“Gwen was always dope,” says Pharrell Williams

producer and one half of the Neptunes. “If there was an ill black record out there, she knew what is was.”

Linda Perry, the songwriter-producer who made Pink into Pink, says she barged her way onto the Stefani solo team by physically accosting the singer at the Grammy awards in 2004. “I was pokin’ her on the head,” Perry says, “and I was like, ‘Dude, you gotta give me a call for the new record.”

Just last week, Stefani put the finishing touches on her new solo album, The Sweet Escape, which, if industry buzz and early radio play can be trusted, is poised to make a major impact. Less self-consciously retro than it’s prodecessor, The Sweet Escape employs the same working method as L.A.M.B.; Lock Gwen up in the studio with a blurry succession of dream-team producers all vying for that one megahit (can you spell bananas?), tape everything, toss it up in the air, and see what sticks. A likely recipe for disaster (which No Doubt purists, partial to human beings playing actual drums and bass, may well judge), but it works, mostly due to Stefani’s feckless, reckless impulse to try anything that pops into her head. Nothing is more out there than the album’s first single and video, “Wind It Up” — typically sinister Neptunes beats and Stefani, backed by a symphony orchestra, singing fragments lifted from The Sound of Music’s “The Lonely Goatherd.” (Yes, that’s right: “High on the hill was the lonley goatherd/ Lay, odl ay odl ay hee hoo.”)