Complex (Sept. 25th 2012)
No Doubt Tells All: The Stories Behind Their Classic Records
It's been 11 years since No Doubt dropped a studio album, but the legendary California group is back. Their new album, Push and Shove, drops today and after a much anticipated comeback, No Doubt has changed up their sound once again. This is the band that spent years together before rising to fame in 1995 with their third LP, Tragic Kingdom, which is now diamond-certified with a single, "Don't Speak," that broke records for its 16-week run at No. 1 on the Billboard charts.
After their largest tour to date, No Doubt took to the studio to finish their current project. Push and Shove was recorded between late 2009 and mid-2011. The fact that they're working with producer Mark "Spike" Stent again makes it seem like they never took a day off from working together, either.
Band members Tom Dumont, Tony Kanal, and Adrian Young spoke with Complex and revisited a number of hits from all of their albums, starting with 1992 debut, No Doubt. We eventually got around to discussing Push and Shove, too. Read on for all of the stories behind No Doubt's classic records.
"Trapped In A Box" (1992)
Album: No Doubt
Label: Interscope
Tony: “It came out in 1992 and was recorded in 1991 in LA at Hollywood and Vine. We had such a small budget making our first record, and the only way we could make it work was that the record company would find studio time in the middle of the night—literally, that was so cheap that we could afford to do it.”
“We were all living in Orange County, we were all going to school and we all had day jobs, and we’d tried to rehearse as much as possible. We’d play a couple times a month, and we would all get in one car and drive up to the studio, probably in the evening. We’d sit on the i-5 in the worst traffic, and we’d get there at like 8 or 9 o’clock, we’d load into this freight elevator in this alleyway that’s still there—I drive-by it all the time when I go out. We’d record into the morning, go home, and then start our days again. We did that so much, and that’s how we made that first No Doubt record.”
“We look back on it now and what a challenge it was, but obviously we were having a great time—we were recording music, so it was cool for us."
Adrian: “I remember making the video, because this was the first time we had to make a music video. We made it for $5,000.”
“There was a juggling act to record that record because we were at a studio in Hollywood where we were only allowed to work certain hours at night, so we would be working our jobs and doing school during the day, and at night we’d go to the studio. We were kind of jack-of-all-trades at that point.”
Tom: “It’s funny on that album—it’s our first album—at that point we didn’t really have any concept of what singles were, as far as being in a band. We had just come out of playing clubs and playing shows, so all of a sudden a ‘single’ was a brand new thing. When we recorded the album and the song, I don’t think we thought of it—we didn’t know until the album was coming out that somebody said, ‘Hey you have to have a single’ and ‘Which song?’ and we just liked that song, we were excited about it. I’m remembering back in ancient history but I think that was how we arrived at that. The record label was like, ‘You get to make a video for that song.'"
“When we did it, I remember the video cost $5000. For some reason we remember that, because at that time $5000 was kind of a lot. But really, in MTV terms, that’s zilch. We filmed it at our band house in Anaheim, and I remember that experience more than anything. It was all very exciting and a big deal for us at the time. I think MTV maybe played it once in the middle of the night, and that was it. But at the time MTV was pretty big—it was a big deal."
"In Orange County, there was this after school local cable show that would play videos in the afternoon and you could call in and request videos. We used to come home from school every afternoon and watch that show, and the ‘Trapped In A Box’ video got played a bunch on that local cable access show. We were pretty stoked about that. I think I’m pretty sure we must’ve called in a bunch. As a single, I don’t think anyone ever played it on the radio. We called it a single but it wasn’t really a single.”
"Doghouse" and "Squeal" (1995)
Album: The Beacon Street Collection
Label: Beacon Street
Tony: “The Beacon Street record was kind of like a b-side to Tragic Kingdom, but it came out before Tragic Kingdom, so it’s a weird situation. We were making Tragic Kingdom, and we were kind of battling with the record company. It was just being drawn-out, in the same kind of situation where we were all working, we all had jobs, we were going to school. We would record as much as possible when we would get some sort of budget allowance to go and record, and it would come in small spurts. We were just frustrated. There were a lot of songs that we knew weren’t going to make Tragic Kingdom so we were like, ‘We can’t waste these songs, we got to put these out.’ So we’re just like ‘Fuck it, we’re putting this record out ourselves.’"
“We planned it out: we’d play shows, save up the money, and we printed up a ton of CDs and we sold them at shows, we sold them in the back of our cars, and that’s what the Beacon Street record was. The first two songs we did for that I think were ‘Squeal’ and ‘Doghouse,’ and we recorded them in the garage at the Beacon Street house in Anaheim.
Adrian: “The Beacon Street Collection was exciting, because we didn’t have a producer. It was a very homemade experience. It was done in a really cheap studio for the majority of it, but then we also recorded three songs at the bandhouse—’Doghouse,’ ‘Squeal,’ and I think ‘That’s Just Me.’ We had this little 15 track recorder for both songs, and we recorded them right at the Beacon Street house. It was a very exciting time to be making music. There was no record company involved, no producer involved—we were just doing our own thing.”
Tom: “After that first self-titled album, we toured on and off for a year, and sold like 25,000 copies, so we were like, ‘Okay, I guess we’re going to make another album then.’ We didn’t get dropped from our label, so that was good, and we started working on the new album. We were just a young band, and our shows locally were better than ever. As we started to write and record Tragic Kingdom, so much stuff happened. It was just a long process with the label. Everything happened in those three years: Tony and Gwen’s relationship broke up, which was really a tough thing to go through for everybody as friends, and then for the band. The band survived that, and then Gwen’s brother Eric left the band. So these are all well-known stories, but it was traumatic. We were just a group of friends who were really tight, and we had our band for years. Our band just got rocked with this intense, personal stuff."
“Beacon Street kind of came of out of our frustration with the label at that point. We didn’t know when we were getting a release date, we didn’t know when we’d be able to go in the studio to finish this album. We had this little home studio and we started recording songs. We kind of knew what songs weren’t going to end up on Tragic Kingdom, and which ones were. We had so many songs, so we took the best of the best of the ones that weren't going to be on Tragic Kingdom, and started recording them in our home studio, and put out the vinyl singles to sell at our shows. We didn’t have any music to sell to these people coming to our shows. We started making the vinyl singles. There was ‘Doghouse,’ which had a b-side, and ‘Squeal,’ which had a b-side."
“One day we finally got the CDs made, and we were selling them at our shows, and our A&R guy goes, ‘Hey, what’s this?’ and we were like, ‘Oh, well we made CDs since you guys are making it take so long to record the album.’ But it was funny—they were totally cool with it. They were like, ‘Oh we get it, you’re selling them at shows.’ It was great—we sold one hundred and some thousand Beacon Street CDs, and I don’t know what it stands at right now— maybe a couple hundred thousand. For us it was just a really fun, creative thing to get to do.”
"Just A Girl" (1995)
Album: Tragic Kingdom
Label: Trauma/Interscope
Tony: “‘Just A Girl’ was the first song that was on the radio for us. That was incredible because to hear that song on KROQ-FM in LA, where we grew up, and you’ve listened to KROQ your whole life, and then to hear it on the radio was unbelievable. It just starts spreading, and you start hearing it, and it’s such a crazy feeling. At that point we had been together as a band for nine years. It wasn’t like we had just started and all of a sudden we’re on the radio—we had been struggling and working our asses off for nine years, and finally we’re on the radio. It was such a cool feeling.
“That was the first song that was like, ‘Here’s Gwen Stefani.’ She found her identity as a lyricist, and that was the first kind of shot fired. Prior to Tragic Kingdom, Gwen’s brother Eric, who had started No Doubt, was the primary songwriter and lyricist, and when Eric left in ‘94, it forced all of us to step up. We had half of Tragic Kingdomwritten, and we had to write the rest of the songs, and songs like “Just A Girl” and “Spiderwebs” came after Eric left. There was this hole, this vacuum, and Gwen had to find herself as a lyricist. Obviously she did an incredible job, because Gwen’s honest and so sincere, and that came out in her lyrics, and people related to them."
Adrian: “Having a song on the radio or having a legitimate hit on the radio just wasn’t something we were counting on or expected, and to watch that develop and watch our world change around us was quite an experience, and that song gave us our first taste of that.”
Tom: “When we did record that song, we knew there was something special about it. I just remember by the time we got the keyboard solo on it, we wanted to soften the rockness of it with kind of an '80s style keyboard. The keyboard solo just pulled the song together, and we could feel it. It was nothing like the earlier No Doubt stuff which is so ska, this is like a rock song, and at that time felt really contemporary."
“We got to make a video with Mark Kohr who had done some Green Day videos. I remember the day we made the ‘Just A Girl’ video because at the end of the video shoot, we had to go to the airport and fly somewhere for a show, so things were starting to happen. I remember they were like, ‘The limos are here to bring you to the airport,’ and it was like, ‘There’s a limo here for us?’ It was these little exciting rock and roll moments that happen to you. We had been together—me, Tony, Gwen, and Adrian—for six or seven years at that point. It was exciting, it was like a whirlwind, and with that song, to hear that have it become a hit, that’s when our lives changed."
"Spiderwebs" (1995)
Album: Tragic Kingdom
Label: Trauma/Interscope
Tony: “I remember writing that in my bedroom at my parents house in Yorba Linda. I had gotten a 4-track tape machine and that was after Eric had left so it was like, ‘We’ve got to write.’ I came up with this riff, and Gwen came in. I remember we sat there and just worked on this song, we just put different ideas down, and we took it to the band and everyone liked it.
Adrian: “When we were first working on it, before we went in the studio, it was way slower. It was almost kind of like a funky groove song because it was so much slower.”
Tom: “I remember Tony and Gwen wrote that one. Gwen had gone to Tony’s house, and we used to write songs—it would be either me and Gwen, like ‘Just A Girl’ was me and Gwen with just a tape recorder, or Tony and Gwen with a tape recorder. Tony gave me the cassette tape, and was like, ‘Can you learn this? Can you figure out some guitar parts for it?’ I just remember taking that cassette tape home, and it was just Tony on bass and then Gwen singing in the bedroom, and I was like, ‘Oh my god this song is really good.’ You get that feeling like ‘This is a great song. How’d they write this?’"
"Don't Speak" (1995)
Album: Tragic Kingdom
Label: Trauma/Interscope
Tony: “We had so many different versions of that song prior to the one we had recorded for Tragic Kingdom. We had been playing different versions of that song at shows during those years. What you hear is probably like the third or fourth version of it. We just kept working on it. I think when Gwen and I were breaking up, the lyrics then became just about our break up. Because it was so real, and we were living it, all that stuff came up in that song. That’s the real deal. That’s our lives, and that’s what was happening to us at that time. It was a very, very intense period of our lives, and it was all put out there to share with everybody. [Laughs]"
“It was definitely a challenge for both of us. The hardest part about that was having a massive record that sells 15 million copies worldwide, and then you’re traveling around the world and you’re doing press in all these different countries, and every single question that you have to answer is about the break up. You do that for a couple years, and it could drive anyone crazy. That was just as crazy as what we were really living. The fact that we got through all that stuff and we persevered through all that is a real testament to our friendship. I think it’s also a testament to how much the band means to us. We didn’t let it break us up as a band, and we just kept going and it made us stronger.”
Adrian: “We had that song for a long time before we recorded Tragic Kingdom. But it was different—there was another section, a b-part after the verse, before the chorus. When we went in to record it for Tragic Kingdom, it was suggested to us that we make the song shorter, so we lost an entire section that happened twice in the song. There’s probably a version of it out there somewhere on one of our demos. That took a little bit getting used to. I definitely know that we’ve played it something like 3000 times in our lives. This version feels right."
Tom: “There’s a lot of stories about that song, because that one unfolded over a longer period of time. Originally, Gwen’s brother wrote most of that song, and then after we got at it as a band, Gwen changed the lyrics around to fit her life. Musically, we brought it to another level, but near the end we reworded it. There’s an earlier version of the song where the verses are totally different, which is a really beautiful version and it’s awesome but it’s way more jazzy and really different. That song had a long incubation process."
“I remember being in Europe and we’d get charts and sales reports, and ‘Don’t Speak’ had been number one in the US for eight weeks, and it’s been number one in this country and that country. They gave us a list where the song was number one around the world and we couldn’t believe it. We had the number one album for a couple of weeks leading into Christmas of that year and it was just crazy. It was a year into the album and we just kept going and kept touring."
"Excuse Me Mr." (1995)
Album: Tragic Kingdom
Label: Trauma/Interscope
Tony: “That was another one where we had different versions of that song, and I believe if I’m correct, on that song we had kind of a more mellow version, but we wanted to record the version that you hear now, more of a harder version. I do remember that we recorded a version of that song and somehow it got lost, and we had to go back in and re-record it. I love that song. I think about the video that Sophie [Muller] made for it and it’s cool.”
Adrian: “When we recorded that, we used to play it the way it is now, and our producer wanted us to play it almost kind of like a country-shuffle, and so we gave it a shot. We later decided that we didn’t really like that, but the other version was erased from the tape. We had to go back in—it must’ve been months later—we re-recorded it the way we used to play it.”
"Happy Now?" (1995)
Album: Tragic Kingdom
Label: Trauma/Interscope
Tony: “I don’t know if that was an official single or not but I know KROQ played it and it just spread. Just another very intense break up song.”
Adrian: “We never made a video for ‘Happy Now.’ ‘Happy Now’ was never an official single, but it was being played on the radio by some of the stations. I always liked that one. It’s definitely more of a straight rock song. That one seems to go over live really well.”
Tom: “I think like ‘Happy Now?’ was one that got released as an interim single. When things took off in L.A and California before the rest of the country, there was a lag in the single somehow. We released that as an interim single and it was on the radio a fair amount, and probably more in California than anywhere."
"Sunday Morning" (1995)
Album: Tragic Kingdom
Label: Trauma/Interscope
Tony: “Gwen wasn’t feeling well, and I was at my parents house in Yorba Linda, and I had the guitar. She was sitting the bathroom, and I was sitting outside of the bathroom singing, kind of like serenading her. I was just like, ‘Somebody is feeling quite uh-uh-uh, uh-uh-uh, somebody is feeling quite ill,’ and that became ‘Sunday Morning.’ That’s how the song started. It’s obviously not about someone feeling ill now, Gwen made the lyrics.”
Adrian: “That’s one of the best No Doubt songs ever, I think. That one makes me smile. I’ll leave it at that.”
Tom: “What I remember about 'Sunday Morning' was the video. We did at Gwen’s grandparent’s house in Anaheim. It was just like a one day shoot. I love that video. The whole video was really normal for us before this weird success, but we would be at our band house, we’d rehearse in the garage for a couple of hours, and then we would go to the kitchen of the house and make spaghetti and have a big dinner and hang out. Spaghetti was cheap. That video was just trying to capture that kind of really simple, silly, sweet story of our friendship. Especially coming after ‘Don’t Speak,’ because the ‘Don’t Speak’ video was about us fighting, and who wanted to come back to that? Both of those videos were fictional, but covered different aspects of our friendship."
"Hey You" (1995)
Album: Tragic Kingdom
Label: Trauma/Interscope
Tony: “Making the Tragic Kingdom record was such a blur because it was over such a long period of time, and we recorded some of the songs so many times. I love the way it turned out. We used to play that song so much live—I love playing that song. I think we played it a few years ago.”
Adrian: “When we played that live on the Tragic Kingdom tour, we didn’t play it like the record, we played it more acoustic."
"Ex-Girlfriend" (2000)
Album: Return of Saturn
Label: Interscope
Tony: “That was the first time where Gwen, Tom and I would sit down and record on a computer together without anybody else in the room. That was a different way of doing it. ‘Ex-Girlfriend’ was an idea that started in the early part of writing, but we didn’t really kind of get it going until later in the writing. It was one of the last songs we finished for the record. We were just trying to get modern with stuff internally as far as how we recorded, and I remember we worked on this song down at Tom’s house in Long Beach."
“With Return of Saturn, we rented this house in the Hollywood Hills in 1998 for about six months, and that’s where we wrote most of Return of Saturn. It just goes to show you that we did that in 1998, but the record didn’t come out until 2000. We did a lot of writing and recording after that. That was also a really challenging record to make because we felt a lot of pressure coming off of Tragic Kingdom. It was such a big record, and we were like, ‘We’ve got to prove ourselves as songwriters, as musicians.’ Looking back on that now, we put way too much pressure on ourselves. We probably made it harder for ourselves than it needed to be, but at the same that’s all you could do. You do the best you can. That’s what making Return of Saturn was.”
Adrian: “We thought we had finished the album, and then we discussed it further, and decided that the album needs one more song. We had gone in, and mixed and mastered Return of Saturn, and decided to hold off. ‘Ex-Girlfriend’ was written, and we went in and recorded it at the last minute. Once
"Simple Kind of Life" (2000)
Album: Return of Saturn
Label: Interscope
Tony: “That was the first song that Gwen wrote by herself. Everything-all the music, all the lyrics. She brought it to us and it’s incredible. It’s an incredible song. I think it’s one of the definitive No Doubt songs, especially lyrically. It’s a true Gwen song, and it encapsulates everything she was living and going through at the time. Those are the songs I think people really relate to, because she’s so honest and so sincere in her lyrics. That’s another great, definitive Gwen lyric, wanting that ‘simple kind of life.’”
Tom: "It was genius, because at that point in her life she was like, ‘Tom, you've got to teach me some chords, I want to learn to play guitar.’ She learned like four chords, and she sat in a room one day, I think at Glen Ballard’s house, because we were working with Glen, and she wrote it. It was just so simple and such a great song. I remember when the album came out, we had like a local Orange County newspaper and the music critic was notoriously tough on us. He never really liked our band, he never got it. And finally, when that album came out, on the review, he liked it. He said it was the ‘song of a lifetime’ that Gwen had written. It was great to finally win that guy over. [Laughs] But I was so proud of Gwen that she wrote it all on her own”
"Bathwater" (2000)
Album: Return of Saturn
Label: Interscope
Tony: “We were trying to go with a dancehall feel on that. I love the way that song turned out, and obviously that goes into a different kind of chorus. I love that song, I love playing it live."
Adrian: “I love the showtune sound that it has, and that’s one for me personally that I love to play live.”
Tom: “‘Bathwater’ is another one I remember writing at Glen Ballard’s house, and that one came really quick. It was easy to write. The funny thing is, that was one where it got released as a single, and we got a lot of airplay in L.A. Our album was selling in L.A because the single was out here. But the label never believed in it, and they were like, ‘No we’re not going to promote that song as a single to the rest of the country.’ The label, its their business—whatever. It’s just one of those things.That song is always really fun to play live and it goes over great.”
"New" (2000)
Album: Return of Saturn
Label: Interscope
Tony: “‘New’ came out before the album came out, because that was on the Go movie soundtrack. We were working on Return of Saturn, and one of the songs we had was ‘New.’ We were talking to the director of the movie, and he really liked the song and thought it would be perfect for the movie. We were cool with that, because we saw a rough-cut or something, and it’s such a great movie. I love playing that song live. I can’t wait to get back into that song live.”
Adrian: “‘New’ was written on the road during the touring of Tragic Kingdom. Sometimes I wonder if that’s the best record on Return of Saturn that we made musically, I don’t know. There are times where I have felt that."
Tom: “‘New’ was the only song I remember that we ever wrote while on tour. That was a song that me and Gwen wrote. I kind of have vague recollections of being in the back of a tour bus writing that. That song goes over really well live. There’s something about that song, people love to sing that chorus. One of my favorite things about that song at a concert is to pick out the most unlikely passionate person in the world to sing that. From my vantage point on stage, I’m looking at the audience, and I pick out the least likely person to be at a No Doubt concert and usually it’s an older, grey-haired or bald guy or something, and I'll see him sing that song. People go crazy after singing that song. I love that song because it’s so funny. Not in a bad way, but in an awesome way to see people let loose."
"Hella Good" (2001)
Album: Rock Steady
Label: Interscope
Tony: “Making Rock Steady was a whole different thing from making Return of Saturn. Return of Saturn was a lot of pressure, and Rock Steady was the exact opposite. It was like, ‘Who gives a fuck, I don’t care what anyone thinks anymore, let’s have a good time.’ We started writing that record in January of 2001, and we put that record out in December of 2001. That was the first time in the history of this band, and the only time in the history of this band, that we made a record and put it out in one year. It was the fastest record we ever written and recorded and released. The reason was that we were having such a good time doing it.”
“On the Return of Saturn tour, we were having these dance parties and dancehall parties after the show every night and fed off all this energy for Rock Steady. We were going out to clubs all the time, especially Jamaican clubs, and getting super inspired by dancehall music. Obviously, it shows in that record. Rock Steady is a very club-oriented record. You can play a lot of those songs in clubs. We loved that, and I think it was just exploring a whole new place for us. “Hella Good” was really the first time we did a collaboration anybody outside of the band. We wrote that song with The Neptunes, and I love the way that song turned out. It's another really fun song to play live.”
“I think that [working with The Neptunes] was such a different experience for us, because we had always done everything ourselves. To put yourself in that new place is always a challenge, but looking back on it now is awesome. Those guys brought such an incredible amount of experience into it.”
Adrian: “The comments that we hear sometimes is that it kind of sounds like a Michael Jackson song to start, but really what Pharrell was after was that ‘Another One Bites the Dust’ feeling from Queen. That was a different kind of song for us too, but it really rocks. That one has always felt good.”
Tom: “That was another attempt for us to do something different, and there’s certainly nothing dancehall, reggae about ‘Hella Good.’ It was a beat that The Neptunes had, and Pharrell and Gwen—we got in the studio together and they wrote that chorus together in like, half and hour. It came together really quick, and I agree—that song is like nothing else we’ve ever done."
"Hey Baby" (2001)
Album: Rock Steady
Label: Interscope
Tony: “We had that song, and we went down to Jamaica to record it. We brought Sly and Robbie in, and they’re reggae legends. They’ve done so many incredible dancehall songs too, and they were the perfect producers for that song. Being in Jamaica and recording that song was incredible. We were down there for a few weeks, and I had been to Jamaica before, but we hadn’t been as a band.”
"We grew up on ska and reggae music, and to actually go to the birthplace of all that stuff was very inspiring for us. I loved the way that song turned out. We were down there and we’d have this schedule like, ‘We got to get in the studio at noon, and we go to record all day.’ We ended up going to this place called the Blue Lagoon, and we’d get drinks and we’d sunbathe, and end up eating lunch. It’d be like 4 o’clock and we’d be like, ‘We really should get to the studio now.’ We’d finally get in the studio around the evening and start working, and every day it was the same thing. It was so much fun. We did four songs down there. We did ‘Hey Baby,’ ‘Underneath It All,’ ‘Start the Fire,’ and ‘New Friend,’ which ended up being on the b-side record.”
Adrian: “Recording in Jamaica was fantastic. It was so good I wanted to do it again for the new record, Push and Shove."
“It was definitely a learning experience, bringing more programming into the world of No Doubt, to go along with my playing. I definitely had something to say about that, but I learned to love it."
Tom: “The thing about our band that happens as we write songs is we just hate repeating ourselves. If we start writing a chord progression that we’ve used before, everyone’s like, ‘No, no, no, we’ve done that.’ We never repeat ourselves, and so on Rock Steady, we were really into Jamaican dancehall. It’s a direct line from ska to reggae to dancehall, and we thought, ‘This is what we’re going to do next.’ We start writing to dancehall songs, and realized really quickly that guitars and bass didn’t sound right on dancehall beats. Me and Tony were like, ‘Fuck it, let’s get some synthesizers in here.’ We’re not very good at keyboard, but we just sat in our little computer studio with synthesizers and that song was so fun to write.
"When we released it as a single, we were surprised at the reaction that our old-time fans didn’t dig the sound of it. We always want to move forward. It’s often that we can move forward and have some bit of path, and with Push and Shove, ithas the most ska-ish beat we ever played. But I don’t know if people are going to get that."
“KROQ played it for a day, and the pulled it because at that time, KROQ was playing, like, Limp Bizkit, and ‘Hey Baby’ just didn’t fit. KROQ turned left and we turned right and that’s just what happens when you’re pushing forward. You’re going to lose some people and gain some people. It’s still a really fun song to play live and we love that song. I think it’s a controversial one amongst our hardcore fans.”
"Underneath It All" (2001)
Album: Rock Steady
Label: Interscope
Tony: “When we first wrote that song, we wrote it with David Stewart, who was in the Eurythmics, and he’s a very talented guy. We were in London sometime during the Rock Steady record in 2001, and Dave had this guitar part, and Gwen started singing over it, and before you know it, they had written ‘Underneath It All.’ It was that quick and then we took that to Jamaica, and that’s where we recorded it with Sly and Robbie.”
Adrian: “I just remember recording ‘Underneath It All’ in Jamaica felt so right. It was super organic, we were really trying to breathe the reggae from the place it came from, and being in those moments, and going to the clubs at night, and coming back the next day-just taking in the Jamaican experience and recording reggae music, rather than doing it in Southern California, it just had a different feeling about it. It just felt right.”
Tom: “‘Underneath It All’ is way more traditional, really simple reggae. It was really fun recording in Jamaica. It was a big thrill to be there, and to be welcomed by a lot of really nice people there who were happy to have us. People would come by with gifts at the studio—we lived there for just two weeks. This guy came by with this huge batch of chocolate chip cookies, and I was like, ‘That’s awesome!’ I ate like eight of those and got stoned out of my mind because they were pot cookies. I didn’t know they were so potent. We just had blast in Jamaica."
"Running" (2001)
Album: Rock Steady
Label: Interscope
Tony: “We recorded that one in London. We did that with Nellee Hooper, the producer, in London. Rock Steady was all about trying different things, and at that point in 2001, we had been a band for 13, 14 years. It was like, ‘Okay, let’s be brave, let’s do some different stuff.’ I think we’ve always kind of been that way, and that’s where the song went. That what the record was. It was like, ‘Let’s do some collaborations, let’s write with The Neptunes and Dave Stewart.’ We worked with like five or six incredible producers and production teams on that record. ‘Running’ is the first time I didn’t play bass—I played keyboard bass on a song. I didn’t play real bass. It was just a different thing. It’s just cool to try different things.”
Tom: “‘Running’ was another one that Tony and Gwen wrote on a little Casio with a little drum machine. We did a big tour in 2009, and when we played that song every night, on the video screen behind us, we had a collage. We were going to do the whole song with old photographs of the band together from our personal photo collection. Something about that song and those photos seriously made people weep. That was the song that from the stage, I loved, because I’m not looking at the pictures, I’m looking at the audience. I would watch them every single night, and after a few shows we’d be like, ‘Did you see someone cry during that song?’ People would be moved to tears. There’s just something sentimental about that song and those picture collages that we put on the screen. It was really magical, and what a people thing to be able to do as a band, to invoke tears."
"It's My Life" (2003)
Album: The Singles
Label: Interscope
Tony: “We knew we were going to go on a break, and we were going to put The Singles 1992-2003 record out, and we wanted to put out a new recording for that record. We haven’t released a cover song ever as a single. We went through a list of songs and I think it came down to two or three songs. That was the one that I remember we were sitting with Jimmy Iovine, who runs Interscope Records, on his patio at his office in Santa Monica. We all made the decision that it was going to be ‘It’s My Life.’ We did that with Nellee Hooper, and he did just an incredible job producing that song. We were such big fans of Talk Talk, and we’re such big fans of that song. I hope we did it justice. I’m really proud of what we did, and I hope they feel the same way. People really like that version.”
“You look back on it now and lyrically for Gwen, it was a very interesting statement, because she was about to embark on her solo stuff. It was kind of like, ‘Okay, it’s my life, I’m going to go do this stuff now.’ It really did make a lot of sense—it does make a lot of sense.”
Adrian: “I have the cassette of ‘It’s My Life’ by the band Talk Talk from when I was a teenager, so that wasn’t a hard choice for me. I just thought, ‘Wow, I would love to play this song' and when it was discussed with the band, it felt exciting.”
Tom: “It felt really natural. We knew we were trying to make a single. We just got lucky that it came out really well, and it really worked. In the video, we had fun with this idea-we knew we weren’t breaking up as a band, but to the rest of the world it looked like that, but we knew we weren’t. We were just going to take a break. The idea in the video was Gwen was going to kill us, which is basically what happens in the video, we’re her different lovers."
Push and Shove (2012)
Label: Interscope
Tony: “We’re so proud of this record. It’s been a labor of love—we’ve been working on it for the past couple of years, and we’ve got 11 tracks. It was really tough making the first single, and ‘Settle Down’ felt like it kind of encapsulated so much of No Doubt’s sound in it. It’s got the dancehall feel, and everything that we love. The Push and Shoverecord is just like any other No Doubt record. It’s all over the place. There’s different kinds of songs. We’ve got this incredible song that we did with Major Lazer called ‘Push and Shove,’ which is the title track of the album. There’s so many songs on this record that I can’t wait for people to hear.”
“We spent a good year writing before we even got in the studio, and ‘Settle Down’ was one of the early songs we wrote on this album. When we went in the studio and started recording it, we went through so many different versions. There’s probably 10 versions of ‘Settle Down.’ You just keep going, and you keep fine tuning it, and trying this and checking this out. None of them, except for maybe ‘Undone’—which was the last song we wrote on the record—were really like, ‘Okay, we wrote it, we recorded it, it’s done.’ They were all just like, ‘Okay, let’s come back, let’s try that.’ Gwen and I would go back and redo lyrics just before finalizing the recording like, ‘Let’s try and change those words, I’m not really sure about that melody.’ We were writing as we were still finishing up the recording."
Adrian: "Playing a song like ‘Push and Shove’ just takes us back a little bit, going from ska to the rock and the choruses. It felt natural, and it’s a very exciting song. I cannot wait to play that live. I’m more excited to play that song live than anything at this point.”
Tom: “The song ‘Push and Shove’ was really the one collaboration on the record. There’s another song that Gwen co-wrote with Dave Stewart again, but this was the only full-on collaboration. Major Lazer gave us this beat, and they recorded these verses with Busy Signal in Jamaica, and we were in love with it. The beat is just so infectious, and has that real original ska vibe.
"We took that, and we wrote the choruses—Gwen and Tony and I, and the bridge, and then we put it all together, and kind of went back and forth, and had those guys come in the studio with us. It was more of like a songwriting collaboration between the band, and Major Lazer, and Busy Signal, and Mark "Spike" Stent, our producer. For us, that’s another really bold, adventurous song because it has this great, almost retro sounding ska verses, and it blasts into this heavy-rock, half-time chorus, which is really like incongruent parts. It's really odd and crazy, but it feels so right and we love it. I’m just excited for people to hear it. And again, it’s something that sounds like nothing we’ve ever done before, and hopefully it goes okay.”