Gwen Stefani's been in the spotlight for quite some time now due to her blossoming romance with fellow "Voice" judge Blake Shelton. It's been easy to forget that the 46-year-old's silver lining came after a pretty dark and cloudy period in her life.
"It was like, 'I have so many problems,'" she told Cosmo in the article that accompanies her September cover, explaining why she and Blake were both hesitant to go from "newly divorced" to "newly coupled." "'How can I now be getting into another potentially huge problem? What am I doing?'"
Of course, they went right ahead ... and emerged just months later with a co-written love song.
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As she went on to remark to the magazine, "We were like, 'We wrote a song together! This is crazy!'"
What made the track even more meaningful was the fact that she'd never written a song with her ex-husband of 13 years, Gavin Rossdale, lead singer of rock band Bush. That marriage dissolved in a bitter divorce, the details of which have never been publicly revealed. And while this most recent article is indeed soul-baring, Stefani's careful to keep those family secrets under wraps.
"Nobody except for my parents, the people involved, and whoever they told [knows what happened]," she said. "Nobody would believe it if I could really say what happened. I went through months and months of torture.”
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But she did mention that the problems with Rossdale were ongoing ... and, in many ways, readily apparent. "All you have to do is listen to every single song I’ve ever written and it’s all there," she continued in her furtive explanation of their relationship and its ending. "It’s an ongoing theme that I’ve had for a long time.”
Though she hasn't forgotten the bad times, Stefani's happy to look ahead to the future with her new love interest, Shelton. And besides, there are some things she can still "look back on" and smile about.
"We were laughing our heads off when we saw the blind auditions," she added, referring to the episodes of "The Voice" when she had first begun working with Shelton. "I love NBC, but they for sure edited stuff to look like we were flirting. They chose to run with that story before anything was even real. I hardly knew him."
Still, maybe it was fate after all. "It was like it was in the air — happening before it happened."