The pop veteran answers your questions about the California ska scene in the 90s, making it big with No Doubt and finding love again with the country star Blake Shelton

Did you think Don’t Speak would become such a huge hit? Troy_McClure
I absolutely had no idea. It didn’t even represent what we were doing, because No Doubt were such an uptempo, live-energy band. Even the guitar solo has no business being in that song. The original version was written by my brother [Eric, keyboards], who lived at my grandparents’ house; after they passed away, it became the band house. He’d stay up all night eating peanut butter sandwiches, drinking milk and smoking cigarettes and go: “Oh, I wrote this last night.”

Then I ended up rewriting the lyrics and changing the whole song because Tony [Kanal, bass] broke up with me. It’s crazy, but that song really is the heartbeat of who I am and changed everything. After it came out, we were driving through Israel and these guards came up to the van with guns, which I’d never seen anywhere before. One of them looked in the van and started singing Don’t Speak to me. That soon became normal.