Songfacts®:

• This song evokes the energy and excitement of a new experience. The lyric is directed at a person, but it was inspired by the band wanting to do something new musically.
  
  After years of struggle, No Doubt hit it big with their 1995 album Tragic Kingdom. It took a while to catch on, but when it did, it impelled the band on a world tour that took up much of 1997. It was during that tour that lead singer Gwen Stefani and guitarist Tom Dumont wrote this song.
• "New" first appeared on the soundtrack of the movie Go in April 1999. A year later, it was included on No Doubt's Return Of Saturn album, their first in five years.
• In the first few years after No Doubt formed in 1986, Gwen Stefani didn't write songs - that task fell mainly to her brother, Eric. When Eric left in 1994, Gwen took the pen and wrote lyrics and melody for many of the songs that made the Tragic Kingdom their huge breakthrough. When she started writing again, though, she didn't want to dip into the same well, which is how she ended up with a distinctly different sound for "New."
  
  "I felt like we need to come home and reinvent ourselves as songwriters," she said in a "Seven Days Of No Doubt" video. "I felt like I got really lucky on Tragic Kingdom, like I didn't know what I was doing and sort of stumbled upon writing songs for the first time."
• Jerry Harrison of Talking Heads produced this song. It was the only track he worked on with the band.
• This is one of the band's favorite songs to play live. They include it at most of their shows.