The early 2000s girl group The Pussycat Dolls have announced a 20th anniversary reunion tour for their PCD debut album and released a new track called “Club Song.” Did you know that the lead singer for the group actually began her career with a notable 1990s post-grunge band?

Nicole Scherzinger found her greatest success with the Pussycat Dolls, but she actually started in the music scene by singing and touring with ’90s alt-rock hitmakers Days of the New.

How Did Nicole Scherzinger Start Her Career With Days of the New?

The future music star was on the path to an entertainment career early on, starting acting at the age of 14 and studying musical theater while attending Wright State University. While in college, she appeared in regional productions of Chicago, Guys and Dolls, and Show Boat, and it was during her time in college that she was first noticed by Days of the New frontman Travis Meeks.

After a successful debut album, Meeks was working on the band’s second self-titled offering (referred to as the “green” album) when he eventually hired Scherzinger to lend vocal assistance to some of the material he had been developing.

“So I hired her. I hired her to record the [album] and I wrote [all] the parts for her, and she sung backup pretty much on one, two, three, four, five, six – six songs on the record,” recalled the singer previously to HipHopDx. “But her vocals were not [buried] way back in the background; it was like me and her singing, like, left to right, like strong.”

On the green album, Scherzinger’s contributions can be heard on tracks such as “Flight Response,” “The Real,” “Take Me Back Then,” “Phobia of Tragedy,” “Bring Yourself,” and “Last One.”

Days of the New, “Take Me Back Then”

What Did Nicole Scherzinger Say About Her Time With Days of the New?

Reflecting on her time with Days of the New during an interview with BBC Radio 2’s Ken Bruce, Scherzinger recalled, “I was in a rock band. Little known fact, called Days of the New. We toured with bands like Foo Fighters and Bush. That was my first real gig.”

“We were pretty legit. I sang these crazy chanting things, like Celtic chants. I actually did that in the band and had this whistle range where I would sing these crazy high notes and dress in all goth. It was really cool,” she added. “There’s a whole other side of me that people don’t know. But how I got started was in that band, that acoustic rock band Days of the New.”

READ MORE: 5 Acoustic Songs That Are Super Heavy

However, Scherzinger, who was 19 at the time and dropped out of college to take the gig, wasn’t necessarily a fan of the rock touring lifestyle at that point in her life.

“I didn’t like being on tour though. I’d come from theater. I was used to people sitting down and being silent while holding on to every note that I sang with bravado and crescendo and decrescendo,” she recalled. “Then I join this rock band where everyone’s smoking. I’m doing proper legit operatic warmups in the background while people are screaming and throwing beer bottles, and I was like, ‘What is this world?'”

What Did Travis Meeks Recall About Nicole Scherzinger’s Time With Days of the New?

Though their working relationship began strong, Meeks told HipHopDX that he and Scherzinger grew apart creatively over her time in the band. While stating that she “didn’t seem to understand music very well,” he credited her as “an amazing entertainer” and generally had positive remarks about their time together.

Where Else Might You Know Nicole Scherzinger From?

While her gig with Days of the New didn’t pan out as expected, it was only the beginning of Scherzinger’s career. She later participated in a WB talent competition called Popstars, which eventually formed a girl group called Eden’s Crush. The band achieved some marginal success in the early 2000s.

Scherzinger’s breakout came with Pussycat Dolls, who started as a neo-burlesque dance troupe in the mid-’90s before evolving into a music group featuring singers like Scherzinger, Melody Thornton, and Kaya Jones. They released two studio albums — 2005’s PCD and 2008’s Doll Domination. Scherzinger took lead on their breakout single “Don’t Cha” and also sang on chart-topping singles such as “Stickwitu” and “Buttons.”

After Pussycat Dolls, Scherzinger pursued a solo career, served as one of the panelists on TV’s The Masked Singer, and returned to theater where she won a Laurence Olivier Award as Best Actress for her role as Norma Desmond in the 2023 musical Sunset Boulevard, receiving a Tony Award for the same role in 2025.

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