Toronto Star (Feb. 16th 2000)
No Doubt makes return to orbit
Two years in the making, new album is a wrap
No Doubt singer Gwen Stefani strides into the hotel room in thin red stilettos.
Dressed for the day in dark blue jeans and a T-shirt with "I Love You" emblazoned in red, wrapped in a puffy, candy-pink ski jacket and with her previously platinum blonde locks braided into sparkling pink corn rows, she nestles into a corner of the sofa beside guitarist Tom Dumont. The band is in town for two days to promote Return To Saturn, its long-awaited follow-up to 1995's megahit Tragic Kingdom.
Two years in the making, the 14-track Return To Saturn won't be released until April. But the first single, the sly uptempo rocker "Ex-Girlfriend," and its stylish accompanying video by Hype Williams - making his rock debut after numerous high-profile hip-hop videos - are both in orbit and climbing the charts.
"We've never done this kind of promotional tour before an album comes out," says Stefani, who arrived from New York Sunday night with Dumont, bassist Tony Kanal and drummer Adrian Young.
"And everyone has been taking us out to dinner. We had this massive Indian feast last night - it was delicious, but this morning I was thinking, 'Hmm, these jeans feel a little tight.' We don't normally live so lavishly."
But everything has changed for the Southern California band since Tragic Kingdom took off into the multiplatinum stratosphere. The album eventually sold 15 million copies worldwide, almost two years after its initial release, buoyed by singles such as "Just A Girl" and by relentless touring.
"We did a small club tour in California (last) October and it was really hard," Stefani explains. "Imagine us, in the 13 years we've been a band we never went more than two or three months without playing a show. And that's what we live for."
No Doubt embarks on a warm-up club tour in March, which includes a Toronto date on March 27 at the Guvernment, according the band's official Web site.
In both the live setting and on Internet newsgroups - Dumont habitually peruses postings for feedback - the response last fall to No Doubt's new material was overwhelmingly positive, although earlier last year fans were singing a different tune. "I would sometimes get upset reading brutal stuff from fans, saying how lazy we are and asking why it was taking so long for us to put out another album," Dumont says. "I would think to myself, 'If they only knew how hard we were working to try to make this record really good . . ."'
The band spent most of 1998 writing and went into the studio last February with producer Glen Ballard. (Return To Saturn also includes the track "New," produced by Talking Heads' Jerry Harrison and released on the Go soundtrack.)
"The hardest part of (Return To Saturn) had to do with the fact we'd been out of the studio for ages. Our last record was made so long ago that our creative muscle hadn't been flexed in a while," Stefani says.
"A lot of stuff we'd been doing musically before, I think we outgrew. We were trying to find the new No Doubt sound, what we felt reflected us after two years of touring the world and all the experiences."
The band definitely stretches out on the new album, with tunes such as "Magic's In The Makeup" and the strumming guitar and Beatles- esque melody of the next single, "Simple King Of Life," marking a stylistic departure from the busy, ska and New Wave-infused sound of Tragic Kingdom.
"In the past, we've tended to overheat on our songs, load them up, turn the volume to 10," Stefani says, adding with a wide glossy- pink lipstick smile: "I think we've matured enough to realize it's good to leave space for the songs to breathe."
Stefani says she also feels the band has expanded creatively in terms of lyrics. "When we were working on the last album, Tony and I broke up, so I had all this subject matter to write about, which ended up being not only the last songs we wrote for the album but also the main singles.
"This time I fed myself more information and was aware of expressing myself more openly, inspired by people like Joni Mitchell and Sylvia Plath. I was much more influenced by things I was reading, thinking, 'Wow, those girls really knew how to dig deep and say exactly what they're feeling in such a relatable way and such a beautiful way.' "
While No Doubt completed recording 17 tracks last July, the band went back into the studio in August to cut a few more tunes.
"On the commercial side of things, there is pressure to capitalize on your success, but creatively it wouldn't have felt right to release that album (early)," Dumont explains. "In the past, whenever we pushed ourselves we'd come up with something better. When we listened to what we had recorded, altogether we felt the balance wasn't quite there."
Still, No Doubt felt no pressure. "There was much more pressure on Tragic Kingdom because we didn't even know if that record was going to come out, let alone do what it did and take us around the world and have that feeling of people totally loving your music.
"So any pressure had been relieved by the success of the last record. We were fulfilled. We knew we were going to make a record, that we were getting better as songwriters.
"So there was no reason to have a time limit. This time we wanted to please ourselves."