Gwen Stefani felt emotionally "dead" during her break-up with Gavin Rossdale.
Gwen Stefani
The 46-year-old pop star was trying to record her new solo album, 'This Is What the Truth Feels Like', while her 14-year marriage to the Bush frontman was collapsing, and Gwen has admitted songwriting helped to ease her heartache.
She recalled: "I went to the studio and I wrote the first song, and it was this really weird drive on Santa Monica Boulevard, crying the whole way, thinking, 'Why am I going to torture myself even more? I'm already dead.'
"But I did it - I wrote a song and it felt so right. It was the only thing that felt good at all.
"That's what this whole record documents - working through it, having faith, believing in myself and wanting to do something about it. And this is the first record I've ever made in real time: 'Used to Love You' came out three weeks after I wrote it."
Gwen admitted she struggled to hold herself together during the depths of her divorce, which was confirmed last year.
The singer - who has three sons, Kingston, nine, Zuma, seven, and Apollo, two, with her ex-husband - told NPR Radio: "You just crumble, you know? I was down - I was all the way down. And I just felt like, 'God, I gotta turn this around. I can't go down like this. I have to know that this is happening for a reason.' And I knew that I had to turn to music."
Tagged in Gavin Rossdale Gwen Stefani Bush