Gwen Stefani finds songwriting "traumatic".
The 46-year-old pop star has admitted that she completely lost her "confidence" after releasing poor-performing No Doubt’s 2012 studio LP ‘Push and Shove’.
She explained: "I think after doing ‘Push and Shove’ and having it not be successful, I lost a lot of confidence. Songwriting, for me, has always been traumatic, and I’ve always made all these excuses. But I’ve realised 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."
However, the ‘Don’t Speak’ hitmaker, whose new solo record ‘This Is What the Truth Feels Like’ was written whilst her 14-year marriage to Bush frontman Gavin Rossdale was collapsing, says all that pain and heartache is worth it in the end when you write a really "great song".
She told NPR Radio: "Because when you write a great song, it just blows you away. 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. I think when I first started discovering I could write songs, I was so naive. 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.’"
Gwen Stefani: I’ve always found songwriting traumatic
