In an episode from the third season of Friends, Monica hooks up with a co-worker, Julio, who writes a poem inspired by their encounter titled “The Empty Vase.” Phoebe interprets the poem as a metaphor for what he really thinks of Monica: “My vessel so empty with nothing inside/Now that I’ve touched you, you seem emptier still.” Eventually, we learn that “The Empty Vase” isn’t about Monica specifically, but all American women.
The similarly titled “Empty Vase,” a drippy acoustic ballad from Gwen Stefani’s fifth solo album, Bouquet, makes Julio sound like Pablo Neruda: “I was an empty vase just sitting on the counter,” the singer laments. Even across just 10 short songs, the album’s botanical imagery grows heavy-handed and strained: gardens die, seeds are planted, vases are filled.
The second song Stefani ever wrote by herself, 2000’s “Simple Kind of Life,” was, notably, about her obsession with settling down and becoming a wife. And her last album, 2016’s under-appreciated This Is What the Truth Feels Like, mined catharsis from her messy breakup with Gavin Rossdale. So it should surprise exactly no one that Bouquet revolves almost entirely around her current marriage to country artist Blake Shelton.
But it’s still shocking to see how regressive Stefani’s views have become—or, perhaps, always were. “Dressed up like a country girl, I knew you’d approve,” she admits on “Marigolds.” It’s difficult to reconcile the woman who made her breakthrough with No Doubt’s neo-feminist anthem “Just a Girl” with the one on display here. The country-inflected “Pretty” finds her eschewing self-love altogether and tying her worth directly to the attention of a man. “You give me everything that I wanted/I even got your last name,” she proudly declares on the title track.
Even more surprising is how middle-of-the-road the arrangements on Bouquet are. Stefani has said the album was inspired by the ’70s-era yacht rock she grew up listening to in the family station wagon, but the music here is about as unironic as her views on marriage. One exception is the new wave-inflected opener “Somebody Else’s,” which also happens to be the only track on the album with any real bite, cutting her “narcissistic, semi-psychotic” ex down to size.
Elsewhere, “Late to Bloom” is bittersweet and nostalgic, successfully capturing the rush of finding a midlife love after years of crushing disappointment: “I wish I met you when I was younger/Like 22 or 23/Think of all those extra summers [we could have had together].” No one who’s followed Stefani’s life and career over the last 30 years would begrudge her finding happiness, but despite what she claims on “Purple Irises”—“It’s not 1999, but this face is still mine”—it’s becoming harder and harder to recognize her.
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Hard to recognize? Did you listen lyrics in Return of Saturn? The main difference is that she’s brokenhearted then and she’s happy now. But she has not change, at least for those who are actually listening.