Gwen Stefani Marks 20 Years of Debut Solo Album L.A.M.B., Looks Back on Recording: 'Things Were Unhinged' (Exclusive)

What an amazing time!

Gwen Stefani is looking back at the making of her acclaimed debut solo album, Love.Angel.Music.Baby., which she unleashed 20 years ago this week.

"At that point, things were unhinged, meaning that I had zero restrictions: I wasn't in the band. I didn't have children. I wasn't married," the pop icon tells PEOPLE exclusively. "I was like, 'I'm making a guilty-pleasure dance record.' "

After rising to fame with her band No Doubt, Stefani, 55, went solo in 2004.

"I had such an unbelievably clear vision of what I wanted to do," she says in the new issue of PEOPLE. "I had made a style Bible. This is before we had internet the way we do now, but I had torn every magazine, everything from makeup images, to hair, to clothes, to musical references. Everything was collected."

Stefani's first solo effort included lead single "What You Waiting For," in addition to "Rich Girl" and her first Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 "Hollaback Girl," which she created with producer Pharrell Williams.

"I knew what kind of song I was going to write," Stefani recalls of writing "Hollaback Girl." "I had been so put down that I was like, 'I’m just going to show them what I got.' It was that attitude when I went in the studio, and I was like, 'OK, this is the cheerleader I always wanted to be, and I want it to sound like a marching band.' Then he goes, 'I’m going to go eat. I’ll be back. Finish up.' Then we did the 'bananas' part, and we knew after we wrote it — we just made a cultural collision. We were jumping up on the couch, and we got the champagne."

Following L.A.M.B., Stefani released The Sweet Escape in 2006, followed by This Is What the Truth Feels Like, which topped the Billboard 200 chart a decade later.

Stefani will share her fourth solo album, Bouquet, on Friday, Nov. 15. The yacht rock-inspired record includes "Purple Irises," a duet with her husband, country singer Blake Shelton.

“The last four years of my life, I got engaged, then I got married and started my life over,” says Stefani, who married Shelton, 48, in 2021 after nearly six years together.

On her new album the three-time Grammy winner unpacks the aftermath of her 2016 divorce from Bush rocker Gavin Rossdale, 59, and shares the joy she’s found in building a new world with their three sons Kingston, 18, Zuma, 16, and Apollo, 10, and with Shelton.

"If I feel like I have any purpose," Stefani, tells PEOPLE, "it's writing a song."

For more on Gwen Stefani, pick up the latest issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands everywhere Friday.