The Vancouver Sun (July 20th 2000)
Music: No Doubt
A rock band can grow a lot in 13 years. No Doubt has changed members, sound and, except for guitarist Tom Dumont, hair colour. Now the band is considering changing gears entirely. "I think we're going to take it easy after this tour, as far as not working quite so hard," says Dumont. "It's been an intense last five years. I think families are around the corner for some of us. It's just not conducive for relationships, and we're all getting to that age that if we're going to do it, then we have to get on with it." With an exotic bird-like 30-year-old Gwen Stefani leading the band, you might not notice its comparatively beige male members. There is articulate, polite Dumont, 32, party boy drummer Adrian Young, 30, and Stefani's former boyfriend and band manager, bassist Tony Kanal, 29.
The story of No Doubt's success is becoming the stuff of rock folklore. Eric Stefani started the ska-influenced band with singer John Spence in Anaheim, Calif. Kanal joined the band in 1987, and was soon dating Eric's sister Gwen. Spence committed suicide, but the band trudged on, recruiting surfing dude Dumont and later, Young. They were working on their second album when Kanal dumped Gwen and Eric dumped the band to take an animating job on The Simpsons. Struck hard, the band kicked into gear and handed songwriting duties over to Gwen, who dug into her freshly broken heart for inspiration. The result was Tragic Kingdom, which catapulted No Doubt into pop stardom and sales of 10 million units with its fresh-sounding ska riffs and bittersweet girl grief. The new album, Return to Saturn, continues the Stefani saga, this time tapping into her relationship with Gavin Rossdale of Bush. "It's kind of odd, because you take a song like Just a Girl, and it's definitely a song from a very feminine point of view, but because of the musical stylings of the song, it says its thing in a very masculine, aggressive, punkish way," Dumont says.
It took more than two years to release the new album, partly because Stefani was suffering from serious writer's block. At one point, she'd written three songs that got spiked. "She pushed and pushed but she wrote lyrics that weren't great and she knew it and everyone knew it. She has to write things from experience, she doesn't make stuff up." Return to Saturn hasn't reached the platinum success of Kingdom, but Dumont has reached a Zen-like acceptance of the band's plateau. "We're proud of our record, but at same time commercially it doesn't fit in and isn't the big hit we had last time ... in some ways, the pressure of being the big man of the moment is gone, and it's about the things we always wanted to do, which is play music and write songs."