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“talking about women in rock, and how it was getting very difficult for women to break through in that genre, how Nelly Furtado had moved into more of a dance thing.”
    He told Stefani that this was the future, the way to go. “I was like, ‘Look, I think we might not be going in the right direction.’ This wasn’t something kids could relate to. And she was like, ‘No, I like what I’m doing. I’m not changing.’ ”
    “She was really more earthy and hippie and stuff,” says Kafafian, who was writing with her at the time. “She was kind of into the jam band scene. She wrote cool songs and it was kind of like Bob Dylan.” “Brown Eyes” and “Blueberry Kisses” were among the fifty written during this time, he says. They were inspired, says Starland, by Fusari.
    “Rob wanted to do a more modern sound,” Kafafian says. “He didn’t want to make an organic record, like I wanted. Everybody’s fighting. They’re eating each other.”
    Fusari insisted on dance music—according to him and Kafafian. Another source says the stuff they were recording at this time sounded like her high school and college material, like Michelle Branch and Avril Lavigne, half piano-driven balladry, half bratty teen-girl complaint-rock. Fusari won: Stefani would be working toward a more sugary, dance-oriented sound—the airy confections that were the hallmark of Euro-pop superproducer-songwriters such as Max Martin, the thirty-nine-year-old Swede behind some of the catchiest, most ear-wormy songs of the past fifteen years, including the Backstreet Boys’ “As Long as You Love Me” and Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone.”
    Stefani—a huge fan of Britney Spears, for whom Martin had written “. . . Baby One More Time,” Britney’s first-ever hit—was vociferously against the idea. She may not have known what was cool, but she knew what wasn’t, even if she’d once cried outside of TRL after seeing Britney in person as a high schooler. And she was genuinely a fan of serious artists who wrote their own stuff: She’d been raised on Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, the Beatles. She wanted to be earnest and heartfelt.
    Still, there was another problem, one that was far more sensitive: Stefani didn’t have the ready-made looks of an American pop star in waiting. Fusari and Starland didn’t think she could pull off the girl-at-a-piano thing, because, as Starland explains, not a bit uncharitably, you have to be very, very pretty to do that (think Norah Jones, Fiona Apple, Tori Amos).
    These discussions, Starland says, happened openly among the three of them. Stefani remained stoic and practical. She would avoid hanging out at Starland’s place: “I know that the pressure on her to [lose weight] was very high,” Starland says. “She’d come over to my house all the time, and I had Pringles and Hostess cupcakes—I eat very poorly—and she’d be like, ‘Oh God, I don’t want to deal with this. This is the worst place for me to be.’ ” But she’d eat that stuff anyway. Her father bought her a membership at the Reebok Sports Club on the Upper West Side and she started hitting the gym regularly. She dropped fifteen pounds.
    “I was saying, ‘We can do something theatrical so it’s not the attention on her looks,’ ” Starland recalls. “She talked about it on her own, too. She was actively involved; she was like, ‘I know that my look is untraditional, and that I’m not the classic beauty, so we have to do other things.’ Really pragmatic. That wasn’t a process where I felt like she was hurt in any way. She was going to do whatever it took to become famous.”
    So dance music became the obvious route, but the idea was to sound a bit more sophisticated and European discotheque-y, a hybrid of hot and cold, like Kylie Minogue’s “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” or Goldfrapp’s slinky, synth-y “Number 1”: the contrast of breathy, detached vocals over sexed-up, syncopated beats. “I said,