All Access (May 2000)
Just, Like, Heaven
Can No Doubt’s new record, Return of Saturn, save pop music from Britney? Can anyone?
‘Do you know what I mean?’ is not usually meant as a real question. It’s a verbal exclamation mark, an addendum to a statement, like ‘you know’ or ‘anyway’. But No Doubt’s Gwen Stefani means it. We’re discussing the wasteland which is pop music in the year 2000, and the singer is waxing ecstatic on the music that excited her growing up in Anaheim, California.
”It so represents the end of the ’90s”, she says, ”that whole kind of manufactured, recycled thing that is happening. I just feel sorry for those kids. Because I know when I was their age I was listening to Madness, something I discovered from another world away: England; this band that was all about this whole kind of political unity between black and white, and the energy, and this whole new kind of creation of this new music that was just totally homegrown from these people who had something to say. I felt like I had discovered the world when I discovered that music. Do you know what I mean?”
Gwen is prone to run-on sentences when she gets excited. She peppers her speech with words like ‘gross’, ‘gosh’, ‘darn’, ‘like’ and ‘totally awesome’. As much as she is a pop icon and a media target (her on again, off again romance with Bush’s Gavin Rossdale is a favorite tabloid topic), Gwen is still a fan, and she wants the little girls who have made idols of Ricky Martin, Britney and Christina to discover Return of Saturn, her band’s new record. It’s not about ego or money (No Doubt sold 15 million copies of their last record, 1995’s Tragic Kingdom, so none of the four members-Stefani, guitarist Tom Dumont, bassist Tony Kanal, or drummer Adrian Young-is crying poverty). For No Doubt, it’s about music as inspiration.
”It made me start a band myself”, Gwen says of the groups she looked up to as a kid. ”So I just feel like the music that’s out there right now…I’m the first – and I think we all are – to embrace a good song. ’Hit Me Baby One More Time’(sic), that makes me happy. I like to sing that song, it’s a good song. But at the same time it just seems like a lot of that stuff is just so, like…They do all of the marketing just to make sure they can sell the Barbie dolls”.
There is very little of the contrived about No Doubt. The quartet of high school friends (which included fifth member Eric Stefani, Gwen’s brother, until his departure in’94) flogged their ska-inflected pop for eight years before influential L.A. radio station KROQ championed ‘Just A Girl’, Tragic Kingdom’s first single. Two years of touring followed, including stints on the Warped Tour and an opening slot for Bush. MTV loved Gwen’s athletic body and big voice, and put the band’s videos into heavy rotation. SPIN put Gwen – and only Gwen – on its cover in October of 1996. By early ‘97, they were bonafide stars, and a decade after their first ”official” gig at Fender’s Ballroom in Long Beach, California, No Doubt was filling stadiums worldwide.
But the demands of stardom are exhausting and No Doubt finally went home. 1998 saw the band indulging in the three ‘R’s: relaxing, ‘riting, and recording. According to Gwen, the band got off the road at just the right time. ”In a lot of ways, we could have totally kept going. Not physically or mentally, but there was tons of opportunities.I think we all felt like, ‘Gosh, if we keep going we’re never going to get another record out”.
That it took two years to finish Return of Saturn surprised no one more than the band themselves. Says Tom: ”We realized when we started writing and started making it that giving ourselves a deadline is just not very conducive to our songwriting, and it was easier just to get rid of the deadlines and just say, ‘Look, we’re going to write until the thing is done properly, and then to a point where we can be proud of it’. So we did have to trade off getting the thing done in a timely manner with getting it done so it’s a great record;the greatest thing we could do.”
But it wasn’t easy. Their first attempt at recording, with Tragic Kingdom producer Matthew Wilder, just didn’t work. ”It was like something was wrong about it”, says Gwen, ”And not with him but with us.We just weren’t ready to be in the studio; we just felt like we were too comfortable.We needed to be outside our comfort zone and be pushed a little further.”
Scheduling conflicts scuttled plans to record with Michael Beinhorn (Marilyn Manson, Hole.) Eventually Alanis Morissette collaborator Glen Ballard was recruited and Return of Saturn began to take shape. In fact, the record was done and ready for mastering last fall when the band decided that the balance of material was off and another song was in order. Suitably bummed because the record wasn’t coming out, No Doubt embarked on a mini-tour of southern California to work out both their frustrations and new material.
”It just felt like we needed to do something for ourselves”, says Gwen. ”And it was a good thing that we did because we had this song called ‘Ex-Girlfriend’ that we had just written, and it was the song that was like ‘Okay, we’re going to push ourselves and write another song. Tom and I sat down, and we were all excited because we had just worked with The Artist Formerly Known As Prince, so we were like, ‘Okay, we’re going to write ‘Raspberry Beret.’ ”
But the result, Gwen reports, was ”another kind of mid-tempo, ’sad for me, feel sorry for myself’ song”, and the band filed ‘Ex-Girlfriend’ away. Then one day they started messing with a beat sampled from a Tricky record. Gwen took the lyric from the original song and sang them over the new track. The result, she says, was startling.
”Suddenly, the lyrics took on this whole attitude!”, she reports.”Like, it wasn’t like ’sorry for me’, it was like ATTITUDE! I was like, ‘Wow, it’s so different!” A second bout of inspiration hit while they were in the studio re-recording the song ‘Magic’s in the Makeup’. They completed ‘Ex-Girlfriend’, the album’s first single, soon after.
”The whole process was so up and down”, Gwen says of making Return of Saturn. ”It was very draining emotionally. But for us it’s like this is a magic time because we did it, we finished this album. We totally feel like we couldn’t have done any better. We tried our hardest and we feel it’s our best work. It’s hard to know, we’re so close to it. We think everything we do is good.”
Gwen needn’t worry. Return of Saturn may be a melancholy record but it’s also deeper than Tragic Kingdom. Where Kingdom set Gwen’s lyrics (mostly penned about her breakup with Kanal) against a chipper musical backdrop, Saturn is the ”Gavin” record. Songs like ‘Marry Me’ and ‘Simple Kind of Life’ pair lyrics betraying the instability of Stefani’s personal life (she lives in California, Rossdale lives in England, but they’re still together) with slower but no less powerful songs. Musically, Gwen thinks this is No Doubt’s finest work.
”There’s no way I could have written this record any sooner”, she says of Saturn’s sophistication. ”[I] couldn’t have written ‘Ex-Girlfriend’ any sooner than a couple of months ago. Especially lyrically I don’t know how to write. I’m not a creative writer in the sense that I can just make up stories at this point. Maybe someday, but right now it’s just like, okay whatever I’m feeling, whatever’s off-balance, whatever’s on my mind, whatever confusing thing, that’s what I write about.”
For his part, Tom has enjoyed watching his friend develop as a writer. ”It’s interesting because when we were making Tragic Kingdom, right before we started recording, that’s when Gwen’s brother left the band, and I knew it was really hard on her. We certainly wanted to carry on and he wanted us to so the bulk of the songwriting chores kind of fell into our laps for the first time. ”So in some ways it’s kind of funny, he says, warming to the topic. ”If Eric hadn’t have left, Gwen wouldn’t have found her own voice. And as soon as that happened, she started writing songs expressing her own thoughts and, and the music took on a new life. The stuff we were writing had this new sparkle that it never had before. It’s a pretty neat thing to watch from the side as someone blossoms into an artist.”
Gwen blushes at her friend’s description. ”When I’m writing I don’t think about anyone but myself. I’m just thinking about trying to express myself. There is a bit of sacrifice there. It is a strange thing to talk about all day long. Like with me and Tony, it was two years sitting there after we broke up talking about [it]. It’s not healthy at all. But I think that you also feel a lot of comfort because a lot of people relate, and them being able to relate makes you feel that you’re normal just like everybody else.”