When Gavin Rossdale was writing what would become Bush’s just-released 10th studio album, I Beat Loneliness, the 59-year-old would potter around the kitchen of his house in Los Angeles, making a snack as the gnarly, metal-adjacent riffs of his band blasted out of the spare-room-turned-studio speakers at full volume. “There’s no one there, so I’d just leave the track on loop with these ideas dominating the whole house,” he recalls. “Go get something to eat and see what it triggers.”
It’s an unusually domestic picture of a rock star, but one that suits Rossdale’s somewhat unique situation well. A heavy-riffing icon in certain circles, with more than 20 million album sales, a Billboard Number One in 1996’s second record, Razorblade Suitcase, and a career that’s spanned more than 30 years — plus a 13-year marriage to Gwen Stefani, with whom he has three children (they divorced in 2015) — Rossdale still flies comparatively under the radar to the wider world.
