NY Rock (May 2000)
No Doubt on Success, the Road, and Surviving It All
The past couple of years have been pretty quiet for No Doubt, particularly compared with the media hype the band experienced after the release of their 1995 album Tragic Kingdom.
Now, five years later, the band has released Return of Saturn. It's the fourth album for the Orange County, California ska-pop band. The three previous titles include No Doubt (1992), The Beacon Street Collection (1995) and Tragic Kingdom (1995), their biggest success to date.
Return of Saturn boasts an impressive studio line-up: It was produced by Glen Ballard (Alanis Morissette), recorded by Alain Johannes (Eleven, Chris Cornell) and mixed by Jack Joseph Puig (Black Crowes).
NYROCK: Five years between albums is a long time in the music business. It can even be considered a great risk....
TONY: We're a band that works more like a family than a band and that's one of the reasons why certain things simply take longer. Like we can't really write songs while we're on tour because too much is happening around us. Especially after the success of Tragic Kingdom, so much happened that we hardly got a minute to ourselves. It really took some time getting used to the new situation and then we kind of had to relearn being creative again.
GWEN: After we spent two years straight on the road we were really exhausted. We're definitely a live band and we enjoy playing live. That's always been our strongest point and where we got most of our fans from. But being on the road all the time is really uncreative. It's a crazy life.
NYROCK: Then you worked on the album for two years....
GWEN: I don't know where the time went, it just slipped by. It really took us so long.
NYROCK: Before the success of Tragic Kingdom you had toured a lot. But after it, you seemed to be on the road non-stop. How did you adjust?
TONY: It wasn't so much adjusting to the life on the road; it was more difficult to adjust to not being on the road again. If you've been on the road for over two years and you come back home everything is different. Your whole surroundings are different and you need time to get used to it again. You have to get down and sort out your private stuff and all that. You just got to get used to having a home again and not waking up in a different hotel room every morning.
GWEN: While you're on tour, you don't feel like you're a person. You have to function no matter how you feel. But if you're going to write songs, how you feel becomes important again. It's quite a switch. After we got back from the tour I got really depressed, not because I didn't want to be home again but because everything was so different and I had such a hard time getting used to it again.
NYROCK: No Doubt have always been known for mixing many styles. There seem to be many influences affecting your new songs. Where do they come from?
GWEN: Each of us comes from a different musical background and has a different taste of music. So sometimes it's really hard to find a mutual ground. After all, we're a band; so everybody should be happy with a song.
NYROCK: Gwen, you wrote all the lyrics for Return of Saturn and obviously some are rather autobiographical....
GWEN: Whenever I write lyrics I live through them. In a way they reflect a certain period in my life and I live through that period of my life again – relive the whole thing and that's pretty hard. But I want to get better. I want to write lyrics that make sense. I want to say what I feel and what I think, maybe because there are not a lot of female artists who voice what I feel.
Writing lyrics is kind of like writing a diary or reading your diary and living through phases of your life again. I can only write about things I know.
NYROCK: Are you concerned about following the success of Tragic Kingdom?
TONY: We've always made the sound we like and if other people like it as well, it's great. But we have to like what we do. I think it's the best album we could possibly make but we have no influence on how the audience likes it.
Of course, we're going to be happy if it sells, but if it doesn't sell it's not the end of the world and we can't really change it. We're really realistic about it and we already made our money. I don't mean to sound arrogant, but we don't need it to be a big success. It was an album we did for ourselves. Of course, we hope that people like it, simply because we like the album and you always want other people to appreciate something you're proud of. But the point is that it's absolutely beyond your control.
GWEN: I agree with Tony. If Return of Saturn should flop, it won't be the end of the world for us. Of course, we'll be sad because we think it's a great album, but I don't think it would be a reason to split. We toured long enough without having a big success and we didn't get successful overnight. We're proud of our new album and that's what really counts.
NYROCK: What's in the future for No Doubt? Is the band your future or do you have other plans?
TONY: I love being a musician and I can't imagine that I ever want to do something else. I think it all boils down to the fact that we didn't change – success didn't change us. We're the same people we were, only older, but that's natural.
GWEN: I don't really think about what might happen or what I might do after No Doubt. Sometimes I doubted that we'd ever record Return of Saturn. So I think every album is something like a present. We went through some rather tough times and survived as a band and we survived our success. Sometimes I really think nothing can happen to us anymore.