Well, No Doubt’s greatest hits, anyway – which is what they’ll be playing on their last tour before Gwen Stefani drops a solo CD. By Chris Willman.

Shooting what little breeze there is on a hot, insufferably still LA day, Gwen Stefani suddenly feels the need to cull a statistic from a bandmate. “How many times do you think you’ve thrown up in your life, Tony?” she asks. Tony Kanal looks like he’s not certain he wants to play this game. “I’m not sure it’s a lot,” the bass player answers with a nervous chuckle. Better to focus on the immediate future. “This time,” he insists, “it’s gonna be much more mellow and healthy.” Fifty points if you’ve already figured out our subject of the day: rock touring. Their little O.C.-teem-ska-band-that-could, No Doubt, is hitting the amphitheater circuit in June, pairing up with blink-182 for one of the summer’s most anticipated tours. (One of the most economical too: Ticket prices top out in the mid-two-figure range, or about $250 cheaper than it’d cost you for a similar seat to see Madonna.) It’s a nationwide victory lap in honor of their recent blockbuster hits collection, The Singles 1992-2003, whose new song, a cover of Talk Talk’s “It’s My Life,” afforded them yet another top 10 smash (their tenth). This could be the optimal point in their history to catch the band: They’ve been together long enough to almost count as seasoned elder statesmen – 17 years, which is about 170 in rock years – but, being still in their 30s, they’re vigorous, scrappy, and in no danger yet of outgrowing their audience.

Which is not to say they haven’t outgrown a few youthful vices. In “Hey Baby,” one of the several massive singles from their triple-platinum 2001 album Rock Steady, Stefani immortalized her bandmates’ old post-show romantic pursuits, as ironically observed by her from across a crowded bacchanal. But any would-be female band-aids hoping to be party to that decadence this summer may walk away disappointed, since, with everyone in the group either married, engaged, or seriously involved, that song is primarily a historic document.

”I’m sad for Tony on this tour a little bit,” Stefani says, offering sympathy for her bassist and ex-boyfriend Tony Kanal’s lost youth. ”Because these guys used to party so hard. Basically they would start drinking at around five to get rid of the hangover from the night before. Then they’d have an after-party every night, bring a DJ booth and lights and songs and everything, with whatever backstage passes got out to whatever girls. And it was months of that, every single night. The nights we didn’t play, they would go to clubs.” Those years may be gone, but, to crudely paraphrase ”Casablanca,” they’ll always have porcelain.

Speaking of toilets (and we do promise to move along), now is as good a time as any to offer a word of warning for anyone planning to catch No Doubt this summer. If you’re buying beer before their set, be sure to ask for a child-size cup, because there will be no bathroom breaks. Which is to say, you won’t be getting any of those less familiar album tracks that usually signal fair-weather rock fans to make the traditional dash for the loo. The whole set list will come off that best-of. ”It’s really exciting to be able to go on a tour where every single song we’re gonna play will be a single,” enthuses Stefani. ”It’s gonna be like this” – whereupon she strikes a James Bond pose, spraying the room with firepower: ”Bang bang bang bang bang!”

The catch? They’ll be out on the amphitheater circuit for a mere month before Stefani heads back indoors to reload, since she’s still got a long-aborning solo album to get done and released before year’s end.

The tour, in fact, was never supposed to happen. The group had planned to be on hiatus all year, but current events were set in motion in early 2003 when the band initially decided to “put a B-sides record out with a bunch of cool stuff for die-hard fans,” Kanal says. Then came the bright idea to – hey! – throw in a disc’s worth of A sides, along with a couple of DVDs, and make it a boxed set. The final result of this evolutionary process was two separate projects: Boom Box, a limited-edition set, and the single-CD Singles collection, which has moved almost 2 million copies.

“We just wanted to celebrate that we’ve been in a band as long as we have,” says Stefani of the hits collection and commemorative tour. ”None of us were expecting to go out right now, but it’s funner when you don’t plan it and it just happens.”

“Tony, your hair is so white!” yells Stefani, commanding Kanal’s attention from across a bank of lights at an outdoor photo shoot. This would seem to be a textbook case of the pot calling the kettle platinum, but she’s right: Kanal is looking fair enough that you wonder if maybe he’s the member Martin Scorsese should’ve picked to play Jean Harlow in The Aviator, the Howard Hughes biopic starring Leonardo DiCaprio (to be released in December). “It’s like a fluorescent bulb,” she marvels, moving closer for a blonde-on-blonde comparison. “Is my hair that white?”

Meanwhile, drummer Adrian Young has turned whiter than either dye job, thanks to a six-foot boa constrictor that has just been introduced to the circus-themed set. Young’s performed live in nothing but a jockstrap, so it’s clear he lacks any phobias about public nakedness, but he’s got one about snakes, and his request to move to the farthest edge of the shot is granted. Stefani, for her part, digs the boa (though it proved to be too uncooperative to make the final photo). For a good half-hour she has it around her neck. Asked what 25 pounds of pure muscle coiling round your shoulders feels like, Stefani – looking altogether too relaxed – says, “It’s like… a massage.”

Maybe they could take the boa out on tour to help work out those post-thrashing neck cricks – or, in Stefani’s case, to relieve her daily noon pre-tour workouts. “It’s ruined my day,” she complains. But perhaps this buff rock icon doth protest too much, since moments later she’s telling her fellow band members, “I want to be working out with you guys on tour!” The guys smile faintly, as if trying to replace the mental image of a StairMaster with a picture of Jim Beam.

Or it could be just the genuine smile of a recently acquired domesticity. Kanal, 33, will be bringing his girlfriend on tour. Guitarist Tom Dumont, 36, is newly engaged. (He’s the one who, with his new bushy ‘n’ bearded look, might as well be a member of Phish. ”I’m the not-rock-star of the group,” he says.) Drummer Adrian Young, 34, is married and has a 2-year-old son; he’s also one of the few avid golfers to sport a full Mohawk, which helps ensure he gets accosted every time he leaves the house. (”I wear hats, every day, but it doesn’t matter,” he grumbles.) And as everyone probably knows, Stefani, 34, married her longtime beau, Bush-man Gavin Rossdale, in 2002.

You might think marriage would have taken a bit of the bloom off Stefani’s incurable romanticism – that maybe she wouldn’t mind getting out of the house and living the single life for a few weeks this summer. You’d think wrong, you heartless cynic. ”It’s gonna suck” being away from Rossdale, she says, ”though it always makes it very exciting when you get back together again. This is the first year in our relationship we’ve ever really hung out this much – like, every day. I love waking up together. And also making records at the same time [while living] in the same house, so that’s a first too.” She describes a typical working-couple setup: ”We go off to the studio and don’t see each other all day long, and then we’ll see each other at night and it’s ‘Oh, how did it go?’ It’s rad – I love it.”

At this point, it may be some of our more love-soured readers doing the throwing up. But Stefani is the rare distaff rocker who can fully indulge a girly-girl side, with all the romance and glam that might entail, and still seem like one of the boys. She and her band have always been crafty about striking intriguing balances. Starting out as a bunch of ambitious Anaheim teenagers in an unremarkable late-’80s ska band, No Doubt matured into the goofy but pop-savvy alt-rockers behind 1995’s 8-million-seller Tragic Kingdom. Five years later, maturity was the unexpected order of the day with a confessional follow-up, Return of Saturn. In December 2001, they came back with a well-regarded return to immaturity – and successful step forward into dance music – with the electronics-shaded Rock Steady.

Their next album should mark a pendulum swing back toward writing on guitar and piano and away from dance beats. Or so they say now. It’ll probably be a long, long time before anyone hears it.

In a makeup chair between shoots, Stefani is telling her assistant about the tracks she’s been recording with Outkast’s Andre 3000, a number he wrote called “Long Way To Go.” They’re set to resume work on the song later today. “We sing [in unison], but because his voice is so cool and mine is so geek,” she worries that “it sounds like I’m singing backup on his record.” Tonight she’s going to try to talk him into doing it as a true duet, trading off lines.

Stefani describes her first solo album as a dance project, a CD made up of electronic beats rather than the band tunes she’s accustomed to with No Doubt. Dallas Austin is on board, as is Beyoncé producer Rich Harrison. But in some ways it doesn’t sound like a huge departure: Nellee Hooper, who co-produced Rock Steady’s best cuts including “Hella Good” (their most club-friendly hit), is producing some tracks. And Kanal is co-writing and producing two others. Since No Doubt has been so successful in reinventing themselves, couldn’t she have purged some of the creative impulses within the context of the band?

Well, no. “The music I wanted to make for the dance record is something I could not do with No Doubt,” she maintains. ”It would exclude members, because it’s programming, it’s electronics. But it’s cool, because everyone’s been supportive, and there’s no plan to quit doing what we’re doing.” The others concur, noting their own sideline activities producing new artists or playing in other bands – including, in Young’s case, a recent touring stint with reunited new-wavers Bow Wow Wow. ”We’re not sleeping together,” says the drummer. ”We can cheat on each other. It’s cool.”

Perhaps the most ironic part of Stefani doing a solo album is that the lyrics are much less autobiographical than the material she writes for No Doubt. “There are some weird twists to the themes, but it’s not heartfelt, deep, painful subject matter. I sing ‘baby’ a lot which I haven’t done before,” she says with a laugh. So she had to go solo to get impersonal? That’s why I don’t call it a solo record,” she responds. “I call it a dance record. A solo record to me is like heart-pouring-out, ‘Finally here’s me! This is what they’ve been holding me back from!’ That’s not what this record is. I want to make a record that’s a modern version of the ['80s] stuff I grew up on that made me feel really happy, that you can dance to in the club.”

For now, Stefani has set aside her disco ambitions to concentrate on moving the big crowds they’ll soon encounter in amphitheaters. Which should be a cinch given their arsenal of hits. ”There’s something really fun about going into the opening chords of “Don’t Speak,” to hear that crowd roar,” says Dumont, asked to pick a live favorite. ”But from the musical side of things, “Ex-Girlfriend” and “New” are songs that are kind of intricate, where there’s a lot of detail and subtlety in the way you navigate the songs, but at the same time they’re very rocking and aggressive.”

“Sunday Morning” is one I love playing,” says Kanal.

“Just a Girl” is always a winner, even though it’s not my favorite song to play, because it’s hard and you get tired,” Stefani says. ”But people get so excited. If you’re playing a festival and not doing too good, then all of a sudden you play that song, it’s an instant win-over.” And her own favourite? ” ‘Rock Steady,’ but we’re not playing that on this tour. Right?

“We could throw it in a couple of shows,” Kanal offers.

“But it wasn’t a single,” Stefani points out.

“You never know what kind of shows we might do,” he says guardedly, a little less prepared than Stefani to have a band meeting in public. So there you have it: They might throw in an album track or two and break the all-singles edict. Nonetheless, No Doubt fans, while the band members do their pre-tour workouts, you might want to work on steeling your bladders. Because even if “a real love survives a rock-steady vibe,” a full tank of Bud might not.

Back from its trip to Saturn, No Doubt is ready to Rock Steady. By Tom Lanham.

Gwen Stefani is late. Not really late, just 15 minutes or so. But the platinum-haired, pout-lipped, pinup-perfect ska-pop goddess has a good cause – her boyfriend, the similarly pout-lipped, pinup-perfect rock icon, Gavin Rossdale of Bush renown, is her wheel man this particularly crisp autumn afternoon. He must’ve missed a Hollywood-hills turn or two. And when this oft-photographed No Doubt diva arrives? Most assuredly, she’s ready for her close up, Mr DeMille; in a flowing, floor length, red cashmere cape (complete with wolf-wowing hood), Stefani sweeps into the spacious, sparsely appointed digs of her band’s bassist Tony Kanal. She doesn’t just walk – in her patent-leather pumps, camouflage pedal pushers and baggy V-neck sweater – but sweeps and ’40s film starlets must’ve swept on Oscar night.

Stefani’s trademark blonde tresses are clustered in a humble bun today. She lets her locks down, she smiles, for the music-clip shoot of “Hey Baby” – the funky-punky first single from No Doubt’s new Rock Steady comeback on Interscope. “In the video, I have total Veronica Lake hair,” she purrs, curling into a wrought-iron chair on Kanal’s back porch.

Stefani sported a self-designed hound’s-tooth-jacket-and-golf-pantaloons number on VH1’s recent Vogue Fashion Awards, where she won Most Stylish Video, “Ex-Girlfriend” (from 2000’s platinum Return of Saturn). Startling the calm Kanal, seated opposite her at his patio table, Stefani jumps up from her chair to demonstrate the surreal hands-clasped-in-triumph victory rumba she danced when her name was announced at the ceremony. “And when I got up to claim my Award, all of a sudden the single was on; ‘Hey Baby’ was blasting!” she informs Kanal. He’s shocked; the song hadn’t even hit the radio yet, but he welcomes the well-placed leak. “So I was like ‘What song is this? Hey baby, hey baby hey!’ ” Stefani trills, shimmying around the concrete while her chum gives her the thumbs-up.

And sure, she rubbed shoulders with top-name designers like Patricia Field, Donna Karan and Stella McCartney at the event, she cedes. “But ever since puberty, I’ve always liked to get dressed up, and I’ve always made my own clothes. My Mom always took me to fabric stores like Jo-Ann Fabrics, House of Fabrics, and then with the band it was like Halloween every day. Like, ‘Oh cool! Now I have an excuse to dress up – it’ll be fun!’ And I spent a lot of time doing it, right Tony?”

Kanal (no slouch himself in designer jeans, T-shirt and a meticulously blond-streaked, prickly-hedgehog ‘do) nods, smiles sagely. And who should know better? He and Stefani dated for eight years, but broke up – with some irony – during the writing and recording of ’95’s Tragic Kingdom, their 15-million-selling sophomore breakthrough. He prepares to speak, but his ex is on a roll. Returning to the Veronica Lake theme, Stefani asserts that she did “just get so inspired by that whole starlet period of Hollywood. I’m fascinated by all that stuff; Julie Andrews and the whole Sound of Music thing, and musicals. And I definitely felt weird when Tragic Kingdom was coming out and the only girls that were around were the country or folkier style – the no-makeup singer/songwriters – or the really hard L7 or Hole-type rock bands. I didn’t feel comfortable in either one of those areas, so I just decided to be myself. And it all turned out all right.”

Stefani is sporting tiny gold earrings shaped like plastic 45-rpm centers, her customary jungle-red lipstick, and huge knuckle-obscuring rings on each hand; one that reads GWEN, another that spells NO DOUBT. It’s a defiant yet remarkably feminine persona, one that teenage fangirls around the world have been copying for at least a half-decade (even though No Doubt coalesced, to little fanfare, way back in ‘86); a style so distinctly Stefani that it – along with her velvety vocal talent – helped propel recent duet clips from techno-maestro Moby (“South Side”) and Eve (“Let Me Blow Ya Mind”) to the winner’s circle at MTV’s 2001 Video Music Awards (for Best Male Video and Best Female Video, respectively). “Without Gwen, the video wouldn’t have gotten shown in the first place,” Moby shyly assessed at the VMAs. Stefani is still dumbfounded – she almost turned down the artists’ original offers, not wanting to be seen “as just a side dish.” And she was pleasantly surprised when countless folks from the techno and hip-hop communities recognized her at the show, waved friendly hellos.

“But the thing about No Doubt is, we were a band for nine years before we had any commercial success.” says Stefani, whose charming, self-deprecating humility can win you over in a heartbeat. “And that, in a lot of ways, has kept us really grounded in the sense that we know what’s happening when they take our picture, that’s not the real thing. We know who we really are, and that it can be gone at any moment. And we feel lucky to still be making music without having to grow up, to just sit around with each other and go to different countries and record with legends and hook up with all these different talented people.” So many people, in fact, that it’s a good thing phones are no longer in rotary. Her nails never would’ve survived dialing all those long-distance numbers.

Set to a cheeky, off-kilter synth riff (even most of his bass lines were performed on keyboards, Kanal swears). “Hey Baby” is Stefani’s humorous study of backstage barnacles, acolytes dying to kiss the ring (either one). “I’m the one they feed upon,” she vamps with neo-Norma Desmond drama, truly baffled to be confronted by “a stranger in my face who says he knows my Mom and went to my high school.” Produced by Sly and Robbie – with raucous guest toasting from rude boy Bounty Killa – during a hard-partying, beer’n'rum glugging stay in Jamaica, the track is a sassy, brassy leap forward from Saturn’s awkwardly insecure “Ex-Girlfriend” (“I kinda always knew I’d end up your ex-girlfriend… Why’d you have to go and pick me?“). Fans of Stefani’s spunky “Spiderwebs”/”Just a Girl” from Tragic Kingdom probably cringed to hear her melt into uncertainty on such somber Saturn sonnets as “Dark Blue,” “Too Late,” “Simple Kind of Life” and the painfully blunt “Marry Me.” Those same listeners will rejoice to rediscover Stefani on Rock Steady, writing and singing with newfound confidence and class. Any mistreating male who crosses her now will come to with a throbbing jaw and a ring indentation as a reminder of exactly who KO’ed him – GWEN from NO DOUBT.

By all accounts, the Glen Ballard produced Return of Saturn was a real bear, a total emotional drain on the group. It posed a tough question: How do you go about topping a 15-million seller? Especially when your founder and key songwriter (Gwen’s Svengali brother Eric Stefani, who first forced her to sing as a scaredy-cat teen) has just quit to sketch cels for The Simpsons? So yes, Kanal shrugs. “Making that record was a very laborious process. The head-space we were in for the whole Saturn phase was extremely serious.” So last November, he, Stefani, guitarist Tom Dumont and drummer Adrian Young “sat down and said, ‘OK – we’re gonna give it another shot, make another record.’ We kinda made a decision to move ahead, but this time we were gonna remove some of the restrictions that we’d had previously. We opened ourselves up to trying anything for this record, just having fun with it. So last January, myself, Tom and Gwen sat down again and started writing.”

The words and music flowed. On one of her London jaunts to visit Rossdale, Stefani paused long enough to co-pen a daffy dub-echoed ditty with Dave Stewart, “Underneath It All.” For two Cars-kitschy compositions – “Don’t Let Me Down” and “Platinum Blonde Life” – No Doubt (Kanal, 31, and Stefani, 32, are New Wave boosters from way back) enlisted the Cars’ mastermind himself, Ric Ocasek, as producer. Madonna mainstay William Orbit oversaw the OMD-ish “Making Out”; Prince personnaly retooled the Paisley Park-polished “Waiting Room”; and Bristol Sound legend Nellee Hooper finished off five cuts, including the Lene Lovich-retro “Running.” “Love is like a punishment/ Homegirl here to represent,” Stefani deadpans in the dancehall title track, but tacks on an optimistic punch line: “Our love is rock steady, rock steady…”

Stefani had suffered writer’s block for Saturn “But the thing I learned from my Dave Stewart experience is that you can write a song in, like, 10 minutes,” she says. “I wrote ‘Underneath It All’ in an instant, just sat down and wrote it right then and there. And the Tony – who’d flown over to England, too – got super-excited about the idea of going to Jamaica to work with all these dancehall producers: Sly and Robbie, Steelie and Clevie. We had maybe five songs written at the time, but Tony made it happen. Next thing we know, we’re in Jamaica. It was magic.”

“We found the balance on this album,” is how Kanal sees it. “All of it came from a very organic place, it was super-spontaneous, but it was just fun. Every single song on it was fun to write; every time we sat down together to work on music, it was fun. And it’s brought certain things to the band that we didn’t have before, like a feeling that we’re gonna be around a little longer. Whereas on Tragic Kingdom, I think people really thought we were gonna be one-hit wonders.”

Sept. 11 found No Doubt mixing in London, where they’d rented a house next to Rossdale’s. Stunned by the Worl Trade Center disaster – and trapped in Britain with no way home – the musicians wondered if such an effervescent, bubblegum-chewy effort would sound glib in light of such grim events. They got over it. “I mean, this is what we do, and what we need to continue to do,” figures Kanal. “And you hope that the stuff you’re creating will provide some sort of relief or a… a…”

“Diversion?” Stefani offers, hopefully. “Music is so powerful and it’s such a gift that we have here; I’m actually thrilled to be creating it and it’s such and uplifting album. And whether this stuff happened on the 11th or not, people can still put their headphones on and have a little fun for a minute, maybe not taking anything too seriously.”

It’s a sentiment tat might appear Pollyanna-mushy coming from any other artist. But Stefani – with her big, innocent eyes and down-home delivery – somehow makes it sound earnest, honest, a little heartfelt wish that the feel-good milestone of No Doubt’s career will make a few despairing souls out there, well… feel good.

A week earlier: Gavin Rossdale sits in a record company conference room, anxiously drumming his fingers on the table. Rossdale’s got a new record himself to discuss (Golden State, with Bush), but Stefani is definitely on his mind.

He felt her pain in London (“It was really hard for her after the tragedy – she was torn with being with me over there and being with her family in America”); understands the misgivings that fueled “Ex-Girlfriend” (“It’s very difficult in this line of work to find stability, substance, because the demands are so great, coupled with the distance and shear loneliness – for anybody in a traveling band, you’re incredibly alone a lot of the time”); and sensed her need for commitment, possibly a family, in “Marry Me” (“Although I don’t know if now is the perfect time to be breeding – we’d be like ‘Welcome to the world, kids! Here are your antidotes!’ “). And you can hear it in the singer’s voice – after six years together, his love for Stefani seems genuine, unflagging. There is, ahem, no doubt.

And as most of Rock Steady’s sugary poetry spins on a Gwen/Gav, enduring-love axis, Stefani’s report card on their relationship is equally glowing. “Gavin is so sweet, and he has a great heart,” she beams dreamily. “And he’s had to prove himself to people his whole life, even to all my friends. But this has been a great year for me and Gavin, for the band, for everyone. We spent loads of time together because he did his record here in LA while we were working, then when we went to London to mix, he was there the same time we were – it was perfect.” Stefani suddenly startles Kanal again by stomping her spiky heel. “But I’m tellin’ ya, nobody’s fucking asked me to get married! Ever! It’s weird. And everywhere Gav goes, everybody is at him about the ring, the ring. And there is definitely a baby boom right now – have you noticed that? Or at least all of our friends are pregnant. Adrian’s having a baby, too. It’s the first No Doubt baby, and it’s gonna be on tour with us.”

Stefani has heard all the No Doubt gossip. Or rather, the surprising lack of it – the general profile is of some nice Orange County-bred, Los Angeles-relocated kids who made good while offending the absolute minimum of bystanders along the way. “And I’m glad people think that,” she says. “Sometimes I think we should roughen up and try to get a little more” – her scarlet nails slice through the air to designate quotation marks – “you know, ‘cooler.’ ”

“It’s true – it’s really rare that people are mean to us,” Kanal chimes in. “We’re really lucky and blessed that way. And I think the reason we’re somewhat grounded, as Gwen was saying earlier, is that it was nine years before Tragic Kingdom came out, which was when we first farted having commercial success… Waidaminnut!” he stops himself, midthought. “Did I just say ‘farted’?!”

Yup, Stefani nods, laughing hysterically while Kanal hides his face in his hands. “And people haven’t heard anything yet!” she gasps, a not-so-veiled tour bus reference. “But we really do try and be nice to everybody, because we were the alternative to the alternative for a long time. It was so weird when Tragic Kingdom came out and all of a sudden we were like the mainstream, because No Doubt had always been the exact opposite of whatever was popular. And now, with Rock Steady, all we feel is lucky; really lucky to be able to try on all those different hats.”

But it’s a real red-faced Kanal who gets the last word in. Sort of. “There was a really important point I was trying to make. But now I can’t remember what it was!”

What is it about No Doubt diva Gwen Stefani that makes her one of those “I wish she were my best friend” kind of girls? How about her amazing sense of style, killer voice and real-girl hang-ups? Yeah, she may be “just a girl,” but she’s rock’s reigning queen of real. And with her band’s new album, Return of Saturn, you’re guaranteed to get up and groove once again as Gwen goes off on everything from breakups to makeup. By Alexa Joy Sherman.

As No Doubt’s Gwen Stefani sits in her record label’s offices in LA, finishing off a plate of Chinese food, she dispels a major myth (and, no, it’s not that all girls are on a diet): You can’t take those fortune cookies seriously. “All your financial goals will be reached in 10 years,” she says, smiling as she reads from the slip of paper. The message is a little late, considering No Doubt’s last CD, Tragic Kingdom, sold, oh, about 15 million copies. And as Gwen sits there looking like a thrift-shop princess in a big, corduroy overcoat that’s almost the same color as her slightly faded pink-and-platinum ponytail, she tells us that, although she always wanted to be in a band, she hardly expected to be in one this huge. “I never had any goals that big!” she says. “I just wanted to be able to move out of my parents’ house.”

Mission accomplished. Gwen and the guys have certainly come a long way from their Orange County, CA, home, where a teenage Gwen spent a lot of time on the fringes trying to figure herself out. “I didn’t have a lot of friends in high school; it was mainly just me and my best girlfriend,” she admits. “I had no clue what I wanted to do with my life.” When she wasn’t doing laps for the swim team or struggling through maths class, Gwen was at home, making her own clothes and developing an over-the-top fashion style that her teenage fans, “Gwennabes,” later adopted. “When I hit puberty, I decided I didn’t want to look like anyone else in school,” she explains.

Even though Gwen was happy to be doing her own thing, it was her big brother, Eric, who helped her find her calling. “He was the cool older brother. He was really artistic, and I just lived through him,” she recalls. When he bought home a record by British ska band Madness, Gwen was hooked. “After I discovered music, I basically hung out with the rockabilly, ska and punk people,” she says. “We thought we were pretty cool, especially compared with the cheerleaders and jocks.” When Eric joined a band called No Doubt in 1987, Gwen tagged along to rehearsal and eventually found herself taking center stage as the lead singer. Even though Eric later left the band, Gwen and the guys – Tom, Adrian and Tony – have been a solid chart-topping unit for years now. “We’ve all become really good friends. We’d spend time together even if we didn’t work together,” says Gwen.

But that doesn’t mean it’s always been smooth sailing with the boys. Bassist Tony Kanal broke up with Gwen after they’d been together for seven years, which has fueled some songs penned by Gwen in the past. “In high school, I was so in love with Tony,” she gushes. “I used to drive across town to his school just to look at him. What an idiot! I was so weird!” But, she quickly points out, “I wasn’t a high-maintenance girlfriend. I was just intense and in love and I didn’t have any outside passions. I’ve since learned that you can’t find your happiness through someone else.” She’s also quick to add that the single “Ex-Girlfriend” is not about Tony – nor is it about her current boyfriend, Gavin Rossdale.

Gwen and Bush heartthrob Gavin have been going strong for more than four years now. Considering the spotlight they live under, they’ve kept their relationship pretty low profile. “It’s hard to be in a band and have a relationship,” she says. “I’m going to be so busy for the next few months that I’ll hardly get to see him.”

One thing that hasn’t been low profile, though, is Gwen status as a strong role model for girls and a trend-setting fashion icon. “It’s so funny that my clothes and my look have become a part of how people see the band. My clothes in the ‘Just a Girl’ video were what I wore to college that week, and I did my hair like that every day,” Gwen laughs. In fact she even admits, “A lot of my clothes are just what I wear to hide things I don’t like about my body. I wake up and think, Okay, what’s gonna make my butt look smaller today? I have the same issues as any girl.”

What about the metal mouth she sported at the VH1 Fashion Awards? “I’ve always wanted straight teeth and I finally had the money to do it,” she says. And the pink hair? “I did that when I was feeling frustrated while we were recording the album. I think I make big changes in my appearance when I’m depressed or going through something emotional.”

It’s that “I’m just like any other girl” attitude that makes Gwen seem so genuine. “Everything I do is just a personal choice,” she says. “I’ve learned that the more you are yourself and the more unique you are – to the extent that no one else is anything like you – the more powerful you are.” Spoken like the real-girl goddess we’ve always known her to be.

Tom Dumont launches more hooks for No Doubt’s Return of Saturn. By Kyle Swenson.

The moment the world got smashed over the head with No Doubt’s “Just a Girl” from 1996’s Tragic Kingdom, it was widely assumed the band was an overnight sensation. Not exactly.

The band formed in 1986, watched their major-label debut album flop in 1992, and logged years of recording an performing before its new wave/reggae/ska sound made a blip on the rock and roll radar.

In fact, as Tragic Kingdom was exploding towards number one on the charts, lead singer Gwen Stefani stated on the band’s Web site: “Last year, we were hanging by a thread. We were ready to quit and save ourselves from becoming a bunch of losers.”

But as unexpected as No Doubt’s success was, the reason for the band’s stardom is obvious. Once you hear a No Doubt song, the razor-sharp hooks are instantly mainlined to your brain, where they play in a constant loop. Return of Saturn [Interscope], is another hit machine–full of fluid ballads and up-tempo pop songs, with flavors of hip-hop, reggae, ska, and new wave.

Although it has big shoes to fill, Saturn should continue the pop revolution started by the 15-million-selling Tragic Kingdom. And No Doubt guitarist Tom Dumont is happy to share his insights on how the band created the super hooks that finally launched them off the ground.

What was your approach to tracking on this album?
A lot of the songs were tracked live – bass, drams, guitar, and a scratch vocal. Then I would go in and redo most of my parts. Sometimes it was really easy and straightforward – we’d get a sound in ten minutes – and other times we would spend all day working on a song and it wouldn’t come together. Having our producer Glen Ballard and engineer Alain Johannes – who is an amazing guitar player – there to bounce ideas off of was really helpful. They would yell out their approval when I was doing something good, and let me know if I was doing something that wasn’t cool. A lot of times, I would completely scrap what we had been rehearsing and make up new parts in the studio.

What would cause you to change a part you had already worked out?
I like the idea of seeing what Gwen and I can create spontaneously. On “Ex-Girlfriend,” for example, I came up with these weird transitions between the verse and chorus on the spot. Because of that, I could step out of the way of the bass line when I needed to and support the vocal. It’s like doing a painting with four other painters and I’m the last one to put my colors on.

Do the parts change again when you play live?
Yeah – recording a song is so different from playing it live. Playing live has always been our strongest point, so it’s important that the songs rock. But that doesn’t mean duplicating the album. It means tweaking things.

Like what?
Well, on “Magic’s in the Makeup” I layered so many guitar parts in the studio that I couldn’t do them all live. I can’t possibly play both acoustic and electric, or do two counterpoint lines at a certain part of the song – I have to find a way to simplify it all into one part. The same thing happened on our last album – “Don’t Speak” had this really lush acoustic guitar, which I could never do live. That song also has a classical-guitar solo, and onstage I would usually play it on an electric with a warm, Santana-style tone. So the song was a little less poppy, and it had a little more edge.

Without the benefit of all those studio layers, is it difficult making a guitar part sound powerful live?
Sometimes it’s hard, but in a live setting you can definitely make it work without having everything going on. If you have the melodic and emotional content there in one form or another, it will still work for the audience. We do have two other guys play live with us, covering horn parts, keyboards, and percussion. They both sing backup vocals, too, so there’s a lot being filled in. I would love to have one more guy onstage to fill up the guitar parts.

Do some songs ever not work?
Sure. We tried to do one of our B-sides on a club tour, and the guitar part was too insane – I couldn’t get it to work live. On the record, a noise gate was triggered to open and close by a metronome. As the gate opened, this echoey guitar would come through that was flanged and mixed with a weird, trippy delay. The part sounded like a sequencer, but I couldn’t replicate the sound live, and everyone was disappointed. I suppose I could have plugged into a digital delay and triggered a noise gate with our drummer’s hi-hat, but I’m not super big into using effects live.

Why not?
I feel it’s better to have a simple, pure guitar tone. We have horns and keyboards so there is a lot going on, and the subtleties of the guitar can get lost if I get too tricky with effects. I use a wah and a couple of other pedals, but 90% of the time it’s just straight electric guitar tones from the amp. I love players who can pull out all the effects and do it really well, like Alex Lifeson and Reeves Gabrels. But for me, it’s pretty much just guitar, wah, and amp.

What about effects in the studio?
I have a lot of pedals, but I didn’t use many on the album. We got some effects without pedals by using compressors in creative ways. In the verses of “Magic’s in the Makeup,” for example, there’s this little guitar line that is super-duper compressed with a ’60s tube compressor. You can hear the note breathing in this really trippy way. We did a similar thing in “Don’t Speak.” On the verses, we set up the compressor so that the harder I plucked, the quieter the note was – which is the reverse of how natural sound works. It forced me to play very gently. As soon as I plucked hard, the compressor would just close down the note and suck it in.

Is there a particular way you set up your amp?
On my Bandmaster I usually set the gain at 6 or 7, and the master at 2 or 3 so there’s a bit of grit to the tone. If I dig in and play hard, it breaks up and distorts, and if I back off and play gently, it cleans up. I like that middle ground. On my Soldano – which has overdrive for days – I have the gain at 3 or 4 and the master volume at 3. That saturated overdrive is really cool, but for the most part, I need something more subtle.

So you get most of your distortion from your amps?
Yeah – almost never from a pedal. I’m one of those purists. If one amp can’t do it, I’ll find another that can. The Fender Pro Junior is so cool. I can crank it to 8 and it overdrives perfectly. The Matchless, the Fender Bandmaster, and the Vox AC30 can do it, too. I’ve noticed that if you record with too much of that saturated overdrive, it actually makes the guitar tone sound smaller. The best kind of overdrive is like what you hear on an old AC/DC album – just an SG plugged into a Marshall head.

How did you record the acoustic intro in “Magic’s in the Makeup”?
I played this arpeggiated part once with a standard acoustic guitar, and then I doubled the part with a guitar strung with the octave strings of a 12-string. It’s a strange and beautiful sound. It’s like playing the part on a 12-string, but something about separating them into different tracks gives all this definition and sparkle to the plucked lines. We did the same thing on “Suspension Without Suspense.” Gwen decided to string one of her guitars that way, too, because it sounds so pretty.

What does Gwen’s guitar playing bring to the songwriting process?
She adds a really cool chemistry. She’s not as concerned with music theory as I am, so she comes up with progressions I would never write, and I love that.

There aren’t many guitar solos on Return of Saturn.
Going into it, I had this philosophy that I was going to try to make an album with no solos on it. I’m into this minimalist thing. It’s not that I’m against solos, but I guess because of my heavy metal past, I’ve been toning down that side of my playing for years. It doesn’t always fit stylistically. On the last album, there are a couple of solos where I kind of went off. This time I didn’t want to go, “Okay, time for the guitar solo.” I wanted to put in solos where they would really help the song.

How do you compose your solos?
The way I’ve always done solos is to improvise maybe five takes, and then listen to them and see if I can make a composite. I might say, “Man, I love the first bar of the first take, and the fourth bar of the second take. Let’s edit them into a single take.” Sometimes we would splice a solo together, and then I’d learn it and replay it in one take. But Pro Tools comps work great. It doesn’t sound like there’s any editing going on. “Magic’s in the Makeup” has a composite of two different solos and it’s pretty seamless.

How did you record that solo?
It was with the Guild Polara. The high end of that guitar is brilliant, and the low end is full. I played through my Fender Bandmaster head and a Matchless 2×10 cabinet. The solo is kind of like “Freebird” – there’s a bit of a cheese element to it, but I think it still works melodically within the song.

How did you record the album’s first single, “Ex-Girlfriend”?
That was the last song we wrote for the record, and the process was different from how we tracked the other songs. Most of the record was written on acoustic guitar, sitting in a room with Gwen and a tape recorder. It was really organic. But “Ex-Girlfriend” was different. We wanted to do a reggae-flavored song, and Gwen had a Tricky CD, so we found a song on there that had a cool beat. I recorded the groove into Steinberg Cubase [hard-disk recording software], and replicated the beat using drum samples. That’s how Dr. Dre makes records – he goes to old soul or funk records to find grooves. All the drum loops in there are Adrian [Young] playing drums through all kinds of weird guitar stomp-boxes strung together to create these trippy filter effects. For the acoustic part, Gwen just sang the line to me. I had my acoustic guitar miked with a Shure SM57 routed through an Avalon VT737 tube preamp. I recorded two tracks – one is a harmony to the other.

How did you get that nasty tremolo on “Bathwater”?
I played a hollowbody Guild Starfire III through my Fender Bandmaster with the Matchless cabinet. I cranked the gain to 8, and used the tremolo on the amp. I love that tone. I’ve listened to a fair amount of Reverend Horton Heat and I was trying to cop that attitude. I just wanted a real gritty, tremoloed, pseudo-rockabilly deal.

Pick a favorite guitar part on the album and tell me how you recorded it.
The song “Marry Me” has a couple of my favorite parts. There’s one electric part and one acoustic. The acoustic is an old ’40s Harmony. It comes out sounding pretty full-bodied on the record, but if you heard the guitar acoustically, it sounds kind of nasty and nasal. The acoustic lines were reminiscent of that Lauryn Hill song with Carlos Santana playing guitar ["To Zion" from The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill]. I was trying to get that vibe.

I recorded the electric part at the rehearsal studio when we were making demos. We used [Line 6%1 Amp Farm. That plug-in is amazing - it's really frightening. I just sat with the CryBaby set at a static point and improvised rhythms. It was one of those days I didn't feel like being there, so I took off and got a sandwich. I said to the producer. "Just edit together whatever you like out of my part." I came back and he had made this great little loop for the song. I love that I can filter my improvisations through the producer's sensibility, and he'll pick out what sounds good to him and make the loop. On one hand, it's a really lazy way to do a guitar part, but it's also a really cool way to collaborate.

How was recording this album different from the Tragic Kingdom sessions?
On the Tragic Kingdom album, we doubled so many guitar parts. It's a very dense record. On this record, I wanted the guitars to be more sparse. If I could get away with one guitar part for the song, I would.

The song "New" contains a signature No Doubt riff, similar to "Just a Girl" from the last album.
That song was recorded before the rest of the record, for the Go soundtrack. I used that Guild Polara, and we rented a Marshall and a Soldano, and the engineer blended the two to get the tone. The part is also doubled by a fat analog synth. The idea was to create something somewhere between Devo and the Cars - an angular, jagged line that percolates along. And there's this weird counterpoint - one line is an F [sharp] minor scale, going up F [sharp], G [sharp], A, B, and the alternating part goes down chromatically, starting with F [sharp].

What guitar players amaze you?
Greg Brown, who was on the first two Cake albums. We went on tour with them for a little while and he was my hero, because he played this Guild hollowbody through a 2×10 Silvertone amp with no effects. We were playing arenas and amphitheaters and he just plugged in – it was all coming from his fingers. He comes from a country style that’s kind of foreign to me. That’s why it dazzled me, because I grew up with heavy metal and hard rock. Before Greg, it was Alex Lifeson, Ritchie Blackmore, and Tony Iommi.

How would you advise someone to become a good rhythm player?
You definitely have to lock in your rhythm somewhere between the kick and the snare – the key is to find some kind of synchronization. You also have to listen to what the vocal is doing and support it. There were times on past albums where I played parts that walked all over the bass and vocal, and that’s not an effective way to drive a song. I love being aware of what everyone else is doing and finding parts that help lock down the groove. It’s all about supporting the song, and I find it’s more fun to work with the band.”

Space Gear

Guitars: Dumont says he has “a zillion” Hamers, including a Standard, Newport, and Eclipse 12-string electric. He also owns a Fender Jaguar, a Guild Polara and Starfire III, and a Rickenbacker 12-string electric.

Amps: Fender Pro Junior and Bandmaster, Matchless DC-30 and Clubman 35, Vox AC30, Soldano SLO100 head with a Fender Tonemaster cabinet, Marshall MS-4 Micro Stack, and Fender Mini-Twin.

Effects: Dunlop CryBaby and Uni-Vibe, MXR Phase 90 and flanger, Danelectro Dan-Echo.

Strings: Ernie Ball .010s.

Transcription source: http://www.accessmylibrary.com

Tired of Ska, Bored with bindis, and suffering from writers block, No Doubt looked back to the 80’s for inspiration, conjuring a new-wave fest that would do Missing Persons proud.
Now only if a certain person would propose…

In bed with Gwen Stefani! Bliss! Rapture! Total listener-contest dream come true!

That is, if you’ve haven’t already spent two years in a tour bus with Gwen Stefani. Or a thousand hours at soundchecks with Gwen Stefani. Or 18 months in recording studios with Gwen Stefani. Or untold nights in cramped, urine-smelling, graffiti-mottled backstage dressing rooms with Gwen Stefani.

“Feel free to remove your shoes, dude,” Stefani chides one bedmate. “‘Cause I do, like, sleep here.”

Arrayed upon their singer’s huge, Sleeping Beauty-meets-Kama Sutra four-poster, the males of No Doubt nonetheless seem quite content with their current arrangement, staged for a visiting video crew. Surrounded by scented candles, their backs against the mirrored headboard, drummer Adrian Young (in spotted cheetah coif), bassist Tony Kanal (newly bleached blond), and guitarist Tom Dumont (proudly untinted) lounge like the three stinky brothers of a pink-haired fairy princess, here in her Hollywood castle.

The cameraman asks which member will greet the viewers at home. “Tom, you should do it,” says Kanal. “What should I say?” asks Dumont. “Just take your cock out and throw it down.”

Dumont, who is wearing a brown argyle sweater, looks unlikely to perform this feat. (“The rest of the group, they have this entertainment ethic,” he says later, in the drawl of a philosophizing patrolman on Cops. “I love music, and I love playing guitar, but showmanship isn’t my strength.”)

Kanal is undeterred: “Cock’n'roll, yo!”

The bandmates are here to tape an intro for the premiere of their new single and video, “Ex-Girlfriend,” and their homey little bedroom tableau is the first pre-album publicity they’ve had to do in five years. That is, since the days when Stefani was blonde, Anaheim was home, and “ska” was considered a hot growth stock.

Much has changed since then. Homes have been bought, SUVs have been registered, and the group has labored for two years on a follow-up to their 15 million-selling ‘95 smash, Tragic Kingdom. The result, titled Return of Saturn, is a rambunctious and assured burst of new wave revivalism by people who clearly grew up within broadcast range of ’80s-era KROQ-and who are quite aware they aren’t kids anymore.

Fittingly, the video recasts the band as a fresh but familiar-looking rock entity: : kind of like the ‘96 Smashing Pumpkins, with a pinch of Garbage, a bit of Puffy, and a lot of fluorescent clothing. Like most No Doubt videos, the Hype Williams-directed, anime-inspired vignette also contains a wry autobiographical wink. It stars Stefani as a pink-cornrowed, kung-fu-fighting assassin whose assigned hit turns out to be her ex-boyfriend. “I play the ex-boyfriend,” says Kanal. “Surprise.”

Kanal has already endured the worst revenge a jilted girlfriend can exact: being made to perform her he-done-me-wrong songs before thousands. But Kanal has long aged out of the role of mute romantic villain-both in and outside No Doubt’s circle. Despite the fact that he caused their heroine enough heartache to power a platinum-selling weeper like “Don’t Speak,” today’s younger No Doubt fans, who dish in chat rooms like soap addicts, hardly consider Kanal the devil.

“Gavin is the devil,” jokes Nina Young, Adrian’s new wife and No Doubt’s former production coordinator. She is, of course, referencing Bush singer and Stefani boyfriend Gavin Rossdale. “The kids online, they want Gwen and Tony back together. To them, Gavin’s like the Yoko Ono of No Doubt.” (To which Rossdale replies, “Jesus Christ!”)

Concerned fans would probably be gratified to see the vibe here today. Under the gaze of numerous Gavin snapshots, here cuddles a group it would take one hell of a “Yoko” to shake. “Tony! I wanna be with Tony!” cries Stefani’s little niece Madeline, who clambers onto the bed.

“C’mere, little lamb,” Stefani calls from the middle, beckoning not her four-year-old roommate but her older, smaller one: Maggen, a shaggy, 16-year-old Lhasa apso with a ribboned topknot. The cast assembled, the ersatz but inseparable family called No Doubt is ready to greet the world. The cameraman asks them to move closer together.

“Come on, nerds,” Stefani coos brightly, pulling them tighter. “Come on! Come on, nerds!”

No Doubt’s members are all around 30; they’ve been together since high school-two facts that make them a special brand of modern-rock act. While most bands today resemble hockey teams or rapping Navy SEALs, this quartet recalls a not-so-distant era when men and women toiled together in the making of rock’n'roll songs-a time of bouncy, Anglophilic high jinx known as new wave. “We love music from the ’80s,” Kanal says. “Even the cheesiness of it. That was what we grew up with.” And like well-adjusted children of Simon LeBon, No Doubt wear the ’80s exceptionally well.

Produced by studio svengali Glen Ballard (Alanis, Aerosmith), Saturn has many of the sugar-high thrills we expect from the folks who brought us “Spiderwebs” and “Just a Girl.” But they’re colored by an audible wistfulness, the kind you might evoke by sticking an Adam Ant pin on your Fubu sweatshirt.

“The songs’ DNA contained a profound knowledge of ’80s pop,” Ballard says. “And I think there was an unconscious decision to key in on the sounds and textures that evoked what Gwen was writing about, in terms of a reflective look back.” Named for the astrologically designated moment of adulthood (a 30-year mark at which the planet Saturn realigns with its position at your birth), Return of Saturn is about pondering the past, taking stock, and freaking out. “Assessing my life / Second-guessing,” sings Stefani in “Artificial Sweetener.” Two songs later she’s getting Oingo-existential (“Six Feet Under”). And in both songs, the fretting about romance and destiny comes with so many Split Enz guitars, Cure bass lines, and Missing Persons keyboards that few survivors of the John Hughes administration will brave with a dry eye. But the members of No Doubt are actually quite far from the futuristic androgynous of the classic new wave era.

For proof of this, look no further than the album’s real surprise, “Simple Kind of Life.” In this beautifully crafted ballad, Stefani weighs dreams of motherhood against career. “All I needed was a simple man,” goes one verse, “so I could be a wife.” Five tracks later she’s pining for nuptials in “Marry Me,” pouting “I can’t help that I like to be kissed / And I wouldn’t mind if my name changed to Mrs.” (“Kind of a sledgehammer of a hint,” quips Rossdale.)

Girl Power? Jewel wouldn’t sing lines like these. But this is exactly the kind of unfashionable, unpunk sentiment No Doubt shouted out in the middle of grunge season, giving voice to legions of kids who knew that, deep down, they weren’t nearly as “alternative” as they dressed. “You can’t argue with Gwen’s passion for honesty and openness,” enthuses Rossdale. “It takes a lot to be that vulnerable and lay yourself open like that.” And this is something even the most jaded No Doubt detractor would have to admit: Makeup or not, these guys aren’t faking a thing.

Orange County, circa 1985: a sunny Reagan stronghold with a variety of disgruntled musical youth. Of these, the ska fan was probably the least imposing. Neither as icy as the goths nor as tough as the hardcores, ska kids were generally fun-loving and integrationist hipsters with good organizational skills and bad dance moves. While No Doubt has long outgrown this scene, its members are still imprinted with some of these traits.

Take Tony Kanal. A dreamy-eyed 29-year-old of Indian descent, he’s No Doubt’s second-prettiest member. (“You are a beautiful man,” reads a letter from a gay grad student, closing with a hopeful “P.S.: I have lots of muscles.”) Onstage, he’s a sweaty, head-bobbing dynamo. Offstage, he’s pretty far from a wild-livin’ rock dude. In his bedroom closet: ten pairs of carefully stacked, different-hued Dickies (“that’s what I always go for first”), a pile of neatly folded Beefy-T’s (“pick any out, you can’t go wrong”), some warm-up pants for sportier occasions, and several flavors of Puma. In his office bookshelf: The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success by Deepak Chopra and Power to Burn: Michael Ovitz and the New Business of Show Business. Kanal has been the band’s business manager and archivist for over a decade.

“This is where I spend most of my time,” he says, leading the way into the first-floor office of his still partially furnished Hollywood Hills home. By the desk is a framed poster from the movie Scarface. “I usually watch that or The Godfather: Part II before most business meetings,” he says, then laughs. “It really does work.” Pointing to another wall, he shows me a framed ticket stub from his first concert: Prince, “Purple Rain” tour, February 23, 1985. “Wear something purple,” it reads. “And I did,” Kanal confirms. Below it is another stub: the Untouchables, March 14, 1987, Kanal’s first ska show. Deprived of wardrobe suggestions, he showed up dressed a bit study-hall, fretted at the punkish crowd, and hit a thrift store to re-gear-up.

Within months of joining No Doubt in 1987, Kanal was managing the band and dating leader/songwriter Eric Stefani’s sister, who took over as singer when John Spence committed suicide. Then Dumont joined up, defecting from a heavy-metal band led by his sister. (“Yeah, I had a mullet,” he confesses. “But it was a more forward-thinking mullet.”) Last came Young, who soon established a rep as the band’s hardest partier and most frequently naked member. Such was the high-energy live act signed to Interscope for a self-titled, profoundly ignored debut in 1992-the year No Doubt’s story got truly interesting.

Just as the band was beginning work on their second album, two things happened. Eric decided to quit the band, and Tony decided to quit Gwen. These are precisely the events supposed to end bands’ histories, not begin them. But what follows is a classically ’90s tale of female empowerment: Girl grows up happy in the shadow of guys. Guys fail her. Girl finds hidden strengths. Girl rescues guys, goes platinum. “Suddenly, all the lyric-writing responsibility was kinda dropped into my lap,” Stefani says. “And I had all this stuff on my mind. Broken-heart stuff.” Which led to Tragic Kingdom’s “Just a Girl,” “Don’t Speak,” and “Happy Now?”- hits that blew these four friends into the stratosphere. And that is how Gwen Stefani, her bandmates, and her bindi helped pull America out of the grunge age. Which was a breeze, they say, compared to making their latest album.

“If you hit the hole in four you get a par,” says Adrian Young, holding forth on a Long Beach, California, golf course. “If you hit it in three it’s a birdy. Two, it’s an eagle. Five is a bogey.” According to this scale, I am currently hitting about a booty. Taking aim, I slice a ball deep into a bucolic wooded region. “It’s so strange that you don’t know anything about golf,” says Young. “Where did you grow up?”

In many ways, Young is the living embodiment of No Doubt’s ’50s-flavored So-Cal dream, his lifestyle more like an ring-a-ding anesthesiologist’s than a rock drummer’s. He plays golf, drives a black Mercedes, and lives with his wife in a huge house with orange trees and a well-stocked wooden bar. Only his cheetah ‘do and slightly maniacal eagerness conveys that Young is, as Stefani puts it, No Doubt’s “cool-meter,” he who kicks most ass.

We jump into the golf cart and tear off, two Big Gulp-sized cocktails jostling in convenient beverage holders. “I take this game way more seriously than I take anything in life,” Young says, cornering so sharply my margarita nearly upends. “It’s an obsessive thing. It makes me more mad than anything-any girl, any band fight. It’s just full of anguish.” He stops, grabs a club, and hits an impressive drive onto the green. “Go in…go in…motherfucker!”

The making of Return of Saturn held lots of its own brand of anguish for No Doubt. The process began in early ‘97, two months after the Tragic Kingdom tour ended. It continued, three producers and four false starts later, through January 2000. DMX would have put out five albums in that time.

“Here’s the thing about our band,” says Kanal. “We have really strong opinions individually. And you get 13 years into a band, and you learn not to step on other people’s sensitive areas.” While conducive to band harmony, this diplomacy makes efficient songwriting next to impossible.

After months of wheel-spinning, they decided to sack their longtime producer Matthew Wilder – too much a buddy now to effectively whipcrack. They met with Rick Rubin (Chili Peppers). They worked with ex-Talking Head Jerry Harrison, recording the Go soundtrack hit “New.” They recruited Michael Beinhorn (Marilyn Manson, Hole), who bowed out over scheduling conflicts.

And all the while, their singer and lyricist was slowly, gracefully sinking into despair. “I just couldn’t write words – I had nothing to say,” Stefani says. “It was one of the darkest phases of my life. And there was so much pressure, because everybody was waiting on me.” Finally they met producer Ballard – a calming, Zen-like presence and, significantly, someone who’d already ushered another ’90s rock woman into mega-platinum sales. Ballard reviewed songs, picked winners, and suggested arrangements. He also helped Stefani determine what she really wanted to say.

“Gwen kept repeating, ‘The person who wrote “Just a Girl” isn’t me anymore.’” he says. “She had to figure out where she was emotionally then, not six years earlier. And that’s always a hard thing to do.” Indeed, it must be hard to hear “Just a Girl” at 30 without noticing the lyrics’ extra layer of irony – especially when you’re out of the spotlight, back in your parents’ house, and feeling, as Stefani says, “like an old, fat tennis shoe.”

“I think I lost bits of myself when I was on tour,” she says. “I spent the last couple of years trying to find what was the real me, the real Gwen.” She got into Sylvia Plath. She studied the songwriting of Joni Mitchell. She went through rocky times with Rossdale. (“Ex-Girlfriend” is about him, not Kanal.)

Finally, she rediscovered the person who could make all this sadness and confusion tuneful. But Stefani didn’t exactly emerge from the experience full of heady soundbites on, say, the writer’s craft or journeys of self-discovery. This is how she describes the genesis of “Simple Kind of Life”: “I had just gotten my period so I was, like, real emotional? And then I just started playing these chords, and I was like, ‘Hey, I just wrote a song.’ And I went to play it for the guys and I was on the verge of tears, ’cause it was so emotional. And Glen just looked at me and was like, ‘That’s an amazing song.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, you think so?’ ”

Phrases like this got our sweet, open, slightly spacey California girl dissed six years ago, chided as a Valley Girl among the moody rock chicks. But set against neo-navel-barers like Christina Aguilera and Jessica Simpson, Stefani’s particular brand of frankness seems complicated, even mysterious. In person, she can come off girly, glamorous, or surprisingly tough – calling her friends “Poop” one minute and “Dude” the next. She’s shared rock stages with punks like the Vandals and Vogue spreads with movie stars like Heather Graham. In a way, today’s emphatically “strong women” like Lauryn Hill and Courtney Love make this bipolarity seem even more unusual.

“With us, it didn’t matter that I was a girl,” Stefani recalls of No Doubt’s early club years. “That was the whole point. I could still get up there amongst all the other punk-rock fuckin’ bands in Orange County and make the crowd go off just as hard.” Standing in the doorway of her Hollywood Hills house, Gwen Stefani takes time out for some acting – a little sense-memory exercise.

Having just posed for the cover of Young’s golf-mag-with-attitude, Schwing!, she’s wearing a gray zip-up hoodie, oversized khaki slacks, and a classically Gwen-ish found-fashion accessory: a white hairnet. “Okay,” she says, “you stand right there.” She’s about to re-create her immediate reaction to her current home. “I’ll show what I did when I first walked in.” She goes outside and shuts the door. While Stefani has taken some tentative forays into Hollywood, auditioning for roles in Fight Club and Girl, Interrupted, she is an inexperienced actor. Still, she brings great verve to the enterprise. She opens the door, walks in, stops, and gazes at the interior. “Oh my GAAAAAAAAAHD!” The crazy, hysterical scream of delight echoes against the stone walls. “It was just like that,” she says. “Well, almost that loud.”

Stefani’s dramatic Spanish-style chateau has a wrought-copper gate and Rapunzel-ready balconies. In the entryway stands a three-foot, blue-robed Virgin Mary, directly across the rotunda from a multi-armed Hindu goddess – a fitting icon combo for the nice Catholic girl who brought Indian forehead fashion to the mall. “I thought it would be good, ’cause it’s all girls living here, to have Mary right there to kinda greet us,” she says. “A little reminder to be good girls.”

The girls in question are Stefani, her sister Jill (a quiet 27-year-old Berkeley grad in art history), and Jill’s daughter Madeline. Her niece was born when Stefani was on tour and, like many little girls across the country, got to know her primarily from videos. Clearly a Gwen favorite, Madeline receives another shriek of delight as she comes running into the entryway. “Sissy!” the four-year-old calls, using the standard appellation for all household members. She is holding a pink, bear-shaped lollipop. “Look! I painted my sucker the same color as your hair!”

Stefani leads us through the living room, passing a curious array of pharmaceutical apparati: a distillation tube, beaker, and Erlenmeyer flask. “That’s a birthday present I got for Gavin,” Stefani explains. “Because his record’s called The Science of Things? And he has a song called ‘The Chemicals Between Us’? So I thought that would be a cute present.” Off in the kitchen, the phone rings. It’s for Gwen – whose reaction makes it pretty clear who it must be. “AAAGGGHH!” She clomps over on her high heels, head thrown back dramatically. “Hi!” she exclaims, grabbing the phone. “What’re you doing?” Silence. “Oh, that’s so cute!”

It is, of course, “Gav,” calling from Vienna. Rossdale has become an extended family member in No-Doubtland. He is, Stefani says, both a better cook and a better dresser than she is. (“He doesn’t let me wear bright yellow pants anymore.”) He often introduces her to new authors. He helps Tom Dumont’s schoolteacher girlfriend grade papers. (“Imagine if her students knew who was grading them!” Stefani says.) He even helps field phone calls from the Artist Formerly Known as Prince, mouthing “Do it! Do it!” as the reclusive pop genius called Stefani for a collaboration.

The Artist had first terrified No Doubt by attending one of their Minneapolis concerts, after which he invited these lifelong Prince obsessives back to his paisley pad to jam. “First of all, I do not jam,” Stefani says. “And I mean, he’s not like somebody you meet and walk away going, ‘Oh, he’s a normal person just like you and me-da-da-da.’ You walk away going, ‘That is the Artist Formerly Known as Prince!’”

Later, he modified and recorded the No Doubt-penned song “Waiting Room,” as yet unreleased. “It was so weird,” says Stefani. “Because it was Prince singing lyrics I had written about Gavin with music I had written with Tony.” The mind does indeed boggle. But No Doubt may be the only rock group in history that could make a surreal, vaguely incestuous entanglement between a British neo-grunge singer, a pink-haired rock diva, her ex-boyfriend bassist, and a five-foot, purple-hued, ambisexual pop genius seem normal – even…wholesome.

“Excuse me,” says the fabulous man with the Robin Leach accent. “We’re having an argument. “Do you…sing?” Our two unbidden guests are hovering over No Doubt’s table at Pastis, the newest Manhattan hotspot, the kind of super-chic place where Air is the Muzak, the busboys are flossin’, and everyone seems quite desperate to be perceived as somebody.

With her sparkly makeup and tightly woven pink braids, Gwen Stefani is clearly Somebody. Our friends just aren’t sure exactly who. “I sing,” Stefani says meekly. “I sing in the shower.” “You’re in a baaaahnd, aren’t you?” insists the visitor. “What’s the name of your baaaahnd?”

These questions evince a particularly poignant cluelessness, since Stefani’s band is, in fact, surrounding her. In a room filled with Prada, the boys’ attire includes a black jersey, an Abercrombie-looking button-down, and a Black Flag T-shirt. To the star-spotting fabulousie, they are invisible. To Stefani, though, they are, quite literally, an entire world.

After the inquiring minds wander back to the bar, the rest of No Doubt explodes with laughter. “Is that you, daaaahling,” says Kanal, almost head-butting Stefani. “Are you the one…the one with the baaaahnd?” Young asks. The four friends from Orange County recommence the fart noises and cartoon voices. “From the beginning, no matter who we played with, or who we hung out with, our band was always just its own little group,” Stefani says. “Like, its own little land or something. If I started something new today and looked for three other guys, and said, ‘Hey, we’re gonna do this for the next 13 years….’” Stefani trails off. “I can’t imagine it.”

A blur of Gucci and pashmina whirling behind her, she still seems a bit incredulous. “But somehow, you know, it happened.”

With thanks to Mike McKeaney of ND Universe

With her Minnie Mouse voice, crop tops and Indian-influenced make-up, Gwen Stefani became an unlikely American icon. Yet, amid all the acclaim, the lead singer of No Doubt has been tortured by self-loathing and broken relationships. By Emma Forrest

Every so often there is a celebrity so very beautiful and so very blonde that she inspires not only gossip but also lookalikes. In the Forties, factory owners requested that Veronica Lake change her signature eye-covering tresses because they were causing accidents in the workplace. In the Eighties, concerned mothers, the Far Right and even the Pope voiced their disgust at a new singing sensation called Madonna, who was causing girls to wear bras as outerwear and crucifixes hanging down in barely existent cleavage.

In 1996, a ska-tinged Californian band broke the charts worldwide after a decade of trying. Propelled by the hit Just a Girl and the ballad Don’t Speak, No Doubt sold more than 11 million records in the US alone.

While bassist Tony Kanal, drummer Adrian Young and guitarist Tom Dumont watched in bemusement, their singer, Gwen Stefani, became America’s sweetheart.

Right now, scrunched up on a sofa in Manhattan’s Four Seasons hotel, Stefani herself looks like a drag queen. ‘Yep, me and my make-up artist are rocking the drag-queen thing at the moment,’ she admits. Her once blonde hair is in cerise corn-rows, tight against her scalp. Her eyebrows have been removed and replaced with stark black lines. There is a glittery tear painted in pencil beneath her eye. Her lipstick is purple red, with a thick black outline. Her skin and eyes are dead. She speaks slowly, almost painfully, as if struggling to stay awake. Her sentences trail off, as she tucks her feet under her and snuggles into an oversize silver coat.

For an acknowledged beauty, she looks pretty terrible, as if she’s been sleeping in her make-up for weeks.

Not like a person about to go the gym, which is how she signs off each conversation we go on to have. She looks like a person unhappy in her heart, a beautiful girl wanting to look in the mirror and have visual confirmation of how disgusting she feels inside. Later listening to the tape of our conversation, I can’t help noticing how many times she says the word ‘ugly’.

Acute anecdote will begin, ‘This sweetest little girl came up to me all excited and told me how much she loved me and how beautiful she thinks I am’ and will end with the coda ‘which is crazy, because I was feeling so ugly.’

‘I remember waking up the morning of my 29th birthday and I knew I was going out to dinner with the band, so I spent an hour scrubbing myself, trying to get the ugliness off. And I dressed accordingly, in a stretch waistband skirt because I felt so fat. Then it turned out that they had planned a huge surprise birthday party. And I had to be fat and ugly and turn 29 in front of everyone!’

No Doubt’s new album, Return of Saturn, is based, she says, on the notion that for the first 29 years of someone’s life (the same time it takes the planet Saturn to orbit the sun), a person is only beginning to understand themselves.

‘I thought, “Hmm, maybe that’s what I’m going through. Maybe that’s why I feel so crap.” ‘

I ask how the crapness manifested itself. ‘I was not happy on a daily basis. Before if I was depressed, I would eat ice-cream. But in the past few years that hasn’t worked. I’ve felt in a rut and sluggish. I definitely came off tour saying don’t look at me. I felt like an old tennis shoe, all used up. I still get embarrassed about sitting and singing in the studio in front of the band, who I’ve known for 13 years. I was like “don’t look at me”.’

The less she wanted people to see her, the more extreme her make-up became, until it was practically Kabuki. The first thing she did when she turned 30 was have braces put in. She wore them proudly to the MTV awards. She didn’t even need them.

‘I turned 30 and I just wanted to be a kid again.’

Trying to picture her without the dark lipliner and corn-rows, I ask her if she would be prepared to look bad in order just to look different. She grins through teeth tinged grey by the reflection of her blue-red lipstick.

‘Lots of times I do that. I mean, braces, for goodness sake. I just thought, “F- it. I look bad. So what?” ‘

Stefani sighs. ‘I definitely was carrying an extra 10lb the past two years. I didn’t know why it was there, but I knew I couldn’t get rid of it. I think it was depression? or protection.’

A thought strikes her. ‘The night Tony broke up with me. I put braids in my hair.’

Guitarist Tom Dumont sits in on our first meeting, ostensibly because the band is keen to be recognised as a musical outfit rather than mere back-up for Stefani. But he is also there to deflect questions about her complicated relationship with bassist Tony Kanal and her current turbulent on-off romance with Bush frontman Gavin Rossdale.

She and London-born Kanal were together for seven years before he broke up with her. It was Kanal’s Indian mother who inspired Gwen’s notorious bindi fixation. The singer is not supposed to speak about the aftermath of the relationship that inspired their breakthrough album, Tragic Kingdom, in 1997. Like Lindsay Buckingham to Stefani’s Stevie Nicks, Kanal spent the past two-and-a-half years on the road, performing songs about how he had all but destroyed her.

If Stefani looks haggard, Kanal is a picture of bullish good health. There is something of a young Brando quality about him. In a Details magazine interview published after they had just split up, Stefani had revealed that she still pounced on Kanal in the tour bus bed and tried to get him to make out with her. His response? ‘Get off me!’

‘Imagine, he was my best friend. Tony was so much more than just my lover. I depended on him for my happiness. When he confessed that he needed more space and that he didn’t think we were going to make it? I thought, “You can’t say that to me. You’re my best friend. You’re taking my life away from me.” ‘

Kanal, for his part, when I asked him later that afternoon about the potential difficulties of touring with an ex-girlfriend said, ‘The greatness of the songs outweighed any weirdness.’

Dumont becomes uncomfortable when Stefani begins to describe how a temporary break up with Rossdale inspired the new album’s strongest song and debut single, Ex-Girlfriend, with its heartfelt, hopeless chorus, ‘I kind of always knew I’d end up your ex-girlfriend. I hope I hold a special place with the rest of them.’

Stefani is surprisingly frank about what she sees as her shortcomings. ‘I’m insecure and jealous and paranoid. I just want to be worshipped. I just want to be cuter than them and everyone else. Girls get so paranoid about the fact that there were people before them that their boyfriend could possibly have cared about. I don’t want to look like anyone else and I don’t want to be on a list.’

There’s something especially awful about watching a strong, sassy pony of a girl break her heart over a man, and exhilarating as the tune is, the lyrics are incredibly raw. Another standout track is Simple Kind of Life. A paean to a suburban, married life, it begins with the admission that ‘All these simple things are simply too complicated for my life’ and ends with the plaintive whisper, ‘You look like you’d make a good dad.’

The songs from Tragic Kingdom provided a hook-laden, pop savvy antidote to the American musical landscape at the time. Bush, a third-rate Nirvana who found massive Stateside success due, in large part, to Rossdale’s pin-up boy image. The two bands were diametric musical opposites, but in 1997 No Doubt agreed to go on tour as Bush’s supporting act. Stefani and Rossdale became lovers.

‘We were on the same label,’ says Kanal, ‘and they thought it was good exposure for us, which it was. And Gwen’s really glad we did it,’ he whispers slyly.

Of the emotional menage a trois that resulted from Stefani and Rossdale’s touring relationship, she says, ‘I’m not gonna say it’s been easy. But me and Gavin want it to work so much. To tell the truth, I’m way less cool about his ex-girlfriends than he is about Tony.’

Asked in a recent interview if he was keen to have kids with Stefani, Rossdale responded, ‘Well, you really do have to find the right person before you do that.’ The implication being that a 30-year-old woman with pink hair and braces on her teeth might not be the one.

Between our first and second interview, I bump into Stefani and Kanal during New York fashion week. They are front-row centre at Vivienne Westwood. Stefani is wearing a silver leopard-print dress that goes down to her ankles, up to her neck and covers her arms. It looks pretty itchy, and fashion writers nearby turn their noses up at it. But the photographers crowd round her, snapping for so long that the show is delayed.

‘Who was the girl with the pink hair?’ asks a woman who had rushed to take her photo.

Gwen Stefani from No Doubt.

‘Will my daughter be proud of me?’

Yes. I say hello to Kanal, who seems suspicious as to why I’m there. Then I wave to Stefani.

‘Oh, hey! Hey, how are you? Tony, look who it is!’

Today she is all exclamation, whereas the night before she had been sentences half finished, half hearted. Of course, this could be a different kind of melancholy – one that dresses to the nines for high-profile appearances at shows, who waves and smiles, and greets the press with good grace.

Stefani has always been very accessible, a cartoony kind of icon rather than sex symbol, as charming and tame as a Blackpool postcard. At the beginning of her fame in 1997, Stefani dominated MTV with the same rock-hard body,

Minnie Mouse voice, strong, Italian face and Lana Turner bleach job as Madonna. But where Madonna was then in her genteel, pseudo-British phase, Stefani was a pogoing, sweating, crop-top-wearing Tasmanian Devil of a performer. She made her own punk-meets-Vegas-showgirl costumes and wore a trademark bindi on her forehead. Everywhere they played,

Stefani would look into the audience and see little girls (‘babies!’ she calls them) dressed just like her. Madonna had left her young fans long ago in pursuit of respect, post-feminist theory, kinky sex as artistic expression.

Looking at her smiling for the press, I was reminded of a question I’d asked her at the Four Seasons. What did she think of the dichotomy of being rock’s number one Love Goddess, adored by the crowd, yet unlucky in personal relationships. She had blinked her dark eyes several times until the panda make-up began to smudge. For a moment the glittery fake, drag-queen tear beneath her eye looked alarmingly real.

Like Anaheim, superstardom is a weird place to come from by Dave Wielenga

Three small orange trees grow along the curb in front of her stately mansion in an old-money neighborhood above Los Angeles, and the bright pink that has replaced brassy platinum as her hot new hair color glows all the way down to her scalp. No, Gwen Stefani has not forgotten her roots. But it’s going on five years since No Doubt, one of Orange County’s most enduring and identifiably local bands, experienced its overnight international sensation. Since then has come the 15 million-selling CD, the sold-out global tour, the fan zines and Web sites and MTV awards, the weekly photographic updates in Rolling Stone on every change of clothes, boyfriend or party itinerary—all of it laced with just enough rags-to-riches pathos and angst to green light an upcoming VH-1 Behind the Music special, which will be synergistically broadcast in April to coincide with the release of the band’s new album. By now, Stefani has been a bona fide pop Tinkerbell for so long that it’s sometimes hard to believe she was ever that just-a-girl who grew up near Disneyland. Her faithful little doggie—a 15-year-old Lhasa apso named Maggen that is one year older than the band—is still at her side, Toto-and-Dorothy-style. But the Oz they inhabit clearly isn’t Anaheim anymore. When No Doubt’s tour stopped for two nights at the Pond a couple of years ago, Stefani’s parents visited her in a hotel. “Something happens to you when you travel the world and embrace everything,” Stefani acknowledges. “Suddenly, you realize that the small, little back yard you came from is such a . . . like . . . Anaheim is such a weird place to come from.”

Of course, that seemed to be the point of Tragic Kingdom, the 1995 CD that rewarded No Doubt’s eight-year slog through the music business with the many-edged gift of sudden superstardom. The album title was a local cliché, a deft spin on Disneyland’s a.k.a. that emphasized the jading toll taken on the real people who live just outside the Happiest Place on Earth. The cover—a collection of photographs, including an Anaheim City Limits sign—drew from the stylized labels that used to adorn orange crates and delivered a powerful visual summary of the hollowness of Orange County’s agri-rural values in the face of sprawling post-punk suburban pavement. Beneath a picture of sun-kissed Gwen adorned in a shimmering cheerleader outfit and proudly holding a rotten orange swarming with green flies in her scalding red fingernails were the words “Bought and Sold Out in U.S.A.” Beyond the bitterness, however, the music somehow celebrated.

The very-long-awaited new album, Return of Saturn, again drips with disillusionment, although through themes that are at once more universal and more personal. It seems like the obvious, seamless next step for the band—and it’s unquestionably the final disconnect with its ska roots. Stefani’s powerful voice still leads the way but has occasion to explore more nuance, often bobbing and weaving among expertly layered arrangements of far-flung snippets of ’80s and ’90s pop. The lyrics are improved, too, although almost relentlessly under the weather. Every song paints the picture of a woman struggling with her own dark introspection, putting on the best possible face while the rest of the world parties by.

Turns out that’s the point of Return of Saturn, too. The title references the 29 years it takes Saturn to revolve around the sun and compares it to the amount of time it takes a person to truly begin to understand him- or herself. Stefani was drawn to the metaphor by a long bout of what’s-it-all-about, got-to-get-it-together depression that she experienced after she became a star just before turning 30. “I was very excited that I found a title for my disease,” Stefani says with a laugh. “It’s sick, but it’s true.” The cover is a sensational collage by the artist LaChappelle, filled with elements—tubes of lipstick, a wedding cake, a dial pack of birth control pills—that signify each of the album’s 14 songs, which have titles like “Magic’s in the Makeup,” “Marry Me,” “Six Feet Under” and the first breakout single, already a hit, “Ex-Girlfriend.”

“Not to say we’re any better than anybody else,” says Stefani, “but Tragic Kingdom was all about being an Orange County band—you know, like, screw LA and screw everything else. ‘Cause, you know, that’s what we were. And we were describing it. But . . . I don’t know how to talk about this. . . . I don’t think about it too much . . . but we got to go from being kinda like the Orange County garage band to being in India and playing for thousands of people on a handmade stage. And when you realize there’s so much more out there—other places, other people, other cultures—well, your eyes get opened.”

On most mornings during the past two years, Stefani’s eyes have opened in her multimillion-dollar home of gray stone and iron fencing. It’s a veritable palace of quaint design and quirky luxury, not unlike the Sleeping Beauty castle, with a modern security system subbing for the drawbridge and moat. She moved in after about three years of nonstop touring in support of Tragic Kingdom—and, factoring in No Doubt’s incessant clubbing before that, some 11 years of near-constant performing. The elegant estate is situated in a quiet neighborhood full of them, on a hillside about equidistant between the Greek Theater in grand old Griffith Park and the Figaro Café, the new coffeehouse and bakery in the gentrified funkiness of Los Feliz.

On this morning, Stefani is sitting demurely against the arm of an antique couch that is situated in the center of a dark parlor located just off a high-ceilinged foyer that feels so medieval it ought to be lit with torches. She’s wearing white wedgie shoes, tight blue jeans, and a loose and shoulder-baring blue-cotton blouse. Her hair is pulled back into a pink ponytail. Her makeup is perfect. “I got out of the bathtub 15 minutes ago,” she says, chuckling, “so I think I did all right.” She looks pretty. Tony Kanal, her long-ago beau and still the No Doubt bassist, is at her side, sniffling through a bout with the flu. Next room over, her sister and her publicist are laughing in the kitchen. Out back, some guys have just shown up to clean the pool.

“We were so fulfilled coming off that world tour,” Stefani recalls, steering the conversation back toward the subject kind of wistfully. She is squinting out the window into the glaring gray of a barely overcast morning, which lights the burgundy-toned room like a TV with the sound down. It’s a strangely meditative ambiance, lush and gloomy and campy all at once, and it seems to involuntarily channel brighter memories. “I remember a show in Spain, far into the tour, where we were at this low point with all of us just not getting along,” Stefani says, getting more energetic, “and we played for just the most fantastic, passionate crowd you could ever hope for, full of little girls dressed up like me, where all these Spanish-speaking people knew every word to every one of our songs. It was like this big slap in the face, like ‘Oh, my God! We’ve affected some people around the world!’ It makes you have this totally grateful and rewarding feeling.”

Stefani pauses for a moment, and when she resumes, she’s speaking quietly again. “We’ve gotten to be so many things,” she says, smiling warmly, talking almost absently. “You know what I mean?”

And, of course, we don’t.

The swollen, burning, trademarked sacred heart that dominates the décor at the House of Blues was a pretty apt symbol for the vulnerability that No Doubt was feeling when the group bounded onstage at the sweaty Sunset Strip club—packed shoulder-to-shoulder and chest-to-back—for a hastily arranged show on Oct. 6, 1999. Their new album was very late, and the concert was part of a minitour of small West Coast venues that marked the end of an 18-month performing hiatus.

“It was very difficult to go out there after such a long time,” recalls Stefani. “I looked out at the crowd and thought, ‘What am I doing here?’”

Questions about No Doubt’s pace and direction had been swirling for a while. For the first time in a career that spanned 14 years and three albums, millions of people were anxiously awaiting the band’s new music. And waiting and waiting. Meanwhile, there were rumors that work on the CD wasn’t going well. Hoping to facilitate the creative process, the band had been practically living together in a rented home in the Hollywood Hills and according to various reports had composed between 30 and 50 songs. Nonetheless, they had mowed through more than a half-dozen release dates, three big-name producers and at least two album titles. And the essence of the project was still unclear.

“It was really hard for us, a time when we had to prove to ourselves that we could sort of grow up as songwriters —that we could really improve our craft,” Stefani recalls. “Because it’s not like, ‘Uh, excuse me, I’m going to go write a song.’ Especially for me and Tony because it’s harder for me to write on bass than with chords, where it’s a little more apparent what melody to pick. It got intense. Tony would be like, ‘Come on, Gwen! Come on! Come on!’ And I’m practically crying, ‘I don’t know! Nothing’s coming out! I’m crap! Everything’s crap!’”

Stefani shakes her head and then smiles. “And the next thing you know, we wrote ‘Six Feet Under.’” She turns to Kanal, who is sitting quietly next to her on the couch, and rouses him from his flu-medication funk. “Remember when we wrote that? It was just a nightmare! And then it ended up being a pretty cool song.”

Kanal stirs to life as he remembers that instance—and more. “We would go into the studio, record a bunch of stuff, then kind of look at ourselves after the whole recording situation and say, ‘Damn, this is just not ready yet.’ We need to go back and write more songs,’” Kanal says. “We discovered we needed to have an abundance of songs to pick from. Every time we thought we were done, we would listen to the music we just recorded and say, ‘You know what? We need maybe one more song.’”

Sometimes it wasn’t only members of the band who were saying it. The record company apparently rejected a few versions of the album that the band considered complete. Meanwhile, people in the industry were speculating about what the long downtime might do to No Doubt’s marketability, wondering whether the band’s fan base might disintegrate.

“Bottom line, the effect of long gaps between releases is usually bad,” says Tess Taylor of the National Association of Record Industry Professionals. “Obviously, you want quality control—you don’t want to be throwing a new album into the market every six months. But anything in excess of two or three years, given how consumer tastes change, is not good. How can it be good? There were 30,000 albums released in the U.S. last year; that’s a lot of other bands competing for the same consumer dollars.”

But the flip side of consumer loyalty is quality musical productivity. Big-name acts these days don’t exactly keep the kind of pace set by the Beatles, who released five albums during their breakthrough year of 1964. Clearly, it’s a different business now—for the artists, for the record company and for the fans.

Pete Howard, publisher and editor of the respected CD-preview magazine Ice, generalizes that there is typically a two-year window of opportunity.

“About a year after a hit album, the window opens,” he says. “After about three years, it’s getting pretty closed again.”

It will be nearly five years between releases for No Doubt if Return of Saturn really does land in record stores on April 11.

“They’re at the outer edge,” Howard says. “There’ll always be a certain segment of the music audience waiting for their next effort, but with each succeeding year, the initial impact has less carry-over. Because of Gwen Stefani’s star power—and the fact that she’s stayed in the public eye—there is probably a perception that No Doubt has been more active than it has. I would think they are a shoo-in for 2 million. It would have to be a pretty bad record not to.”

No Doubt insists that outside pressure, whether artistic or commercial, did not play a major role in the process of creating its new album.

“I would say we had a couple of, um, false starts,” says Kanal, putting a delicately diplomatic spin on the band’s split with Tragic Kingdom producer Matthew Wilder after seven tracks had been completed and the sudden arrival and departure of Michael Beinhorn, who has produced big-selling albums by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Soundgarden, Hole and Marilyn Manson. One song from their work with Jerry Harrison, formerly of the Talking Heads, eventually made it to the new album. But the sessions didn’t become truly productive until Alanis Morissette’s producer, Glen Ballard, finally came onboard. Kanal says, “When Glen came into the project, with all his knowledge of producing and arranging, he said, ‘Let’s pick out the best songs and focus on those.’ Together, we took those songs to the next level.”

At this level, say Kanal and Stefani, they won’t judge the success of the music they have made strictly by units sold, even if the music business does.

“Those are unrealistic expectations, and you do your best to keep them as far away from you as possible,” says Kanal. “If our previous success afforded us anything, it was the means to make a record the way we wanted to make it—the financial means and also the opportunity to keep the record company at a distance so we could really be creative for two years. That was important. We’ve never had that kind of chance before.”

Whatever the stresses of this process, says Stefani, they pale in comparison to the days when No Doubt had to squeeze writing and recording and performing amid the responsibilities of school and work and the looming possibility that being a band might someday become impossible. “We used to feel so guilty for putting so much time into the band—like, okay, it’s already been nine years, you know?” she says with a laugh, and saying the number aloud seems to amaze her a little. “It was definitely a what-am-I-going-to-be-when-I-grow-up kind of thing. And the success of Tragic Kingdom allowed us to kind of not grow up—or to grow up as songwriters. We didn’t have to think, ‘Shoot, after I write that song, I better go study so I can make sure I have a future.’ It was kinda rad that way.”

But while they were confronting the challenges of becoming better songwriters, singers and musicians, weren’t the masses of expectant fans lingering somewhere in the backs of their minds?

“No, they weren’t—sorry about that,” says Stefani, shrugging apologetically. “Kind of in a selfish way, no, we weren’t thinking about them.”

“We’re not really talented enough to manufacture something that would make other people happy,” says Kanal. “Whatever comes out, comes out—and then you just hope people relate to it.”

No Doubt brought exactly that kind of full-speed-ahead surrender to its comeback show at the House of Blues. Stefani careened onstage like an acid-laced vision of Marilyn Monroe, her neon hair blown up into a helium bouffant, her aerobics-class kicks thrusting from beneath a slitted overcoat trimmed and cuffed in tacky fuzz. Behind her, the pogoing band did their green-and-orange jump suits proud. The crowd, roaring with approval, bounced right along. When Stefani launched into the opening vocals of a song so brand-new it is called “New,” the crowd went even wilder. As if to compare responses between new and old, Stefani next fell back on “Sunday Morning” from Tragic Kingdom and followed up by taking another fresh number, “Bathwater,” out for a spin.

Then, while catching her breath and making a little small talk after about 20 minutes of unrestrained emotion, Stefani suddenly asked the audience a remarkable, revelatory question: “Do you mind if we play new songs for you? We’ve been gone for a year and a half, trying to make a really good record for you. If we play a couple more of them, would you mind very much?”

The crowd gushed its okay.

A few months later, when Stefani is reminded of this—the night the star asked the audience for permission to perform—she responds with an embarrassed squeal. “I guess I didn’t really think of how that sounded,” she says. But as she mulls it over, Stefani concludes she is comfortable with her request. “I just know that as a fan, I like to hear the songs I like to hear, and sometimes it can be disappointing to hear new songs. Sometimes it can be exciting, but at the same time, it always takes a while. I felt real excited about my new songs, but I didn’t want to force them on anybody, you know what I mean?”

And, come to think of it, we might.

So, how does it feel to live a dream?

Stefani twists her face into something approaching disgust when presented with the question.

“How weird!” she scoffs. “Because it wasn’t even a dream.”

Sensing her answer didn’t take, she looks to Kanal for backup.

“We were too conservative, too cautious, to even expect it,” he affirms.

“To even dream it,” Stefani chips in. “At this level? No way!”

Her vehemence begins to ignite Kanal’s laughter.

“He’s laughing because it’s a joke!” Stefani says, starting to break up a bit herself. “I mean, we fooled everyone.”

As an example, Stefani cites the success of “Ex-Girlfriend,” the lead song from Return of Saturn, which raced straight into heavy rotation when it was released to radio on Jan. 19.

“That was the very last song we wrote for this record, totally last minute, after we thought we were done, because somebody thought we needed one more upbeat song,” says Stefani, who acknowledges with irony that the song is an autobiographical account of a rough spot in her bumpy relationship with her longtime boyfriend, Gavin Rossdale of Bush. “And it ends up being the first single.”

And suddenly the distinction she’s making becomes clearer: it’s not that No Doubt hasn’t worked incredibly hard for its success, but that the band has never known exactly which work—if any—was going to be rewarded.

“We’re not rock stars,” Stefani says. “The thing that happened to us is we were in this band with our friends and we made this record. It was something we couldn’t help doing—being friends, making this record—because it was a passion. And thank God this step, this big success, didn’t come for nine years, whatever the reason. It’s kept our feet on the ground in a lot of ways. We know how easy it can come and how easy it can go.”

Of course, that’s life. But coming to the realization that the highs and lows of our existence aren’t necessarily tied to a formula of cause and effect was unsettling for Stefani when she found herself at the top. She sank into a suffocating depression.

“I definitely needed some oxygen the past couple of years,” Stefani says weakly. “It’s been a hard time for me, on a personal note. I don’t know if it was just the timing of my life or the comedown after the tour or the fact that none of this matches what I grew up expecting to be. I assumed I’d be married with children by now. I’m not, and there are no immediate plans for that because I’m committed to this band right now, so it definitely was confusing, you know? Like, which Gwen is the real Gwen? Why is suddenly everything that I thought was going to be my life now becoming the complicated things in my life? How did I get to this point?”

Stefani laughs self-consciously.

“But I feel so much lighter now. I think it was a transitional phase. I feel I’ve kind of come out the other side, thank God,” she continues. “Because I never really was the depressive type. I was always more like the happy-go-lucky and passive type, where everything kind of bounced off me. And when I got depressed, I got scared that this was going to be me—like, I finally grew up, and this is who I am now! Oh, no! But I don’t feel like that anymore.”

With recording finally wrapped up on Return of Saturn, preparations are underway to promote the album. The band just finished 10 days of interviews with the international media. The first tour, a three-week swing through 10 U.S. cities, begins March 24 in Chicago and visits the Universal Amphitheater on April 14. And as she lingers a few weeks between accomplishment and anticipation, Stefani says she is happy.

“This time is a magic time because the record hasn’t come out yet, but we have fulfilled our goal of finishing it and everybody feels so proud of what we did,” she says. “We don’t know what could happen. Like, it could fail or it could do well or people could just slice it up or they could love it. So this is our time right now to just go, ‘Wow!’ You know what I mean?”