The Sun Herald (Jan. 27th 2002)
No Doubt at all
Gwen Stefani thanks her lucky stars for reaching an amazing place in her life, Peter Holmes reports.
When Gwen Stefani was last doing the media rounds, promoting No Doubt's Return Of Saturn album in 2000, she spent a good deal of time explaining whether the song Ex-Girlfriend ("I always knew I'd end your ex-girlfriend") had been written about her relationship with Bush frontman Gavin Rossdale.
"I used to be the girl that all I cared was being in love and making my partner happy," Stefani told The Sun-Herald at the time, "yet I seem to not have enough time to get that right. I'm so passionate about the band that sometimes my relationships are floundering. That's what I'm writing about."
For the Californian-born Stefani, long hooked up with Rossdale, the trade-off for digging deep lyrically has been losing much of her privacy.
An unbearable curse for most, but Stefani, as with many US artists, doesn't appear in the least fazed by endless rounds of self-analysis with the amateur psychologist-cum-journalist.
"Talking about it," she said, "you find out a lot about your record."
On the recently released Rock Steady, Stefani, who became engaged to Rossdale on January 1, has again used her topsy-turvy relationship as fodder for material and it's a rather confused picture that emerges.
On Hella Good she writes, "You got me feeling hella good/So let's just keep on dancing". Meanwhile, Making Out ("I go around the world to see your face/Cos this just ain't good enough"), In My Head ("Don't talk about ex-girlfriends/Don't talk about you without me") and Detective ("I caught you/Your hands are red/Now I'm your broken-hearted detective") are far more paranoid, angry and unsettled.
When asked about this, Stefani said at first she didn't want to go into details about her personal life before proceeding to spend a fair portion of the allocated interview time doing just that.
Stefani explained the doubting tone in some of her words as having been written when things with Rossdale weren't so peachy.
"Obviously, there'll be a couple of songs on the record that are going to be a little left over from the year before last," she said. "We had some really rough times, as you do as a couple, and for us it was hard with a long-distance relationship. A lot of problems are bred from being apart."
Stefani named Return Of Saturn after an astrological theory that everyone experiences a significant period of change or revelation between 28 and 30, the same number of years it takes for Saturn to reappear at the same place in the zodiac.
At 31 she appears to have come out the other side beaming.
"I had an incredible [2001] with my fiance," she said, giggling at her use of the "f" word. "We really spent a lot of time together and got to an amazing place that we've been really always trying to get to. The whole intention was that we were going to be together and be married and stuff.
"It's funny how a relationship can go in and out of hard times. I mean, isn't that the whole idea of marriage, that you get together and work out problems and if you're good at doing it together, then you get the rewards?"
As for any rivalry between the pair, Stefani said it had long since evaporated handy, given both No Doubt and Bush have experienced mega-selling albums and relative duds at different times over the past few years.
"I felt in the past, maybe before we knew each other as well, there might have been a sense of competition," she said. "As a female I always feel a little defensive because I am the girl and I think it's harder to say, `I gotta go to work now'. It's a new thing for us women to get to go about and have real jobs, so I think that was hard.
"But we've learned how to support each other and it's awesome. Careers go up and down and whether you're in the top of the charts or [not], albums always give you something different and they inspire you in different ways.
"Our last record wasn't a commercial success in the sense that it sold tons of millions of records like Tragic Kingdom, but we'd already experienced that. [On Return Of Saturn] we experienced something else, which was a lot of satisfaction creatively and a lot of critical acclaim."
Rock Steady sees No Doubt employing a swag of famed producers including Prince, Ric Ocasek, Sly and Robbie, Nellee Hooper and William Orbit for another dose of melodic pop and ska-flavoured tunes. Instrumentally, the band pulls back on the guitar and explores electronic beats and synthesised sounds.
Rather than writing each song on acoustic guitar, the band's bassist Tony Kanal and guitarist Tom Dumont taught themselves a music computer program and built each song up from a rhythm rather than chords and a melody. Basic instrumental and vocal tracks were then taken to the all-star producers for final moulding.
"This record is very spontaneous," Stefani said. "We were really recording while we were demo-ing and by the end of the night you could have a CD burnt and listen to what you'd done in your car on the wayto a club."