Songfacts®:

• This song was written by Gwen Stefani and her bandmate Tony Kanal. It's about a girl who is frustrated because an annoying guy keeps calling her. Despite her efforts to blow him off, he keeps calling, meaning she now has to screen her phone calls.
  
  Stefani and Kanal were a couple for seven years, and many of the songs on the Tragic Kingdom album deal with their breakup. This one, though, is not about Kanal.
• There was a real caller who inspired this song. "I always had a boyfriend, so I never had to deal with guys trying to go out with me," Stefani explained in a video No Doubt posted. "But there was this one guy and he used to call me in the middle of the night and try to sing me poetry on the phone or play acoustic guitar for 15 minutes. I didn't know how to get off the phone. Giving this guy my number was the biggest regret of my life."
  
  She says the guy doesn't know the song is about him, and she and Kanal are the only ones who know his identity.
• With the refrain, "Leave a message and I'll call you back," this became a popular song for people to leave as a message on their answering machines.
• Blondie sang about a stalker on "One Way Or Another," but it was one of their other songs that inspired this one, at least musically.
  
  According to Tony Kanal, he and Stefani tried to do something like Blondie's cover of "The Tide Is High," where they used different tempos going from the intro to the main part of the song.
• In America, "Just A Girl" was the only Tragic Kingdom track sold as a single, so if you wanted "Spiderwebs," you had to buy the album. The song was promoted through radio airplay and MTV, and made #18 on the Billboard Airplay chart(songs not sold as singles were ineligible for the Hot 100). The next promotional single was the big hit: "Don't Speak," which reached #1 on the Airplay chart in December 1996 and left "no doubt" about the band's prospects. Their success was a long time coming: They formed in 1986 and had been slogging it out playing clubs for years.
• Directed by Marcus Nispel, the video shows the band performing the song at a stuffy wedding reception that turns chaotic.
• No Doubt performed this at the Grammy Awards in 1997, where they were nominated for Best Rock Album and Best New Artist (even though their first album was released in 1992). They didn't win either award: Sheryl Crow took Best Rock Album and LeAnn Rimes won for Best New Artist.