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