Gwen Stefani is just like any bride in 2020 trying to navigate wedding planning amid the global COVID-19 pandemic. The songstress joined Ryan Seacrest on-air on Monday, December 7, via Zoom and shared how wedding planning is going with fiancé Blake Shelton and how Kelly Clarkson influenced her new single “Let Me Reintroduce Myself.”
Stefani and Shelton announced their engagement on October 27 via a joint announcement on social media. "Yes please," Stefani captioned the sweet post, while Shelton wrote alongside the same photo, "Hey @gwenstefani thanks for saving my 2020 and the rest of my life. I love you. I heard a YES!" The duo’s engagement comes after they first fell for each other on set of The Voice in 2015.
“We’re so excited!” Stefani gushed to Seacrest, revealing she feels they’re “meant to be.”
“It’s so funny to even say ‘engaged,’” Stefani added, after reflecting on her life over the past few years, revealing she feels more “stable” now than ever. “It feels so weird. People have been saying it for so long, like five years, ‘Are you getting married? Are you engaged?’ And now we actually are and it feels like I’m in a cartoon or something.”
That said, their love can’t escape what is 2020.
“I would say I just want my parents there at this point,” Stefani shared when asked if she wants a big or small wedding come time when it's socially safe to celebrate. “My parents wouldn’t come to Thanksgiving because they’re so scared so really would rather it not be a COVID situation. Like, I would rather not have masks and that kind of thing,” she added. “Even when you cut it down to just family, it’s too many people for COVID so we’re sort of going to see what happens in the next few months.”
The duo got engaged while hunkered down in Oklahoma with Stefani’s kids, whom she shared she’s had to homeschool the past couple of months.
“I wasn’t even planning on doing a record,” Stefani added, revealing Kelly Clarkson helped get her creative juices flowing. “She’d been texting me through the pandemic sending me songs that she’d been writing, and I was like, ‘How are you doing this? I have to clean toilets, make dinner — I have no time for anything!’ It was crazy,” Stefani continued. “We had like a 100 days in Oklahoma and ... had five kids in homeschool and she’s like writing all these songs. She’s like, ‘Oh, I just stay up all night.’ And I was like there’s no way I could do that and I was feeling quite jealous that she had new music so I wasn’t even planning on doing it.”
Once she started though, she couldn’t stop.
“I think I have like 20 songs now and they were written really fast and I just started thinking about if I did music, I want to go back to the start,” Stefani explained. “My kids are starting to define who they are by the music they love … so I started thinking a lot about the reggae music and the ska music and how I started and going back to the basics so this song is kind of I reintroduced myself. Like, I’m still the same person but yet evolved, but I still love all the same things so this song is sort of about that."
“Let Me Reintroduce Myself” comes after a five-year break from Stefani, who only recently collaborated on country tracks with Shelton.
“You get insecure,” Stefani explained. “You think people don’t want to hear it. … [But] I was like I don’t really care if anyone doesn’t hear it, I need to write this music. It’s really spiritual. … I wanted to just make some fun music, something fun. I feel like when No Doubt started back in the day, we were kids and we just wanted to have fun and be hyper and do something different … and I just had that feeling. I wanted to do that again.”
Watch back the full Zoom interview with Gwen above and stream “Let Me Reintroduce Myself” now!