Gwen Stefani (Photo: Business Wire)

Two and half years ago, in August 2015, Gwen Stefani was in a dark place, as her 13-year marriage to the father of her three children, Gavin Rossdale, whom she’d been with since 1995, came to a shocking end. However, by Thanksgiving of that same year, she was in a blissful new relationship with her Voice co-star, Blake Shelton, aka People’s reigning Sexiest Man Alive, who had just split from his wife of four years, Miranda Lambert. And seemingly against all odds, “Shefani” are still going strong.

Spending their third holiday season together, the couple’s celebration plans this year include Thanksgiving weekend at Shelton’s Oklahoma ranch, Christmas in Los Angeles, and, of course, a feel-good duet on the title track of Stefani’s new holiday album, You Make It Feel Like Christmas. Shelton will also appear on Stefani’s holiday special, airing Dec. 12 on NBC.

One might wonder how Stefani maintains her steadfast, starry-eyed belief in romance after two very public back-to-back breakups (her previous long-term relationship, with No Doubt bassist Tony Kanal, inspired much of that band’s landmark album Tragic Kingdom). Stefani tells Yahoo Entertainment she “wasn’t even looking [for love] or trying or anything” back in 2015, and admits that when she first started dating Shelton, “I know everybody was like, ‘What are you doing?’ I was the same way! But it just happened, and I just took it.”

Stefani credits her religious faith and a recent spiritual rebirth for allowing her to love again. “At the time when it was going down, never in my wildest dreams would I ever imagine the miracle that happened to me,” she says. “Some people don’t like to hear this, but for me it was a spiritual intervention. It was a true miracle. I think the only way I got through all the hard times is just my spiritual faith and my belief in God, because I’ve just seen the miracles around me.

“I know it makes people uncomfortable to talk about it, but we are at Christmas, a spiritual time, and I am proof of those things,” she continues. “Honestly, that’s just how I got through it and how I got to this place and recognized the gift that was given to me: a new friendship. My No. 1 thing in my life is my faith and everything else falls after that, and I just always have been constantly asking for guidance. That’s all I care about. Everything else is underneath that. [Shelton] was just one of the gifts that I was given. And I’m so very, very, very grateful.”

Stefani may be religious offstage, but on You Make It Feel Like Christmas she sticks with mostly lighthearted, secular holiday fare like “Santa Baby,” “Jingle Bells,” and “Let It Snow,” along with some Blake-inspired originals. “I’m not a choir singer! I never pretend to be anything more than what I am,” she chuckles.

However, You Make It Feel Like Christmas does include some serious moments — like a recording of “Silent Night,” one of Stefani’s sons’ favorite songs (“I’ve sung that to my children their whole life, even when it’s not Christmas, because for some reason it’s such a good lullaby”), and a cover of Wham!’s “Last Christmas,” a modern-day carol that has taken on sad new meaning since George Michael passed away literally last Christmas, on Dec. 25, 2016.

“I am a child of the ’80s,” Stefani says proudly, “and that is one of my favorite Christmas songs. … I didn’t really do it for any other reason except I love that song so much, but when we were about to do it, I started to realize how actually big it was to be doing it right now, and that I did need to get it right. That was one of the ones where I was like, ‘Wow, how are we going to flip this?’ I think the hardest thing to do when you’re doing covers is to make it your own, and also not disrespect or offend the original. I’m proud of [my version], and it’s also my favorite one to do live. I was so scared to learn it, because the way the song is written, it almost sounds like George was writing a bunch of ad-libs; the melody’s pretty hard and complicated. It really is just a magical song, and I think it turned out so good. I would hope that George would love it.”

As for this Christmas, last year Stefani and Shelton made homemade gnocchi, manicotti, and Stefani’s grandmother’s lasagna (“We just cooked and cooked and cooked!”), and this year, Stefani says, “My holiday challenge will be, if I can do it, gingerbread.” Stefani says “tradition is really important” to her, but says her favorite new holiday tradition is just getting to spend the season with her new love on his home turf.

“I think really for our whole family, that’s a new tradition right there, just the experience of Oklahoma and the middle of America. It’s just that cultural collision [between Oklahoma and Stefani’s Southern California] that I love. I’m such a huge fan of cultures and learning their traditions and combining them with what we’re doing. It’s cute.”

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This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.

Gwen Stefani has released three singles in the past year – including two collaborations with her fellow Voice coach, Pharrell Williams, “Spark the Fire” and “Shine” – but fans are still eagerly awaiting a new Gwen solo LP, the follow-up to 2006’s The Sweet Escape. Stefani is still mum on her third album’s details, but two things are certain: She’s very excited about her forthcoming music, and the woman who famously penned confessional songs like “Don’t Speak” and “Cool” (about her No Doubt bandmate and former boyfriend Tony Kanal) and “Ex-Girlfriend” and “Underneath It All” (about her husband, Gavin Rossdale, with whom she shockingly split last month) will be delving into her personal life for lyrical inspiration once again.

“My songs are really about my life, for the most part, so they capture time periods,” Stefani tells Yahoo Music. “Singing them again, after you’ve gone through life and come back, it’s so intense… I just write about my life. Really, you can’t come across any human being that doesn’t have like crazy stuff going on the entire time.”

Stefani says she’s been regularly taking “15 minutes to write down what I’m feeling; it’s so weird that moments like that can turn into songs later on, even unexpectedly… I’m in a real spiritual phase in my life, so it’s all about listening and being grateful and being in the moment, kind of being open to channeling and being guided. So when you’re in that place, anything can happen. And it has, in so many magical ways.

“I feel like I’ve always been spiritual, but in the last two or three years, different people have come to me in my life. And I think one of those people would be Pharrell,” she reveals. “I think that’s what we do in life: People remind you, on your journey. Things happen and you’re like, ‘Whoa, OK, I’m going here now, because I need to.’ And when you need to, it’s almost like a gift when hard things happen, because you find this energy that sometimes gets lost in the clutter of life.”

If the recent upheaval in Stefani’s personal life, after ending her 20-year relationship with Rossdale, is bringing her down, she certainly doesn’t let it show. In fact, she seems bubblier than ever, especially when discussing her new music. While Pharrell isn’t involved in her recording process right now, she’s clearly very enthusiastic about her current top-secret collaborators. “The people that I’m working with now, it’s literally like The Breakfast Club,” she gushes. “It’s like, up all night, in love, discovering each other, like a weird Benetton collection of weirdos. ‘How are we all in the same room right now?’ Like, it’s meant to be. It’s magical… I’m so excited about the music. I feel like it’s my reward for everything I do. It’s so crazy when you have nothing, like you walk into a studio with nothing, and then you have a song that captures your life.”

While Stefani says she’s in “a weird cocoon phase right now, about ready to bust out butterfly-style,” there’s still no firm release date for her album, and she’s in no hurry to emerge from her studio cocoon before the time is right. “I want to share [the new music], but at the same time, it’s really for me… I’m not in a rush for it. I’m just in the moment of being there,” she muses. “I just feel like I’m in this place of just trying to be honest and grateful and listening. And just trying to, I don’t know, be a good person.”

Gwen Stefani will be playing a special “Priceless Surprises” show for MasterCard cardholders at New York City’s Hammerstein Ballroom on Oct. 17. For more information, go to Priceless.com/NY.

This article originally ran on Yahoo Music

When Gwen Stefani made a surprise appearance last April during Pharrell Williams’s set at the Coachella festival — looking absolutely fabulous less than two months after giving birth to her third child at age 44, and right before she accepted a high-profile coaching job alongside Pharrell on The Voice — that famous mommyspeak phrase, “I don’t know how she does it,” certainly came to mind.

Now, with two new singles — “Baby Don’t Lie” and “Spark the Fire,” her first solo songs since 2008 — released in the middle of this Voice season, and more music on the way, Gwen tells Yahoo Music she wouldn’t be able to do it all without some help from her famous friends… namely Pharrell, the man she calls “the best producer/songwriter of our generation.”

“Making music is just not the same, and it’s never going to be the same after having kids,” Gwen says frankly over the phone from her Los Angeles home, interrupting the interview for a moment to attend to her 6-year-old son, Zuma, who has just lost a tooth. “I remember when I did the Love. Angel. Music. Baby. album. I’d just gotten married and just started L.A.M.B.; I was doing my first thing outside of my band and I made that record, and it was a magical time. And then I got pregnant, right before my tour, with [first son] Kingston, and then eight weeks after I gave birth I went back in the studio, because I was like, ‘I gotta put another record out!’ Because I didn’t feel done. I still had a lot of songs that I hadn’t put out from the first record. But it’s just different once you have a baby. There’s no way to go back to having the freedom that you had creatively, because your energy is always going to be focused on the kids. Family and marriage and all those things have to come first, and it’s really different.

“So that’s why now, for me, the only way to make music is to collaborate. That’s really the only way that I could possibly make a record. Any mom that has even one baby is probably thinking, how do I do it, because it’s not possible! But because I have all these talented writers and all these incredible people helping me, I’ve been able to do it. So I feel more grateful then ever. To put out ‘Spark the Fire’ is such a gift. It just feels very precious, because this is not the beginning of my career. So it feels like anything at this point is beyond icing on the cake. I’m so grateful that anyone even would listen.”

Gwen debuted the hard-charging club banger “Spark the Fire” earlier this month with Pharrell on The Voice. It’s the latest in a line of Gwen/Pharrell collabos that dates back to No Doubt’s 2001 hit “Hella Good” (“an insane turning point for No Doubt”) and Gwen’s 2004 solo breakthrough “Hollaback Girl” (“the ultimate song, exactly the kind of song I’d dreamt I could make”).

Gwen recalls her first meeting with Pharrell more than a decade ago: “He was this young little hip-hop guy, rebelliously wearing, like, alligator shirts, and riding skateboards — which was so not hip-hop, do you know what I mean? He was always in his own lane, and that really attracted me. I was quite intimidated by him, because he was so creative and cool.”

Of course, the challenge when returning to the studio with Pharrell, after a six-year solo recording hiatus, was living up to the legacy of her biggest smash song. But surely Gwen didn’t want to just crank out “Hollaback Girl 2”…

“I actually wanted to do ‘Hollaback 2,’” Gwen laughs. “I was like, ‘We gotta do something as good as that!’ But Pharrell is different. He doesn’t care. He’s a magical creature, I don’t even know. He doesn’t follow the same rules. He’s so positive and so inspired. He was ready to go do something crazy. He was doing this crazy stuff, like weird ’80s stuff. I don’t even know what kind of music you call that. And I was like, ‘Really? This is what we’re gonna be doing?’ It just seemed a little bit way to the left. But he was like, ‘No, this is the energy I’m getting off of you, trust me.’ He sees some weird stuff in me and I just have to roll with it, because I don’t want to ever try to get in the way of his insane, creative mind.

“And I guess I had said something to him like, ‘I really want to do something that’s hard,’ though I don’t even remember saying that! But that’s when he came to me to my Voice trailer after being up all night, and he had the first beat to ‘Spark the Fire.’ As soon as I heard it and he started singing the melody on top of it, I knew that was the one. So then we went off that night; we’d worked all day at The Voice and then that night we drove off and wrote the song and stayed up till 3 or 4 in the morning. And we had to be back on the set at 7 a.m.!”

Pharrell isn’t the only artist Gwen is collaborating with these days. She recently lent her guest vocals to Calvin Harris’s “Together” and teamed with another Voice co-star, Adam Levine, for Maroon 5’s “My Heart Is Open.” And her upcoming third solo album will feature contributions from her obvious soundalike successor, Charli XCX, as well as OneRepublic’s Ryan Tedder and super-producer Benny Blanco, who worked on “Baby Don’t Lie,” Gwen’s other 2014 single.

“I was talking to Benny about doing stuff with No Doubt. What happened is we were working on No Doubt stuff, right before I got pregnant, for about six months. But it was quite hard; sometimes when you’re writing, things just happen and it flows, and then other times you have to really struggle. And it felt kind of struggle-y,” Gwen recalls. “And then I got pregnant and then I got really sick with the pregnancy, so I didn’t continue in the studio. And then The Voice called right after I had the baby. So I couldn’t really do No Doubt.

“But I wanted to do new music while I was on the show, so that’s when I went in with Benny. I’d just had the baby and I was on The Voice set, so he would start songs and send them to me, I would work on them, back-and-forth via email. Then he would come to my house and we would record upstairs, because I was nursing. It was crazy, trying to make it happen.”

As for when Gwen’s full album will come out, she admits, “I didn’t always have a plan — even the label was like, ‘Look, it doesn’t have to be a whole record, it could be a couple songs. It could be someone else’s songs.’ Who knows what the record will actually end up being? I had this whole schedule together at first, but I’m kind of undoing it, because I feel like, why am I rushing it so fast? I don’t really want to rush it. So now I’m kind of slowing down and thinking I want to go back in and do a few more writing sessions, just to fill out the record and make it a little bit more personal. I don’t really know what’s going to happen.”

As for whether Gwen will find time in her busy schedule to do another season of The Voice (she won’t be back for Season 8, when Christina Aguilera, who just had a baby herself, returns to the panel), Gwen says: “I would love to! I had the time of my life. It was extraordinarily perfect, like amazingly inspiring for me at this time in my life, such a cool thing — so modern, so what’s happening right now. I loved being part of it, and like I said, nothing gets planned anymore, so I guess if it happens, I’m sure it will happen. And I’ll find out, like, a minute before.”

For now, Gwen is just enjoying the present. “‘Spark the Fire’ is just really a perfect snapshot of this moment where I’m at in my life, exactly how I feel, with a line like ‘hey, get off my cloud,’” she says. “I’ve been riding this cloud for a while. I’ve been on this high, and I just don’t want to come down. I don’t want anyone to try to bring me down from it.”

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This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.

Luckily, they wrapped their interview by saying they will keep working together (possibly on Gwen’s yet-untitled third solo album, due out later this year), so expect this dynamic duo to keep shining in 2015 and beyond.

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This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.