Post by Admin on Oct 19, 2023 21:41:51 GMT
On a fall Friday, Gwen Stefani is coming to the end of a busy week and headed into a busy weekend. “I have three boys,” she says. “Two of them are teenagers. They have their own schedule; I have Blake’s schedule.” That would be her husband of two years, country singer Blake Shelton. “I have to coordinate with their dad” — that would be her ex-husband, rock singer Gavin Rossdale — “and then I have ‘The Voice.’” That would be the NBC singing competition which last season — its 23rd, and Shelton’s final year as a coach — occupied not one but two slots in the top 20 of Neilsen’s rankings of the 2022-2023 TV season. “Plus,” she adds, “I’m making a record.”
Stefani had spent the previous three days on the set of “The Voice,” where she recently returned for a seventh time as a coach, and in three days she’d be marking her 54th birthday in Hawaii (although the trip there was for a concert, not to celebrate). That would come a day early, on Sunday, after a football game in which her two oldest sons — Kingston, 17, and Zuma, 15 — were both playing. “They’re at the same school,” she says. “It’s really tiny. They barely have enough people to even have a football team, but they’re on it together.” She says this brightly and a little breathlessly, which is something of a default mode for her in conversation, and then she added something likely to get an eye roll from most teenage football players: “It’s really cute.” After the football game on Sunday she was having a joint party with her 14-year-old niece, with whom she shares a birthday. “My whole family’s coming over,” she explains. “My mom’s making me lasagna.”
Superstars, concerts and TV tapings aside, Stefani almost sounds like your average overscheduled mom of three. But that is to downplay — drastically — her many triumphs across more than 30 years of shifting popular taste and business transitions in the music industry. Her many accomplishments include a 10-million-selling diamond album (No Doubt’s 1995 “Tragic Kingdom”), the first download to sell a million copies in the U.S. (“Hollaback Girl,” a No. 1 single from her first solo album, 2004’s “Love. Angel. Music. Baby.”), and the first No. 1 album in the streaming era (her third solo outing, 2016’s “This Is What the Truth Feels Like”). Well before Rihanna launched Fenty or Louis Vuitton tapped Pharrell as a creative director, Stefani had her own fashion line, L.A.M.B., which ran from head to toe (glasses to shoes) and included a fragrance — one of the fashion world’s most profitable brand extensions.