Gwen Stefani Says "Push And Shove" Is The Hardest Record She's Ever Made  

After an 11-year hiatus, the wait is finally over.

No Doubt's highly-anticipated Push and Shove hit shelves Tuesday morning and while hustling around the globe to promote the album, lead singer Gwen Stefani called into 97.1 AMP/Los Angeles for a catch up session.

Stefani says she is excited that the record is finally done, but it was a labor of love unlike any other album she's made before.

"This is definitely the hardest record out of every record I’ve made just because I would get up with the kids and do that whole thing all day long, which is exhausting," Gwen said. "That’s harder than anything else, and then go to the studio at like four in the afternoon and feel bad for leaving them and then like force myself to try and write songs and if nothing happened that night, [I’d] feel like a complete failure, like I just let everyone down."

The landscape of music has changed since No Doubt released their last album, Rock Steady, in 2001. YouTube and the iTunes Store didn't exist and even the iPod had only been around for about a month. Nevertheless, No Doubt didn't feel pressured to sound like what they hear on the radio these days.

"We didn’t listen to anything modern, but the one thing that was modern about it was our producer Spike, who brought in a lot of different programmers that would do almost like remixes of the songs and then we would take bits of that and then rewrite or even rerecord songs," she said. "So there was a lot of rewriting and rerecording and overdoing and redoing. I think that’s what gave the modern sound to the record.”

Instead, they drew inspiration from some of their own favorite artists, including Depeche Mode and one hit wonders from the 1970s.

"We would sit and listen to like two hours of music before we even got started just to get a point of reference, like, ‘Oh, I wish I wrote ‘Time After Time’ by Cyndi Lauper.' And then that would be like the song we tried to write that night and it never sounds like that."

Tuesday not only marked the release of Push and Shove, but also the debut of the music video for the title track.

But there's no rest for the weary. When No Doubt returns home from Europe, they'll start shooting the music video for their next single, "Looking Hot" and starting in late November, the band will play several dates at Gibson Amphitheatre in Los Angeles.

-Sarah Carroll, 97.1 AMP Radio/Los Angeles