Gwen Stefani Admitted She Was Never ‘That Close’ to Pharrell Williams

Gwen Stefani and Pharrell Williams have collaborated on a number of her hits. She speaks about their artistic partnership with reverence. According to her, he always gives her the advice she needs. While he plays an important role in her creative life, she once admitted that she wasn’t all that close to him.

Gwen Stefani spoke about her relationship with Pharrell Williams

Stefani once said that she was never all that close to Williams. Still, she put a high value on his advice. 

“He’s one of those people who always points me in the right direction,” she told The New York Times in 2016. “It’s not like we’ve ever been that close, it’s just that he’s so intense and he has such amazing advice and he makes you think. Some of the stuff he said to me in my lifetime really made a huge impact, and of course the music we made together is incredible.”

She has such respect for him that when he asked her to perform at Coachella with him, she agreed without much hesitation despite the fact that she’d just given birth.

“The first time I left the house was to go walk onstage and do ‘Hollaback Girl,’” she said. “I got a tour bus and brought the kids out to Coachella so they could see I was friends with Pharrell and show off to them. And then I got the call about The Voice, and they were like, by the way, Pharrell is doing it. I was like, what? You know what, yeah! I want to do it.”

Gwen Stefani shared what it was like to work with Pharrell Williams for the first time

Stefani said that when she first worked with Williams, they clicked in ways she couldn’t have imagined.

“I’m going to cry. I feel like it was a cultural collision,” she said on The Late Late Show With James Corden. “At first, we were coming from such different worlds but yet we were so similar in so many ways.”

Their collaboration felt seamless as they had similar values.

“We had the same interests, the same… just love for life and art and music and for telling a story and getting our feelings out,” she said.

Her kids thought they were dating

Though Stefani said she and Williams were not all that close, her children were under the impression that they were more than friends. After seeing pictures of them together, they asked her if she’d dated Williams.

“They were such huge fans and I started showing them pictures on the internet,” she told Ryan Seacrest on Live From the Red Carpet. “They were like, ‘Wait a minute, was he your boyfriend?’ I was like, ‘No.'”