There's a downside to putting pieces of your personal life into song lyrics. As Gwen Stefani admits regarding the No Doubt catalog, some of those songs from decades become tough to sing when it comes time for your band to reunite.
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"I can't listen to a lot of the songs because they speak so clearly to me," Stefani said on the "Audacy Check In" podcast. "And it's like, you know, you have regret and mistakes you've made. Most of the songs are about that."
There's one song in particular that makes Stefani uncomfortable now. It's "Ex-Girlfriend," the lead single from the 2000 album Return of Saturn.
"If I do 'Ex-Girlfriend,' even when I say it, I almost throw up in my mouth," Stefani explained. "Because it's like, I just know exactly where I was at in that moment to write that song, and what I know now. It's just like, 'Oh my God.' It just brings you right back."
However, Stefani's glad to have discovered songwriting as a means to express herself creatively and to work through the sorts of personal issues that now make "Ex-Girlfriend" difficult to revisit. She called writing brief yet detailed story-songs "the most satisfying thing."
"Songs are weird because it's not a lot of lyrics. It's not like you're writing a book, you know what I mean, or even a paragraph," she added.
No Doubt will reunite this April at Coachella, with or without "Ex-Girlfriend" on the set list.
Although her songs are short and to the point, Stefani admitted recently on "Jimmy Kimmel Live" that she'll need to re-learn several No Doubt hits.
"I don't remember them, no. Not at all, I don't! I think I'm going to have to learn probably like, eight or nine," she said.
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