Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (June 11th 2009)
No Doubt bounces back with reunion tour after five-year break
Gwen Stefani said she was just going to take a little time off from the band to see what's it's like to be her own person. She ended up being more productive, on multiple levels, than anyone anticipated.
Between 2004 and 2008 the flashy blond singer for No Doubt delivered two successful solo albums, including the No. 1 single "Hollaback Girl," and two sons, now ages 3 and 10 months.
It left the other three members of the multi-platinum Orange County, Calif., ska-pop band to their own devices. Guitarist Tom Dumont released the solo project Invincible Overlord, backed Matt Costa on tour, scored a documentary and played dad. Bassist Tony Kanal did production work for Stefani and wrote songs with artists including Pink. And drummer Adrian Young did session work and toured with Bow Wow Wow.
Meanwhile, for five years they watched Stefani soar up the charts, tour the world and rack up multiple Grammy nominations.
"It was a little bit [difficult], but I knew it was a good thing," Dumont says in an interview from Orlando. "When we finished the Rock Steady tour we had been touring and making albums for so many years everybody was exhausted and a little burnt. She grew up in the band since she was a teenager in high school and found herself in her 30s and being in a band is like being married. It was as if she was married as a teenager and never able to make her own decisions or follow her own inspirations. I know at the time, yeah, [it was a] little bit of a difficult thing, but also really healthy. All of us needed some time apart to grow up a bit. Gwen said, 'We're not quitting or breaking up' and though the public may have perceived it that way, we knew it was just a matter of time."
At the end of her 2007 tour, she planted the seed for a No Doubt comeback by approaching the band and saying, "Hey wouldn't it be awesome if we surprised the audience and you guys came out for the encore and played a couple No Doubt songs?"
They did that and then in early 2008 decided to reconvene to write the follow-up to 2001's "Rock Steady," a triple-platinum, Grammy-winning album that produced four singles, including "Hey Baby" and "Hella Good."
"I think Gwen had seen through the extent of her solo thing, as far as she wanted to take that," Dumont says. "After that tour she said, 'Hey my plan is to get pregnant again and what better thing to do than hang out and write and record an album?' That was kind of the plan last year and that's what we started to do, and then it didn't materialize. I think part of it, Gwen would say, was due to being pregnant and just feeling out of sorts and not creative and not having figured out what to write about. We took a break for her to have her baby and my wife had a baby around the same time, so we took a few months off."
With nothing really happening on the album front, Stefani came up with a different idea.
"She said, 'You know what would be the best thing? Let's go out and play shows again and reconnect as a live band' and it was in a way kind of naughty because it was like going straight to dessert and not eating dinner. We were worried about it because making an album is really important and it's kind of what we need to do. But this is a way to get back to the roots of being in a band and playing shows together and being on stage and getting that incredible ego stroke from the audience and getting that feedback."
To prepare, Dumont says, "We starting getting together in Adrian's basement to dust off the cobwebs and kind of reacquaint ourselves with everything. It was rusty at first. It took us a while to pull it all together and even when we started getting into full band rehearsals, it took us a while."
But when No Doubt finally kicked off its tour on May 2 in Atlantic City, punknews.org wrote, "The O.C. hitmakers blasted back in full force, skanking and strutting their way through a ridiculously tight, upbeat, 90-something-minute workout in front of a raucous, fist-pumping crowd."
"It feels great now, really," Dumont says. "We're all in the groove of the tour."
No Doubt sticks to No Doubt songs, just as Stefani leaves them out of her solo sets, and they rage on with a stage set they all find visually inspiring.
"We figured out when we have a strong theme visually it seems to make the music work stronger," Dumont says. "This time we focused on this '60s modernism look. The stage set kind of resembles this famous building at the LAX airport with this insane '60s modern architecture, and James Bond stuff and a wee bit of 'Clockwork Orange.' It's kind of a powerful stage."
They'll get to the album after the tour, and Dumont says he's not too concerned about the band's core sound of ska-punk being slightly out of fashion.
"We don't think too much about it. We've have a pretty diverse set of influences. Everyone kind of has a different focus and that kind of give-and-take creatively is what creates the sound. It's hard to say what the sound of next record would be. It's safe to say we're not going to break out too much from what we did in the past."