Gwen Stefani has spoken about the No Doubt single that makes the singer “almost throw up in [her] mouth”.
During the latest episode of the Audacy Check-In podcast (released February 16), Stefani explained that she “can’t listen to a lot of the songs” by her band “because they speak so clearly” to her now.
“And it’s like you have regret and mistakes you’ve made. Most of the songs are about that,” she continued (via Billboard).
“If I do [2000 single] ‘Ex-Girlfriend’ even when I say it, I almost throw up in my mouth because… it’s just like, ‘Oh my God’. It just brings you right back.”
The song in question appears on No Doubt’s fourth album ‘Return Of Saturn’. “I kinda always knew I’d end up your ex-girlfriend,” Stefani sings on the track, which she wrote about her relationship with Gavin Rossdale of Bush (the pair got married in 2002 before divorcing in 2015).
‘Ex-Girlfriend’ also sees the frontwoman reference Bush’s song ‘Dead Meat’ when she rails: “You say you’re gonna burn before you mellow/ I will be the one to burn you.”
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Stefani added on Audacy Check-In: “There are lots of times when you’d be on tour doing the repetitive songs, but it’s not the songs. You’re not in the songs. You’re there with these new people every night and they’re receiving the songs. So that’s where you get the energy and you relive that moment with them.”
The singer went on to remember when No Doubt’s hit single ‘Don’t Speak’ was released in the mid-’90s. “My family was very conservative,” she said. “I was very naive. The only place we’d ever travelled to was San Francisco. I’m not kidding you.
“We would [do]…Catalina Island, Big Bear. [I lived at home until I was 26] and when I was 21, they called this family meeting, and we were like, ‘We’re going to go to Italy next year, and it’s going to be this big trip’. And we did. I cried when we left. I was like, ‘I’ll never get to go back to my Italy’.”
Listen to the podcast in full above via Spotify, and re-visit ‘Ex-Girlfriend’ below.
Last month, it was announced that No Doubt would be making a live return at Coachella 2024. It’ll mark the band’s first performance together since 2015. No other tour dates have been confirmed as of yet.
The group’s latest album was 2012’s ‘Push And Shove’, which itself marked their first release since 2001’s ‘Rock Steady’.
Speaking about No Doubt’s forthcoming reunion recently, Stefani explained: “It just happened so fast, and that’s my favourite kind of thing to happen. And I think really just watching the internet blow up [with] how excited that the fans are? It’s inspiring us.”
She continued: “It’s just going to be cool. It’s just going to be: Get up there and do what we always do, which is play our music and try to connect and be so grateful that we got this amazing career that we never expected to have.”