Gwen Stefani Celebrates 20th Anniversary ‘LAMB’ (Exclusive)

What a great time!

Gwen Stefani looks back on the making of her acclaimed debut solo album, Love.Angel.Music.Baby., which she released 20 years ago this week.

“At the time, things were unhinged, meaning I had zero restrictions: I wasn’t in the band. I didn’t have kids. I wasn’t married,” the pop icon tells PEOPLE exclusively. “I was like, ‘I’m going to make a guilty-pleasure dance record.'”

After rising to fame with her band No Doubt, Stefani, 55, went solo in 2004.

“I had such an incredibly clear vision of what I wanted to do,” she says in the new issue of PEOPLE. “I had made a style bible. This is before we had the internet like we have now, but I had torn up all the pages, everything from makeup pictures, to hair, to clothes, to musical references. Everything was collected.”

Stefani’s first solo effort included the lead single “What You Waiting For”, in addition to “Rich Girl” and her first Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 “Hollaback Girl,” which she created with producer Pharrell Williams.

“I knew what kind of song I was going to write,” Stefani recalls of writing “Hollaback Girl.” “I had been so depressed that I was like, ‘I’m just going to show them what I got.’ That was the attitude when I went into the studio and I was like, ‘OK, this is the cheerleader I’ve always wanted to be and I want it to sound like a marching band.’ Then he says: ‘I’m going out to eat, I’m done.’ Then we did the ‘bananas’ part and we knew after we wrote it – we just did a culture clash, we jumped on the couch and we got the champagne.

Follow LAMB, Stefani released The sweet escape in 2006, followed by This is what the truth feels likewhich topped the Billboard 200 chart a decade later.

Stefani to share her fourth solo album, BouquetFriday, November 15. The yacht rock-inspired record includes “Purple Irises,” a duet with her husband, country singer Blake Shelton.

“The last four years of my life I got engaged, then I got married and started my life over,” says Stefani, who married Shelton, 48, in 2021 after nearly six years together.

On her new album, the three-time Grammy winner unpacks the aftermath of her 2016 divorce from Bush rocker Gavin Rossdale, 59, and shares the joy she’s found building a new world with their three sons Kingston, 18, Zuma, 16 and Apollo. , 10, and with Shelton.

“If I feel like I have any purpose,” Stefani tells PEOPLE, “it’s to write a song.”

For more on Gwen Stefani, pick up the latest issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands everywhere this Friday.