas?

I don’t think I knew any of that so it wasn’t me who said it haha

the part about the boys being upset about the spotlight being on her more is so ridiculous since that’s what happens with bands? Like most bands are just known for their lead singers 

 

5 minutes ago, Delusional said:

Does only Gwen sing the vocals in ND songs?

Some of their really early stuff has her brother’s vocals (she was originally just a backup singer). They also have some features on Rock Steady but other than that it’s just her I think