Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (July 5th 2000)
No Doubt: This time, it's no sure thing
Has No Doubt outgrown its audience?
When the quartet hit it big five years ago, its chart-topping album "Tragic Kingdom" seemed anything but tragic. No Doubt played a bouncy, carefree mix of ska and pop, and it featured a front woman, Gwen Stefani, who seemed like an effervescent blend of Madonna and Cyndi Lauper. Those bright spirits made the band a special favorite among younger teens.
It took a while, but No Doubt recently released the follow-up to "Tragic Kingdom," called "Return of Saturn." The album takes its title from the fact that it takes 29 years for Saturn to orbit the sun, which also is the amount of time that Stefani feels it takes most people to achieve full maturity.
In keeping with that adult perspective, the songs on "Saturn" have a distinctly adult cast. "Simple Kind of Life" wrestles with the issue of sacrificing motherhood for career. "Marry Me" contemplates the rewards of settling down, and "Six Feet Under" contemplates the final reward.
Despite generally warm reviews, (Rolling Stone called it "a superstar follow-up") "Return of Saturn" marks a rocky return for No Doubt. The album seems to be struggling to find its audience and has dropped out of the top 40 after a little more than two months.
No Doubt bassist Tony Kanal acknowledges that the band may have made an album that's more mature than its audience.
"Trust me. We thought about those things," he says. "All the bands we admire have always grown and changed from record to record. Bands like U2, the Cure, R.E.M. Bands that had a career. They're always constantly reinventing their sound, but not so much that they disenfranchise their audience. That's what we wanted to do. That thought crossed our minds: Are we shooting over the heads of the people who liked our last album? But you know what? It really wasn't an option. With our band, whatever comes out, comes out, and we pick the best stuff for the album."
Whenever a band takes an extended break between albums and the follow-up proves to be a commercial disappointment, it's natural to ask if the wait allowed the band to cool off.
"We told ourselves there wasn't going to be any kind of time limits on how long it was going to take to make this record," Kanal says. "It ended up taking two years. We didn't think at the time it would, but it just did. We could have easily said, `Look. We've got to capitalize on the momentum of the last record' and put something out quickly. It wouldn't have been the record we have now. We wouldn't have been as proud of it. I'm much much more comfortable knowing we might have waited too long and gave up some of that momentum, knowing we have a much better record now."
Kanal acknowledges his disappointment in sales of "Return of Saturn" but holds out hope that the album will rebound.
"I'd be lying if I said this is what we expected or this is great. You know what I mean? Of course, we wanted it to be higher on the charts, but it's going to be a process. We put this record out, and like `Tragic Kingdom' was a building process, this is going to be a building process. We're willing to go out and do the work, tour this whole summer and keep working until people connect with the album."
No Doubt was not an instant success. The band first got together in Orange County in 1986. Along the way there were personnel changes, a suicide, a band breakup and a failed romance between Stefani and Kanal -- all of it before the group made a ripple nationally.
"At the time it was frustrating, but looking back on it now, I think those eight years before we had the big commercial success of `Tragic Kingdom' only make you appreciate how great things are now," Kanal says. "We don't take things for granted and we're very fortunate.
"It's a cool thing to be able to experience every different extreme of being in a band. We started in a garage and we struggled, and we could barely afford to rent a practice place, and we finally got a van to go around the country, and we played empty clubs around the country. We've built it up in such small steps there was always something to look forward to."
And what if, despite all the hard work, "Saturn" never takes off and No Doubt does a career fade? How hard will that be?
"I think we've grown accustomed to certain things," Kanal says. "It's just human nature. You grow accustomed to traveling a certain way. . . . But I also think we feel extremely fulfilled with the success we had on `Tragic Kingdom.'
"We never thought it would get to that level. So just being able to put that record out, experience that, go around the world and play for people, come home and then be able to make a record that we wanted to make, we do really feel fulfilled."