Gwen Stefani wants to protect her children while shading ex-husband in new album
Gwen Stefani is sharing her truth about her heartbreaking divorce from Gavin Rossdale in 2015.
The 55-year-old “Don’t Speak” singer released her newest album, “Bouquet,” on Nov. 15, and one of the songs has fans talking.
That song, titled “Somebody Else,” was initially released Sept. 18 and explores the emotions she felt following that devastating breakup nine years ago.
“You’re somebody else’s / And it doesn’t even break my heart / You’re somebody else’s / And I pray for them, whoever they are,” she sings in the song.
“Every day with you is rock bottom / Leavin’ you saved me, my god / Look at me blossom / You’re somebody else’s problem,” the song continues.
Stefani goes on to describe the person she is singing about as narcissistic, semi-psycotic, and manipulative during their time together.
“Every time, but not this time / You gaslit my world, it was burning / Had to leave before it stopped turning,” she adds in the song.
While she says releasing the song was necessary, she doesn’t want it to change the way her children, whom she shares with Rossdale, look at their father.
Stefani and Rossdale had three sons — Kingston, 18, Zuma, 16, and Apollo, 10 — between 2006 and 2014. She filed for divorce in 2015, and it was finalized in 2016.
In an exclusive interview with People, published Nov. 14, Stefani reveals that her children are well aware of “what’s going on in their own family and their own life.”
She also says they know “what’s real and what’s true” about the family.
But while she’s still learning how to “protect” them from those truths, she also feels she has a duty as an artist to express herself openly and freely to her fans.
“I feel like it’s my responsibility, whether I have children or not … to share that. It’s a gift to me that I’m sharing with people,” she told People.
“And I definitely think that there’s certain songs that they don’t mean the same thing to me as they would mean to somebody else, because nobody’s in my brain or in my heart or in my soul,” she added.
The No Doubt singer went on to discuss how her relationship with Rossdale differed from what she dreamed of as a little girl.
And also how it differed from the love her parents shared growing up.
“They met when they were 15, and they fell in love, and then they had us (children), and they made us feel like we were everything to them,” she said of her parents, Patti and Dennis Stefani.
“And when you have a family and it’s the opposite of that, it breaks up ... I didn’t know what to do or how to protect my children,” she added. “And I’m still working on that.”
Although her failed marriage to Rossdale “completely ruined” and even “crushed” her dream of a perfect marriage, she eventually figured out how to move forward and “make a new dream.”
That new dream began just as quickly as her old one ended.
Stefani started dating Blake Shelton in 2015, and they eventually wed in 2021.
“The last four years of my life, I got engaged, then I got married and started my life over,” she said to People.
