Gwen Stefani has been busy in recent years juggling her job on The Voice and her Las Vegas residency with raising her kids and marrying country music star Blake Shelton in 2021. Earlier this year, the two musicians collaborated for the first time on “Purple Irises,” the first taste of Stefani’s forthcoming fifth studio album Bouquet.
“Somebody Else’s,” the second single off the new album, is out now, and unlike the celebration of love that was “Purple Irises,” “Somebody Else’s” is a satisfying sendoff to an ex, similar to much of her 2016 post-divorce album This Is What the Truth Feels Like. “Every day with you was rock bottom / Leaving you saved me, my God / Look at me blossom / You’re somebody else’s problem,” she sings on the chorus.
When speaking about the new music in an interview with Rolling Stone, Stefani acknowledged that the song sticks out as an outlier on the album’s tracklist.
“It’s interesting that this song rose [to become a single], because the rest of the record has nothing to do with that subject,” she said. She admitted at first she was unsure if she wanted to even touch the topic in her new work, but she had the idea to include it after the rest of the album came together. “What I kind of realized was after writing the rest of the songs, it felt you needed to see a little bit of the dark to see the light and see where I’d just come from originally,” she confessed.
“I wanted it to be one big statement, and that’s why I feel Bouquet is a really perfect title. Like each song was handpicked with meaning,” she concluded. “It seems like eight years probably feels like a long time for a lot of people, but for me, it was eight years of healing, eight years of transitioning. It went really fast.”
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