In the new music video for her track “Used To Love You”, we get an aching glimpse at what many speculate is the singer’s heartbreak over her divorce from Gavin Rossdale.
The minimalist video shows Stefani in close-up the entire time (no, Tom Hooper did not direct this) as Stefani listens to her own song and lets the lyrics sink in.
Stefani first debuted the J.R. Rotem-produced track Saturday night at her New York concert. The song, Stefani’s first since announcing her divorce from Gavin Rossdale after 13 years of marriage, seems inspired by the split, as Stefani sings on the chorus, “I don’t know why I cry / But I think it’s cause I remember for the first time / Since I hated you / That I used to love you.”
Stefani scrapped an entire album, what would have been her third, after her divorce from Rossdale. She told EW that the album “didn’t feel right” at that point. Since then, a new album began forming:
“I needed to go through what I needed to go through to write the record that I needed to write. There was a lot of prayer and meditating in the sense of trying to be open and grateful with this record,” Stefani told EW. “These songs are really natural — they’re from not worrying about what happened or what’s going to happen but about living in the moment, from trying to be present and trying to feel.”
The video for “Used To Love You” was directed by longtime collaborator Sophie Muller who also directed the video for No Doubt’s “Don’t Speak.”
Watch it, below:
