On the second night of No Doubt’s new tour, Gwen Stefani looked into the sea of fans and screamed, “I fucking love this song!” before launching into “It’s My Life.” It’s the band’s first time on the road since 2004, and the adrenaline is pumping: Stefani also climbed a lighting rig and busted out a set of push-ups during the show, which highlighted the group’s hits. “We’re a live band — we had to get out there and reconnect onstage,” says bassist Tony Kanal, who filled usin on the band’s 55-date tour.

Why tour without a new CD?
We need to find our muse — that’s what this tour is for. Before we made Rock Steady, we has so much fun on the road — having dance parties — that we got excited about dancehall and went to Jamaica to record. When we started wrting our new album, the inspiration was missing, so we decided to get out and play.

Have you written any new tunes?
There’s tons of ideas, but we’re not far enough along to play anything live. I put a studio on my bus, so whenever there’s a long drive, I’ll invite my bandmates on board to work on music.

How is touring now that your bandmates all have kids?
It’s a totally different dynamic — there are five babies out there! Gwen and the guys have cribs on their buses; the afterparty room with the DJ rig and bar is being turned into a romper room.

What’s it like to play old songs?
Tragic Kingdom songs like “Happy Now?” and “End It On This” bring back memories. We’re so lucky to be doing this after 23 years. I know it’s difficult for other bands, but not for us. We actually like each other.

Thanks to Jenny at BSO for the transcription!

Gwen Stefani’s own brand of sexy-cool has made her a style icon. With her first solo album and a line of clothes she’s designing herself, Stefani races into the future. Here, the songstress talks about staying true to herself through the firestorm of fame, her hope for a baby, and the real reason she wears those big, baggy jeans. By Susan Swimmer.

After years of fronting the Grammy-award-winning band No Doubt, Gwen Stefani decided it was time to branch out. She’s “on fire right now,” and who can argue? Her first solo album, a hip-hop inspired dance fest called Love. Angel. Music. Baby, was released in November 2004 and has already gone platinum; she’s just completed a European tour; the clothing line she designs, called L.A.M.B for short, is wildly successful; and a line of accessories and T-shirts called Harajuku Lovers – directly tied to her album – is set to launch this fall. It’s no wonder Stefani’s quirky sense of cool is now the backbone of her very own fashion empire – her sexy-sweet, gender-bending looks have inspired everyone from mall rats to rap moguls, changing the way the world thinks about style. For Stefani, life doesn’t imitate art, her life is her art.

Girly Grunge

By her own admission, Stefani’s look is an ever-changing obsession that started long before she made it to the top of the charts. “Growing up in Anaheim, CA, I always made my own clothes,” she says. “In the beginning I’d go to thrift stores, or places like The Wet Seal and Contempo Casuals, and try to find something weird. Then I’d take it home and remake it. I had a sewing machine in my room; it was the danger zone. It was, like, pins and needles everywhere.”

Stefani’s brand of girlish grunge developed a small, cult-like following among the Gen X-ers who loved Ska music. “My girlfriend and I went to every single Scars and JC Penney’s and bought out every single child’s extra-large T-shirt and tank top. We printed pink No Doubt logos on them and sold them at our concerts.” Stefani paired her T-shirt with super-baggy pants culled from the boys’ section of thrift stores, “because I never really liked my legs or butt,” and her fans went wild. By the time the band started to make it nationally, there were legions of Gwen-itators.

Searching for… Something

Looking at Stefani now, in the studio for Marie Claire’s cover shoot, it’s hard to believe it all started with something so homespun. She is surrounded by racks and racks of brightly patterned couture clothing, and her trademark platinum hair cascades in curls halfway down her back. Stefani wears big, baggy jeans, torn and faded to perfection, and neon-green bra straps peek out from underneath a ribbed white tank. As our talk turns to her career, Stefani’s near-encyclopedic memory of every look worn, every lyric sung, and every concert played, is scary.

I flash Stefani a photograph of herself with fuchsia hair, circa 2000, and her face falls. “My boyfriend and I had just broken up,” she says of the time she and now-husband Gavin Rossdale almost called it quits. “You can tell by my style that I was searching so hard. I was 29, and I was like, Fuck it, I’m going to dye my hair pink. And I had braces, the one thin I bought when I got rich.”

Stefani admits the drastic look wasn’t just about a breakup. After two wildly successful albums, expectations were high for No Doubt to hit again. “It was a really hard time for me,” she says now. “I thought, I gotta be someone, I gotta live up to who I want to be.” It was during this time that Stefani wrote some of her best lyrics. “I really define myself as a songwriter. It’s pure torture, but it’s magic when it happens. When I realized I could write songs, that’s when I discovered myself. Before that, I didn’t feel I was good at anything. I’m a very different girl now than I used to be.”

The Bindi Boom

Stefani says the girl she used to be had no direction. “I had a hard time learning in school. I didn’t know what I was going to do,” she says. She was taking art classes at a local community college, toying with the idea of working as a makeup artist, when the band got offered a European tour. Performing gave Stefani an outlet for the visual experimentation she loved – whatever inspired her got worked into her wardrobe – and she had an innate knack for clashing styles. “I went out with [No Doubt bassist] Tony Kanal for eight years. He’s Indian, and I grew up watching his mom. She’d get all made up, with her sari and her jewels on, and I thought she was so glamorous. I bought those stick-on earrings and started wearing them on my forehead as bindis.” When Stefani wore one in the “Just a Girl” video paired with sporty workout wear, it typified her fashion-blender sensibilities.

Girl Power

No Doubt’s popularity grew exponentially with each successive release, and Stefani rode the wave of huge sales and glowing reviews. When they released Rock Steady, their fifth album, Stefani says it was one of the best times in her life. “Our egos were gone,” she says of her bandmates. “We were just so in love with each other and so proud of the album. It was like, ‘This is crazy, how’d we get so far?’ ”

Stefani felt strong and confident, and the look she honed for the tour was a sort of edgy, sexy, urban chic. “I was inspired by a trip to Jamaica,” Stefani says of the mesh top she wore under a barely there bikini top in 2001. “I wore grafitti pants that looked like a mock-up of the album cover artwork, and I had just done this Pussycat Dolls [burlesque] show with these big ponytails, and I was like, I wanna do ponytails.” Stefani’s body, which she admits takes a lot of work to maintain, was ab-fab. “Having to work out sucks, but once you get me on the treadmill I’m happy,” she says. “I fight getting there, like everybody. It’s always been something I have to work and earn.”

Dream Dress

In 2002, Stefani married long-time love Rossdale ina traditional ceremony in London. “That was one of my best looks ever,” Stefani gushes. “I felt very beautiful. John Galliano did my gown. I talked to him on the phone and showed him pictures of things I liked. He sent drawings over, and the bottom of the dress was all pink. I was like, Is that a shadow, or is that really what he’s going to do? I never told him to make it pink.”

Stefani’s workload has been nonstop ever since the nuptials, and she credits her husband for “balancing me and reeling me in.” With a schedule like hers, it can’t be easy. “A great day for me is not getting out of bed,” she allows. “I like to see how many snack I can eat there, how many crumbs I can drop, and how many really bad TV shows I can watch. I also like the Discovery Channel, and shows about makeovers or babies being born.”

Clearly, motherhood is on her mind, and at 35, Stefani wrestles with the possibility of soon or never. “I’ve always wanted to be a mother,” she says. “I was hanging out with my nephew the other day, and he’s like a frickin’ Twinkie he’s so delicious. But it’s kind of not up to me. I’ve been on this journey, and I don’t want to be too greedy about what’s going to come next. I’ll be really happy when it happens.”

You Know You’ve Arrived When…

In 2003 No Doubt was tapped to perform at the Super Bowl, an honor she calls one of the best moments in her life. What’s more, Stefani shared the stage with Sting, whom she had long adored. “I actually met him for the first time when I was 16,” she says. “My dad worked for Yamaha motorcycles, and he got me backstage after one of the Police’s concerts. I was really fat and puberty-stricken, and my dad was like, ‘ Ask him for an autograph.’ So I did, and he was really mean. But I still loved him.” Stefani laughs at the memory. “When I met Sting years later, I told him that story, and he was like, ‘Oh man, I was such a dick back then,’ ” she says. “But he’s such a great guy.”

Stefani’s skyrocketing status opened unlikely doors, including Hollywood’s Golden Globe ceremony in 2004. “I felt very much out of my element there.I wore a very simple vintage Valentino gown, with my hair up in a French twist. The whole thing was inspired by Hitchcock’s Rear Window. I felt so sophisticated. The press kind of worked me over for that look, but then a year later they said they like it. Whatever.”

Stefani has learned to live with the bad reviews. It’s not like it ever discourages me from doing something I want to do,” she says. “I really don’t care what people say. If I followed what people said I should do, I wouldn’t be here right now.”

East Meets West

Stefani’s most recent style incarnation – sporty Lolita meets French maid – is actually her own take on a trend she saw in Tokyo’s Harajuku neighborhood. “I was really inspired by the kids there,” she says. “They were all about self-expression through fashion, and this whole ping-pong match between Eastern and Western and how we steal each other’s ideas.”

Stefani says the idea of adding four Japanese backup dancers to her show came to her in a dream. Studying a 2005 red-carpet picture of herself with the girls, Stefani is loving the poufy crinoline skirts paired with neon knee pads that pop off the page. I pull out one last photo. It’s a picture of a brunette Stefani wearing almost the exact same crinoline skirt, circa 1989. “Do you see that?” she squeals. “It’s like the same look for 20 years. That’s so crazy! I feel like I’ve come full circle.” And with that, Stefani disappears through the racks of clothes.

No Doubt’s Drummer dusts off his ska roots, teases the Mohawk, and proceeds to party on with the release of Rock Steady

It’s a Psycho-suburban dream come true: Adrian Young was a striving young drummer living in suburbia, playing golf, drumming at home, and playing in a local band called No Doubt. Fifteen years and seventeen million records later Young is a striving young drummer living in suburbia, drumming at home, playing golf and playing in a famous band called No Doubt.

On the eve of their latest release, Rock Steady, No Doubt was days away from ‘warm-up gigs’ with U2. Drum! magazine caught Young at his very large house on a country club golf course. He graciously offered a tour (because the reporter was staring at the pad). The house was tastefully decorated by Young and his beautiful wife Nina in a dark wood, Southeast Asian opulence. Many of the furnishings were picked out by Young while on tour with No Doubt and shipped home. “We went to Malasia, Thailand, places that were new to us. Those are great. I loved going over there” Young pointed a casual finger into bedroom after bedroom, saying, “We party here a lot and people like to stay over.” The bar is large and well stocked and a grinning Young says. “We’ve had a lot of good parties here!

There’s a game room, complete with arcade video machines. The game room ceiling is papered with album covers, mostly ‘70s acts, some ‘80s: Fleetwood Mac, Steve Miller, Madness, The Police. “A lot of those are my wife’s, but my parents were sort of hippie types, they had a little rock band so I grew up on all that stuff, too. I lived in the Santa Barbara/Pismo Beach area until I was ten. That probably affected me more, musically, than growing up in Orange County did. When we moved I stopped listening to as much ‘70s rock and started listening tening to more new-wave, punk, and ska.”

There’s a room that used to be the office – you can tell by the wall full of gold and platinum records — but it’s being redone as a nursery. “I’m the only married one in the band, and the first with a baby.”

As Young walks around the house, he looks more like an athlete than a musician, If it weren’t for the Mohawk, he could easily pass for a young pro ball player instead of a rock star. “When I was growing up I was all about sports. Basketball in high school, and golf. I didn’t start playing drums until I was 18, a senior. It was sports. Now I’m on a basketball team, and a softball thing. My main thing is golf. I probably spend more time golfing than I do drumming.”

All the members from No Doubt claim roots in neighboring Orange County. Anaheim, in particular, serves as a metaphor for things plastic and “Tragic” in the Orange County “Kingdom.” But now some of them live in L.A., and Young is in a suburb known more for Aviation executives than celebrities. “We’re all from Orange County. I live here because I love [this area]. My parents are still in [a town about ten miles away], I like to be close to them still. LA’s too much. Too much partying, too much everything.”

Young waves off the last couple of rooms, offices, guest bathrooms, blah, blah, blah, he seems uninterested. But he gets a spring in his step when he takes us back downstairs to a room near the bar. He slides a large sofa aside to reveal a trap door. “My drum room is down here,” he says, “Watch your head.” We descend the short steps into a basement that has been padded with acoustic treatments. There’s a kit wedged into the corner, a stereo system, piles of CD’s. In the room directly above us, a tape recorder and some other studio gear is wired to capture evenings of inspiration in the drum room. It’s everything a drummer needs — especially privacy. Last night I was playing in here until about 12:30. It’s great. I don’t have a standard practice routine. During the off time I just keep my chops up, trying to stay fluid. I play to Steely Dan records a lot. I’ve been playing to Jeff Buckley’s stuff. I don’t know the drummer’s name, but he’s good. Some Erika Bahdu for groove. I’ve got a Rush CD down here still [laughs]. Last night I was playing to some 311 stuff.”

Young warns us to mind our head again as we come out of the little studio and go to a front room where we camp with some food and drink and get the low-down on his working life. Through the front window the golf course is busy with players. Behind us is the huge backyard and the stone-rimmed swimming pool.

“On Thursday we’ll start three weeks with U2 as a warm up before the record comes out. So awesome. U2 is totally bitchin’. We’ll do our tour next year. This is the beginning of a long cycle for this record. We’ll do a lot of national and international promo for the record first. Do some live dates. Wherever the record’s doing good next year, wherever we could do good tours, that’s where we’ll go. It all depends on how the record does. For us a lot of things are decided close to the dates. We won’t do the states until next spring or summer. By February we’ll know.”

The promotional tour is comprised of a barrage of radio station visits, press interviews, television appearances, and anything else that might shout from the rooftops, “THE NEW NO DOUBT RECORD, ROCK STEADY, IS IN STORES NOW!”

“It’s not ike a regular tour. We don’t take quite as much stuff. I take my kit, I don’t do rental stuff, It’s a little bit broken down. It’s more of a pain in the ass because you’re doing interviews every day, multiple interviews every day. And different timezones. It’s just work.”

“We didn’t want to wait until next year [to release the CD]. The record company’s behind it, they think it’s going to fly. If we have their confidence then we’re pretty much willing to do anything. Because if the record company’s behind it, your foot’s already in the door for your record to do well, because the dollars are going to be behind it. That’s half the battle.”

With Rock Steady the band has turned into a dance hall groove machine. “During the last tour we put on dance parties after the shows. We were listening to a lot of dance hall music and a lot of ‘80s stuff, too. This is the fastest record we’ve ever done. It usually takes us two to three years to make a record. This one’s a total funk-party record. We weren’t trying to prove anything. Just trying to have fun. There was lots of pressure on us for the last of record. This one we were like, whatever.”

The fact that the airwaves are saturated with beat-box rhythms was likely not far from their minds, either. By the time this interview hits the newsstands, most Americans will have heard “Hey Baby,” No Doubt’s first single from Rock Steady.

“Even though I don’t write any of the songs, I still get to have a pretty free opinion about direction [of the songs]. That’s what’s made it cool over the years. I’ve taken a little more of a back seat on this record, though, as far as involvement goes. The songs, pre-recording, are always a struggle and a challenge, and it’s very rewarding. Any band will tell you that. This time I didn’t have it in me to the fight, you know, and I was more comfortable taking the lesser role. And I’m glad I did. It’s been more fun.”

Young told us about the birthing of the infectious dance-hall groove on “Hey Baby.” “My wife and I have a friend with a Victorian house in San Francisco, a one bedroom place. It came vacant, and he said, ‘Do you want to stay in it for a while?’ This was during some down time for the band and me and Nina wanted to get away, so we got a U-Haul and took one rooms worth of furniture, just grabbed the sofa nearest the door and whatever else we needed and went and lived there. But while we were up there, trying to get away, Tom and Tony came up to work on ideas. Work was following me [laughs]! So we went to this recording studio to work out some ideas.

“Tony had this bass line, this dance hall bass line, and I came up with a beat. There was a million ideas, but this one idea became ‘Hey Baby.’ The drums were just recorded stereo, it wasn’t supposed to be a real recording. We got to Jamaica [later, to record tunes for the record with Sly & Robbie] and tried to re-record it. But we couldn’t get it happening. So we just flew [the stereo drum track] into Pro Tools, and it became the first single.”

We asked if the band jammed on it a lot, or did a lot of takes. “Not really. Pro Tools does that. You can stop stuff or cut it up. Versus the last record, when I was hardheaded about the whole thing. My approach then was, ‘I don’t want to cut anything, I don’t want to do any of that crap.’ Sort of an unnecessary, macho way looking at it. But, I feared that if I started doing that, then people would say, ‘That guy’s not really doing that; he’s getting all cut up on tape or Pro Tools. I didn’t want to become one of those guys. But after using Pro Tools] on two records I realized it’s a creative tool. It’s not a way for lousy players to sound good … well, maybe it is, but I don’t think that applies to me.

“The whole thing was done on Pro Tools. So was the last one, actually. A lot of the songs were done at Tom’s condo. He’s got a Pro Tools setup there. So, a lot of the parts recorded in the demoing sessions in his apartment were kept. That environment creates more of a drum machine, drum loop thing, versus four fight people just getting together and jamming. At least for the starting ideas, before I get to play on it. I did all my parts after the fact. It was different, kind of going backwards, drumwise.”

Was that better? “It’s not really better for me, it’s just different.” Did it increase the fun factor for the band? “I think so, yeah. There’s only like two rock tracks on this CD. Those are the two Ric Ocasek did. It’s a pretty eclectic record, which I guess all of our records are. It’s one of our happiest records. We’ve always had that ‘80s thing going on, there’s no shortage of that on this record.

“There were various individuals we wanted to work with, and this was a good way to hit a lot of ‘em. The record was co-produced by the band plus the producers: Nellee Hooper, Ric Ocasek, Sly & Robbie, Steely & Cleavie, William Orbit, and Prince.”

Once the record is out and the promotional tour is done, it’ll be time to pack up the OCDP kit and hit the road. Young, for the most part, looks forward to it. “Touring was one of the best things for me. We toured Tragic Kingdom for two-and-a-half years. After that I felt really, really strong. Definitely helps, getting out on that road and working on your thing. That repetition is a good thing. I love playing live.” And sometimes friends need a favor and Young is happy to oblige. “Sitting in with other bands is a bigger thrill than playing our own show sometimes. I was in Vegas — my wife was working for Stone Temple Pilots at the time — and Eric [Kretz] asked me to play on ‘Plush.’ That was cool. But I don’t know if I can keep touring as much, now that I have a family on the way.” The enthusiasm in his manner as he talks about playing live seems a bit stronger than his cautious words about fatherhood. And he’s enthusiastic about his new drum set, too.

For this tour Young will be pounding on a brand-new kit from Orange County Drum and Percussion, made from a jellybean jar selection of acrylic shells. Young was excited to get to New York for the U2 shows, because, “I haven’t played this kit yet. This will be the first time I use it.

“There’s a lot more sampling and sequencing on this record, too. So, live, I have a lot more samples to play. Some of the tracks I’ll be playing to clicks. We’re using Tascam 2424 Recording machines, and the tech will be running that. I’m going to give him the look— ‘push the button.’ I’m wearing headphones, and I tried to get the biggest, most obnoxious ones I could find. I’m going to make them even bigger, put stuff on ‘em.”

Some drummers, in the off-season between tours and records, like to hook up some outside gigs, some sessions, some clinics. Was sitting in with Stone Temple Pilots an omen of things to come? “I don’t really have time to play with other bands. No Doubt is full-time. I’ll do little things when I’m out, sitting in with other bands, I love doing that stuff. I’d love to play on other people’s records in the future. I could never picture myself doing clinics. I can’t really solo, and my reading is not very proficient. I’ve taken some basic reading classes, but I haven’t really utilized it much.”

We give a hearty “yeah, but.” Enough of the modesty. How does it feel to sell seventeen million records and tour the world? “It’s pretty awesome. Definitely one of the best things about this is the drum recognition from young people. And from people that are older, too, actually. I’ve even heard people cop licks [from No Doubt recordings]. I’m not going to name bands, but I’m flattered by it, I love it. I do it, too. I still do it; I hear my peers, I can’t help it. My friend Josh Freese lives around the corner. I subbed for him a couple times in the Vandals a while back. I copped some of his stuff on this record.”

We asked Young what he would recommend to young drummers shedding for their future. “I would suggest playing to a lot of different CDs. Mixing it up. Keep those horizons expanded. As teenagers musical tastes are usually skewed into tunnel vision. So, expand. Work on groove stuff. If a kid wants to go to school and be taught properly, that’s great, that can only be a good thing. But some kids that come up learning only like that play so stiff it’s amazing. I’ve seen players with lots of drum corps chops but — so stiff. It’s too one-sided, I think.”

Young cast a glance across the way to the fairway. Would he golf today? “I don’t play rounds every day, but as far as playing or practicing goes I probably get in five days a week.” And would he ever consider switching from drums to golf? “Go pro? No. Too hard. I’m not good enough. Right now I’m a 5.3 handicap. That would be rad, though. I work on my game enough.”

Is there a similarity between golfing and drumming? “Oh, yeah. You’ve got to stay relaxed. [laughs] Stay relaxed or everything goes to hell.”

With thanks to Mike McKeaney of ND Universe

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!”

With Rock Steady, No Doubt officially joins pop-music aristocracy by Dave Wielenga

Gwen Stefani and Tony Kanal were in a London bar one night last summer, taking an all-night break from a long day of mixing tracks for No Doubt’s latest album, Rock Steady, when in walks maybe the biggest rock star in the world.

“Bono came out and met us because we had a lot of mutual friends,” explains Kanal. “We drank with him. And I’ll tell you—like I was telling Gwen earlier—the cool thing, the inspiring thing about that guy is that you see Bono, and he’s totally got his shit together. He’s this great musician—legendary now—and he’s politically active, helping people beyond, like, our wildest dreams.”

“He really does it!” Stefani interjects.

“And on top of it, he likes to drink and really let go,” Kanal continues, “which, to me, makes it very real.”

“He’s Irish!” Stefani says.

“But it’s cool to find that balance in life,” Kanal says, forging ahead, “of doing the things that are important, but enjoying yourself, too.”

“Enjoying day-to-day life,” Stefani offers.

Her final comment makes a feather-light landing, and the conversation drifts away without anybody really noticing—replaced for a moment by the lingering memory of that night in London, its lessons and their implications.

This is how they do it, Gwen and Tony, interview after interview, a half-hour or an hour at a time, sometimes all day when a new album is coming out (Rock Steady is being released Tuesday). Last time, barely 18 months ago, when Return to Saturn was about to drop, they did it at Gwen’s place, a mansion in the hills near Griffith Park. This time, it’s at Tony’s home at the bottom of the hill, sitting around a table on the backyard patio of an old house he has made completely his own in a funkily gentrified neighborhood of Los Feliz. In Spanish, that means “the happy ones.”

It’s a nice, sunny day. The garden is old Southern California suburban gorgeous—a small, green lawn surrounded along the wooden fence and stuccoed house by well-troweled beds of flowers and shrubs—and the air is quiet except for the soft murmur of traffic a block or so away. We’re all sipping hot tea.

And then: “Tony!”

Kanal is startled from his lethargy to see Stefani, his long-ago ex-girlfriend, take a piece of gum from her mouth and throw it across the patio into his precise landscaping.

“Gwen! Stop doing that!” he snaps, real irritation serrating the edge of his cool. “You threw one over there, too. Earlier, you did. Did this one go on the . . . the thing—the sidewalk, I mean—or is it somewhere in the grass?”

Stefani giggles with mischief and defiance and then ignores him completely.

“This is Tony’s house,” she tells you, with sass, “so I can throw my gum”—she pulls another piece from her mouth—”like that”—and she chucks it across the patio—”and his mom’s not gonna come and get mad or anything like she used to when we were kids.”

Kanal is exasperated, but he has known Stefani since 11th grade. He has seen much worse than this playful rebellion against his mother’s long-ago scolding. Hell, everybody who heard Return to Saturn—which dripped with the what’s-it-all-about lyrics of Stefani’s turning-30 depression—realizes there’s worse than that.

Kanal waits out Stefani’s little button-pushing episode and then steers the interview back on course. “We had a really good time making the record,” he says slowly and then looks expectantly at Stefani.

“Yes,” she says dutifully, “we did.”

They go silent for a moment before simultaneously breaking into laughter.

This is how it has been for Tony and Gwen for—well, it seems like forever. Rock Steady is No Doubt’s fifth album, but nobody noticed the first two. They were doing this long before Gwen could tell about the time one of her idols, Joni Mitchell, complimented her for “Simple Kind of Life” when they saw each other on the same plane. They were doing it long before Tony could sheepishly apologize to Ric Ocasek for writing a song influenced so much by the Cars (“Platinum Blonde Life”)—and before Ocasek could sheepishly apologize that he really hadn’t noticed the resemblance.

Not that Gwen and Tony seem to drop these names with arrogance or calculation. “I mean, can you believe we had the opportunity to write a song with the guy who wrote ‘Sweet Dreams’?” Stefani gushed, in reference to Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics. And, speaking of gushing, she reports that Puff Daddy approached her at a party to report that he had heard the new record. “He said he had to change his pants after hearing it—that he peed his pants, he liked it so much,” Stefani says, perhaps offering an inadvertent insight into the hip-hop mogul’s new P. Diddy moniker.

Mostly, however, these illustrious names seem to emerge naturally in conversation, which, in this case, illustrates the essential message of the new album: with Rock Steady, No Doubt has officially ascended into the pop-music aristocracy.

Sure, Orange County’s long-ago house band has been world-famous for seven or eight years. But the 15 million sales of Tragic Kingdom could have been a Spice Girls aberration. And the 1.4 million sales of Return to Saturn was nearly a Hootie and the Blowfish disappointment. But rather than descending into the world of Geri Halliwell or Darius Rucker, Gwen and Tony have emerged as something like their generation’s Sonny & Cher. By now, the crème de la MTV has become No Doubt’s for-real runnin’ buddies. In half an hour, they mention Bono, Prince, Kid Rock, Puff Daddy/P. Diddy, Ric Ocasek, Nellee Hooper, Steely & Clevie, Joni Mitchell, the Neptunes, William Orbit, Sly & Robbie, Bounty Killer, Dave Stewart, Eve, Jimmy Iovine, and Dr. Dre. There are times during the interview when it’s obvious Gwen and Tony are trying not to mention a celebrity, perhaps self-conscious about the impression they may be creating. But by now, Gwen and Tony get their names dropped as often as any of the others.

In fact, the fuel for Rock Steady is nothing less than the interface of the internationally famous. No Doubt literally traveled the globe to write, record and produce it with the people who helped compose Mother Earth’s late-20th-century soundtrack. Prince co-produced and sang background on the gushy-funky “Waiting Room.” Ric Ocasek gave a Cars overhaul to “Platinum Blonde Life” and “Don’t Let Me Down.” William Orbit plugged in “Making Out.” Hip-hop crew the Neptunes co-wrote “Hella Good.” But high-profile mixmaster Nellee Hooper provided the closest thing to a production theme, turning the knobs on five of the songs. Additionally, the band traveled to London and Jamaica—their demos stored in ProTools computer programs—to work with Dave Stewart and the dancehall production teams of Steely & Clevie and Sly & Robbie.

This is a long way from that garage on Beacon Street.

“Well, it is, and it isn’t,” says Stefani, blowing at a wisp of straight, bleached-blond hair that has escaped from the clip intended to keep it out of her face. “In some ways, this record feels as though we sort of went backward toward what we used to be. Because No Doubt has always been kind of an up, positive band. This record has that approach. It’s really spontaneous and fun. It has a lot of our roots, which are, like, the ska-reggae-dance-hall thing. It all kinda comes from that same place, of making music with our friends. In some ways, it feels like we are coming home in a way. Except we’re more mature and maybe a little bit better musicians . . . hopefully.”

And except that their friends are more famous and more talented. And, again, that the members of No Doubt are, too.

The band has never before displayed such elasticity and command, such mastery of modern pop songs and production. Stefani bends and shapes her voice into the styles of chanteuses ranging from Janet Jackson to Nelly Furtado, from Pat Benatar to, well, Madonna—whom she appears to have supplanted on the throne of over-the-top queen—without falling into imitation. The contributions of Kanal, Tom Dumont and Adrian Young—who often have seemed overlooked in the light of Stefani’s stardom—remain in the background. But now their presence seems essential, not only for their emotional stability (the band-ness of No Doubt) but for their musical virtuosity as well. Maybe it’s that we’re just noticing, but these guys are good.

“When Tragic Kingdom came out, people had a tendency to write us off—not necessarily as one-hit wonders, but as one-album wonders along the lines of a bubble-gum pop situation,” Kanal says. “I think we had that chip on our shoulders when we went into Return to Saturn. For lack of a better word, that was a ‘labored’ process. But I think we proved ourselves as songwriters and musicians. There’s not a day that goes by that somebody in our peer group doesn’t tell us how much they liked that record.”

Many from that “peer group” also wanted to work on the next one.

“But this time around, it was more like, ‘Let’s just fuckin’ have fun,’” Kanal says. “It was really free. We took off all the restrictions we previously had. Tom and I even said, ‘If we don’t play our instruments on some of these songs, that’s okay. Whatever’s best for the song.’ So sometimes we’ve got Tom on keyboards and me on keyboard bass—and when we do ‘Hey Baby’ onstage, we’re going to have four of us playing keyboards. But the key was we wanted to work with people we’d never worked with or people you’d never think we’d work with.”

Like Bono, for example. He didn’t do any work on the album, but their all-nighter in that London pub led to the mini-tour as U2’s opening act that No Doubt just finished.

And considering the way No Doubt’s world is expanding, you wonder aloud whether, like Bono and U2, there might potentially be a political or humanitarian or somehow activist side to Gwen and Tony and No Doubt? And it turns out that Gwen has been wondering, too.

“You know what? The world is changing,” she says excitedly. “I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Because at the VH-1 Fashion Awards, they were asking that. And I was thinking, ‘I’ve never written a song about those things before, but it will be interesting to see how the changes in the world affect us creatively.’”

Tony seems uncomfortable with the direction of the conversation.

“I just think that we—that’s No Doubt—have been about fun, about having a good time, just kind of a release for people who come to see us to get away from all those serious things,” he says. “So I think the way we help is by lending ourselves to charity events, things that everybody does. That’s how we help, rather than songs that are political statements. That’s never been our thing, you know?”

Another of those small silences ensues. Tony turns to Gwen and continues, backtracking a little, perhaps concerned he’s stepped on her toes.

“That’s not to say that you wouldn’t do it . . . like, write lyrics about that in the future,” he says. “We’ll just see if it happens naturally.”

Stefani isn’t mad, but she is a little ruffled.

“I know, I know—that’s what I was saying,” she tells Kanal. “I was saying, ‘I wonder if, in some way, it’s going to affect everyone.’”

“Like, if you get inspired someday,” Tony offers.

“Look, I’m just wondering how it’s going to affect us creatively,” Gwen says. “I don’t know. It’s going to affect us, no matter what. And I’m wondering if it will be beyond, you know, where everyone’s like, ‘Did you wear a different outfit tonight because of the whole terrorist thing?’ And I’m, like, ‘No, I didn’t! I’m not!’ Oh, you know what I mean. We hear the stupidest questions.”

By Mar Yvette

It’s not often that a band can withstand its founding member departing, increasing creative uncertainty, weak record sales, mounting industry pressure and loads of internal (and extremely personal) tension. But that’s exactly what O.C. darlings-turned-world-famous wünderkinds No Doubt have done – and they’ve got their very own episode of VH1’s Behind The Music to prove it. Together now for almost 15 years, chances are many of you Mean Street readers got to experience the group’s kinetic live shows back in the day when Anaheim was known simply as Disneyland’s epicenter and Gwen wasn’t touted as a diva in fashion magazines; a term the gregarious lyricist laughs about. “I think of Aretha Franklin when I hear that word. I don’t wake up in the morning and go, ‘you diva!’ “

But now that frontwoman Gwen Stefani, guitarist Tom Dumont, bassist Tony Kanal and drummer Adrian Young have sold a gazillion albums (okay, maybe only multi-millions), have toured the world over and are international superstars, circumstances have changed tremendously; the band, however, remains much the same.

“As far as all the fame and celebrity stuff, that really is a strange part. But it doesn’t really soak in. It doesn’t enter the real world of four best friends who make music together and get to have this extended childhood and go around dancing onstage for people,” reveals Stefani. “We feel very, very blessed to be doing this still. Everything after Tragic Kingdom has just been borrowed time. None of us expected that we’d still be doing this, you know?”

When I finally get the chance to begin the interview, a PR associate warns that Stefani is feeling a bit under the weather and must be very careful about saving her voice for the show. This lowered my expectations slightly as I envisioned a truncated discourse where Stefani might not be too enthusiastic about yet another scribe badgering her for details about everything from musical inspiration to favorite lipsticks (she loves The Sound of Music and the staining power of Anna Sui lipstick, by the way). But once she starts talking, one would never guess that the fashion-forward singer is battling a cold with only “two bites of salad” in that oft-bared tummy of hers. Perky and genuinely friendly, Stefani’s manner is warm and welcoming while her unaffected speech is marked by a plethora of “you know?” and the occasional “dude.” In essence, she is a real slice of Orange County. Likewise, when guitarist Tom Dumont speaks, he is sincere, gracious, given to laughter and shares in Stefani’s sentiments about No Doubt’s success.

“When Tragic Kingdom came out in ‘95, we had been together for eight years not because we were extremely successful, but because we had a really strong friendship.

“The cool thing about all the fame and stuff after Tragic Kingdom is that we’re still here and we still have the same friendships and still enjoy being together,” he reveals. “It’s cool that we’ve made it without hating each other or becoming drug addicts or anything bad, you know what I mean? The analogy I use is that we’re like brothers and sister. There are moments when we drive each other crazy, but at the same time we’re really tight and have this deep connection. No matter what I do to piss off Tony today, tomorrow we’re gonna be hanging out drinking and playing tennis.”

It’s been little more than a year since No Doubt released a new album, and just in time for the holidays comes Rock Steady – a danceable collage of ska, reggae, dancehall and new wave synthesizers bobbing within a sweet pop bubble. Rerouting themselves from the slightly dark departure they took on Return Of Saturn, No Doubt is feeling fine and ready to share the love.

“We were in a really good mood while making this record and it was probably one of the most magical times in the group,” gushes Stefani, waiting for sound check at the Staples Center before she and the group open for U2 on their current Elevation Tour. “The last record was like our growing pains record. We came off of Tragic Kingdom and we made a record that we took very seriously. Everybody took it on like a huge responsibility to prove to themselves that they could become better songwriters and all that stuff, so it was definitely a darker phase for us. And after completing that goal and going on tour with that record, we felt that we really did it. We love that record. It just set us up for this really great space to be in. Our friendship and chemistry is, I don’t know…” she pauses for a moment, “just better than ever! Which is just so mind blowing after all these years.”

From the smooth, tropical “Rock Steady” and the new-wavy “Making Out” to the Elastica-meets-Garbage vibe of “Platinum Blonde” and the perfectly percolating reggae-synth of “In My Head,” No Doubt has audibly delved into a new multi-layered, somewhat experimental sound that is as sonically diverse – everything from laser gun noises to Jamaican dancehall beats – as it is unifyingly upbeat.

“It’s been a record where we just sat down and said, ‘well, if we’re gonna make a record, we’ve gotta clear the slate and be really free; be able to do whatever we want.’ So it was a real experimental record in a lot of ways,” remarks Stefani.

And like mad musical scientists, the group spent the last year honing their experiment at home in Southern Cali, in Jamaica and in London. As Stefani recalls, “We found this music called dancehall, which is a Jamaican [type of] music that’s basically the evolved, modern version of ska [and] reggae. And that’s what we’ve always loved. I mean, we started our band as a ska band. So when we started making this record we said, ‘let’s make a record that we can dance to ‘cause we wanna be in a club and hear our song come on.’ So we just sat down and started writing and ended up recording in Jamaica with legendary Sly and Robbie, Steely and Clevie and just these hard-core dancehall producers. We had a real magical time there and it just set up the whole vibe for the record.”

Adds Dumont, “Some of the stuff was inspired by contemporary Jamaican dancehall music. But accurately, there is this huge cultural difference between what dancehall music in Jamaica is doing right now and what we’re doing.” Which is? “Well, we’ve got a white girl singing, not a Jamaican singer doing more of a rap thing,” he laughs.

Another fresh element of Rock Steady is the inclusion of more electronically inclined components in the songs. As Tom explains, “As far as the electronic thing, it didn’t happen on the whole record, but it did on a lot of the record. It’s kind of me and Tony, deciding out of our own tastes, to lay down our instruments to experiment with keyboards. We just got a bunch of synthesizers and started messing around with making songs that way. So like on ‘Hey Baby’ Tony played half the bass line on the keyboard, and all these weird Star Wars sounds and laser noises that you hear were just us having fun with it. Right now, for me, using all these new elements to push music forward is really exciting.”

Moreover, with the ProTools program, the technologically savvy Dumont was able to transform his Mac computer into a full-blown recording studio.

“ProTools is really expensive, but once you have it, it’s so amazingly powerful. Like on a lot of the songs all the vocals and keyboards were recorded in my living room,” he enthusiastically recalls. “It opened us up creatively in this amazing way because it was just us being creative all day long with a microphone. So when we had about six or seven songs we were like, let’s go to Jamaica and record these things. Then we came back and recorded more at my house again and when we had about 15 songs that we really loved, we went to England to record them and we were done. That’s how this album came about: writing and recording in bits and pieces with things that were exciting and inspiring to us.”

Rock Steady signifies another first for No Doubt: outside collaboration. In addition to Jamaican producers Sly and Robbie and Steely and Clevie, the group enlisted the help of other celebrated artists like Rick Ocasek (The Cars), Orbital, Dave Stewart (The Eurythmics) and Prince. As Stefani readily offers, “We decided to open ourselves up to other people that we respect, because for the 14 years we’ve been a band we always made records with just us four and nobody else. Our success has afforded us to work with some incredible people, and we did that because we had the opportunity to. Can you imagine if we just said, ‘nah, we’re not gonna let anyone inside our world.’ This record was all about letting people into the No Doubt world and I think it reflects it. We don’t get sick of it or jaded by it. I mean, we’re on tour with U2 and it’s intense!” she declares with amazement. “It doesn’t get old.”

Dumont agrees. “It’s kind of like going to music school ‘cause we’re sitting with people like Prince and watching how they work and learning from them. Or working with Dave Stewart on “Underneath It All” was literally just us and a guitar for a half an hour and [coming] up with this really pretty, sweet song with a reggae vibe. When you collaborate, you’re filtering your creativity through someone else’s sensibility, so you come up with a different result than you would if you were just working by yourself.”

Stefani can’t help but express her enthusiasm for the new album and all that went into making it.

“I’ve been in the band since I was seventeen, and just to get to this point where we can make a record that we’re all in love with and work with all these people is amazing. This record was done so quickly, it was almost a miracle for us to get it done in a year. If you would’ve told me a year ago that I would be sitting here talking about this record coming out I would have said no way!”

But despite all the opportunities afforded by fame and success, life in the public spotlight is often just as much about adulation and respect as it is severe scrutiny and judgment. Stefani candidly reveals. “I wrote a record called Tragic Kingdom and it was all about Tony and me and our split up. I certainly didn’t think that that record would come out and I certainly didn’t think that 16 million people would hear it. And then I didn’t think that I would go on tour for two-and-a-half years and every day having people pick at my wounds. That was definitely challenging for me and for Tony, but we’re very open about it. I don’t really have that much to hide. I’m really a regular, normal person. I have the same problems that everybody else does and for some reason, the way I put it down with the melody people can relate to. That makes me feel great and even more normal.”

Perhaps an anomaly in the world of entertainment where artists go to great lengths to ensure privacy, Stefani doesn’t attempt to shield her deepest thoughts and feelings. “I don’t censor myself at all when I’m writing, even now that I know people are going to hear it. I don’t really consider anyone else when I’m writing, just my own thoughts. The only other person I usually consider is the person I’m writing about. I can see how with Tony a song might hurt, and I never want to hurt anyone. Or when writing about Gavin, I know that people are gonna read into it. So there’s been a couple of songs I may have changed some of the words here and there, but only because I don’t want to hurt my boyfriend or anyone [else].”

So what about a song like “In My Head” that carries the verse, “Let’s talk about the future/ Let’s talk about the wedding”? Is that truly what’s in Ms. Stefani’s head at the moment? She laughingly replies, “Dude, that’s been on my mind since eighth grade! It’s like, uh … when am I having the kids, when am I gonna get married? I mean, every girl thinks of those things all the time. That’s the thing: It’s only 12 songs at two minutes each and if everyone thinks they know everything about me from that they’re crazy, you know? It’s only a snapshot of one night or one idea, so I feel like I am sharing a lot, but yet I’m not.” She pauses, “I just think that I’ve been really blessed. Me and Gavin are totally in love and anything that we don’t have control over – like all the stuff that’s written about me or the band or our music – is something that I can’t really think about. My job is to try to write great songs and try to put on a great show.”

Signaled that it’s time for sound check, Gwen Stefani and Tom Dumont are off to do just that.

With thanks to Mike McKeaney of ND Universe

Gwen’s still in love. Adrian’s having a baby. And the hip-hop world is on the phone. The long and surprisingly happy life of No Doubt by William Shaw

Self-doubt and heartbreak used to be Gwen Stefani’s twin muses. When her lover dumped her after seven years, she told the world about it. The drama had a neat twist since the jilter happened to be her own bass player, No Doubt’s Tony Kanal. Last year, when the band put out Return of Saturn Stefani continued beating up on herself. Now the 31-year-old singer is suffering a masochist’s worst misfortune: requited love. “Real love”, she says dreamily. She leans forward in a wicker chair and fingers her gold ankle bracelet. Hanging from it are the five letters that denote her Bushman: G-A-V-I-N.

No Doubt is in Olympic Stadium in gray and chilly London, where Mark “Spike” Stent – knob twirler for U2, Madonna, and Bjork – is polishing the band’s fifth album. No matter where Stefani is, though, a part of her is forever in Orange County. She blurts “Omigod” at the slightest provocation; she says “fuck” a lot, too (which could be attributed to shacking up with an English rock star). And when she talks about her own group, she’s pure Cali: “Like, I can’t believe we’re still doing this. It’s so rad. ”

In London, Stefani stays with Bush’s Gavin Rossdale at his house in Primrose Hill. Her colleagues – bassist Kanal, guitarist Tom Dumont, drummer Adrian Young – rent a flat in Earl’s Court. After fifteen years on the same tour bus, No Doubt remains one of the few bands that conform to the romantic ideal. They hang out. They visit London nightclubs together. They actually like one another.

That attitude has served the group well. For much of its early career, No Doubt operated in enemy territory, ambling along as Fishbone also-rans. Then, when every other group was churning out post-Nirvana grunge, No Doubt turned in the relentlessly poppy Tragic Kingdom. Their label despaired. The album sat on the shelf so long, the band thought it would never come out. Months after its release, the editors of Rolling Stone were voting No Doubt the third-worst band of the year. It took just over a year for Kingdom to crawl up and conquer the charts.

Which is why last year’s Return of Saturn was something of a novelty: the first No Doubt album to be released to immediate approbation. Giddy, No Doubt opted to change its own rules; instead of functioning as a hermetically sealed unit, they decided their fifth album would be a series of collaborations. They’d already experimented with Prince at Paisley Park. They’d go on to spend 2001 with a dizzying selection of their favorite artists. Kanal – a major fan of Jamaican dancehall musicians – took the band out to work with reggae veterans Sly and Robbie. Stefani lined up a session with Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics. Ric Ocasek of The Cars and Madonna’s William Orbit added a few ideas. The band capped the year with hip-hop heavy Timbaland. The fresh blood was reviving, but there was one snag: “This record was too man-heavy”, Stefani says. “You work with someone like Timbaland, and suddenly you’re being lectured. And you’re like, ‘Dude, I’ve been doing this for fifteen years’ “.

With this album, No Doubt abandons the ska band pretense. In fact, Stefani has become a major hip-hop fan. Earlier this year, she guested on Eve’s “Let Me Blow Ya Mind”, the video of which resulted in newfound urban cred and an MTV video award. She also turned up in Moby’s “Southside” clip. Don’t expect another guest appearance, though. “I don’t want to be like I’m the fuckin’ side sausage”, she says, even if working on the Eve track did earn her the chance to pull Dr. Dre in on a track, too. Now, as the release deadline looms, the group’s trying to whip a massive pile of experimentation into pop.

Today, the group is trying to make sense of a new song, a striking but decidedly eccentric piece of soul called “Waiting Room”. They’ve been wrist-slapped for waywardness ever since 1992, when their first A&R man said they needed “focus”. So much for focus. In the studio, Kanal proudly plays the latest version.

Later, I tell Stefani how much I liked it. “You heard it?” she asks. “I hate that you heard it. It’s not done.” That night they’ll work until four in the morning.

It’s late. She’s tired. She lowers herself onto a chair. Suddenly she realizes something is wrong. The fly on her cargo pants is wide open. “Sorry”, she says, zipping it up. “I’m just a scumbag”.

A few days later, No Doubt is having its photo taken at a bar in London’s Convent Garden. For a scumbag, Gwen is retentive about she and her band present themselves. This afternoon, she’s decided that diamante and hair spray isn’t quite it. “I look like a 35-year-old who works in a bank”, she declares, ordering a change. She swaps the rocks for two massive ghetto-fabulous gold rings that were made for a her by a friend in LA. The one on her right hand reads ROCK and on her left, STEADY – the title of the new album and a declaration of where they stand.

“Omigod!” she exults suddenly. “Adrian’s having a baby! Adrian’s having a baby!”

It’s true. Adrian Young’s wife is four and a half months pregnant. Gwen is ecstatic, if a touch jealous. She wants babies badly. No Doubt’s slow-but-eventually-spectacular rise meant that she had to put a lot of things on hold. Tragic Kingdom interrupted her education; she was majoring in art at Cal State.

“I’m good at it” she says of that first love. “I feel kind of sad ’cause I left on tour and that was gone. But I always envisage myself six months pregnant and painting. ”

She pauses for a second, then starts laughing. “I’m going to be a pregnant painter”, she declares, as if she’s trying to pick a fight. “It’s going to happen. You watch”.

No Doubt’s Tony Kanal gains taste & maturity.

This summer marks 30 years since Tony Kanal was born and 15 since he took up bass. For nearly 14 of those years, Tony has played in the service of No Doubt, a band that began in Southern California’s third wave ska underground and became one of the defining groups of ’90s pop. With the 1995 Interscope album Tragic Kingdom, and its worldwide, bass-heavy hits “Just a Girl,” “Spiderwebs,” and “Don’t Speak,” No Doubt seemed to come from nowhere to international stardom. But this was no overnight success; Tony and his bandmates had struggled to make it since high school.

The first two radio hits from No Doubt’s follow up album, Return of Saturn, show a promising musical range – from the driving punk of “Ex-Girlfriend” to the sensitive rock of “Simple Kind Of Life.” But delving into Saturn reveals a lot more: a band that has moved toward more refined, creative songwriting, and a bassist whose heightened melodic sense, judicious use of space, and increasing ease with the group’s stylistic mixture of rock, reggae, and new wave reveal a self-less approach. “There are parts on the album I feel I can be proud of,” says Tony. “Not lines that show off what I can do, but parts with an intricacy and emotion I never thought I could play.”

The calm, serious expression Tony wears just barely hides the bubbling energy and excitement beneath – his speech is liberally decorated with superlatives like “amazing,” “incredible,” “awesome” and “phenomenal.” Nonetheless, he overwhelmingly communicates a sense of being grounded, the kind of personality you’d expect in a good bass player. Kanal has an ease with his emotions – from the thrill of taking his parents to India and playing a show their friends and family could see, to the disappointment on that same trip, when some Indians, still saddled with generations-long colonial mindset, treated his European-descent bandmates with a deference he was not afforded. No Doubt’s incredible success has let them see the world and experience hard work and struggle – including the suicide of an early bandmate. That range of feelings is increasingly present in Kanal’s bass lines. From the driving, energetic eighth-notes to moments of melancholy reflection to surreal new-wave fun, Tony’s lines give energy and life to Saturn’s broad emotional range.

Born in England, Tony Ashwin Kanal moved to Orange County, California, when he was ten. He credits his dad for fostering his love of music, from playing records when young Tony couldn’t sleep to encouraging him to take up saxophone in middle school. At the end of 9th grade, Tony’s jazz band teacher needed a replacement for his graduating bassist. “Dave Carpenter was a phenomenal bass player,” remembers Tony, noting that his former classmate is not the same Carpenter as the prolific sideman who’s played with Al Jarreau and Peter Erskine. “Plus he was a cool guy and all the girls liked him, so I put my hand up.” In order to catch up with his classmates, who had all been playing for a few years, Tony spent the summer in a crash course on his new instrument, guided by band teacher Mike Stouffer, and Carpenter, whom Tony still meets occasionally for lessons. “Dave was the one who taught me how to play bass. I wouldn’t play the way I play if it weren’t for him.”

After a year of playing, a friend approached Tony about joining No Doubt. In March 1987 16-year-old Tony joined the crowd watching No Doubt’s first show at Fender’s Ballroom in Long Beach. He auditioned for the band a week later, and in two weeks he was playing No Doubt’s second show. “I gave up saxophone soon after,” he smiles. Playing in No Doubt turned Tony into a bass nut. He finished his three years of high school jazz band, learned all of Flea’s lines on the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Uplift Mofo Party Plan, and increasingly turned his attention to making music from the bottom up. “I love bass – bass-heavy recordings, bass as an instrument. I wouldn’t want to play anything else.”

We met Tony at his Los Angeles home, a nicely redone Mediterranean on a modest lot that speaks more of Tony’s contentment with his success than of stereotypical rock-star opulence. The tastefully framed No Doubt memorabilia on his walls shows Tony as a media-savvy veteran of many magazine covers shared with his bandmates – vocalist Gwen Stefani, guitarist Tom Dumont, and drummer Adrian Young. But Tony has his doubts about being on the cover of Bass Player. “I’ve never been a musician’s musician. Most of the people on the Bass Player cover have amazing music-theory knowledge, and I don’t. I think I’ve been able to grow and maybe do some cool stuff because I’ve played with the same group for so long. I’m comfortable, and I’ve been able to experiment and try everything.”

How would you describe your playing style?
I’m a definitely a rock bass player influenced by punk. I always try to stay melodic so the bass line can stand on its own but at the same time provide that foundation for the rest of the band.
We’re a rock group with a reggae/ska side and a new wave side. When we started we were part of this underground ska scene. But we all came from diverse musical backgrounds, and we knew we wouldn’t be able to contain ourselves. We had to explore and experiment. I think of us as a true American rock band that’s heavily influenced by British music.

Do things you learned in high school jazz band – such as how to walk or how to interpret a harmony – help you in No Doubt?
Absolutely. All of that comes in to play. But when you’re in your own band and writing your own music, you don’t think about that stuff when you’re writing your bass lines. You’re not thinking – it’s just coming out.
I struggled through jazz band. I had to switch to bass clef, and I wasn’t a great sight reader. Plus I was spread kind of thin: I was on the swim team, editor of the school paper, and for the last few years doing No Doubt. After high school it was purely rock & roll: playing in No Doubt and making up my own bass parts, simple as that. Playing in jazz band was never my thing, but that’s what they have – there’s no rock band in high school. Theory never came easy for me; it still doesn’t.

That’s surprising – your bass lines sound like you have a good command of harmony.
That’s probably because I’ve been playing with No Doubt for almost 14 years. I’m comfortable with the people I play with, and that makes all the difference. If you took me out of No Doubt and put me in a studio situation, I’d have a hard time.
But I have total confidence in what I’m doing. When slapping was big in the early ’90s, playing was about proving yourself and your chops. I was really into that – I wanted to be able to do all that stuff, and I was okay at it. I slapped on our first record. It was more of an ego-driven way of playing bass. Now I understand my role: to make good bass lines for the song I’m working on at the moment. My job is to make a bass line that supports the guitar, drums, and vocals and leaves space for them, too. I feel I’ve been successful in making that transition to where playing is more about music than ego. And since I’ve made that, I feel confident in what I’m doing. This new record has been my most comfortable record making experience.

Was there a point when the light bulb came on?
I think it just comes with time and maturity, but 27 months on the road for Tragic Kingdom had a lot to do with it. When you’ve been out that long, you’ve tried every song, every way.

Who are your bass influences?
Before I was in No Doubt I listened to a lot of pop music, like Michael Jackson and especially Prince – Prince is my idol, my facourite. I still love all that stuff, but then when I was 16 and got into No Doubt, Eric Stefani, who started the band, exposed me to a whole new world of music: Madness, the Specials, the Selelecter, Bad Brains, Fishbone, Red Hot Chili Peppers, ska, punk, thrash, funk, all that stuff. I remember feeling so vibrant, like I’d finally found my thing and the whole world opened up. All those bass players made such an impression on me: Flea, Fishbone’s Norwood Fisher, Horace Painter from the Specials, Mark Bedford from Madness, Darryl from bad Brains – Flea being the foremost.

What did you get out of Flea’s playing?
At the time his slapping blew me away. The cool thing about Flea is how he continues to grow from record to record. By the time you get to Blood Sugar Sex Magik, it’s so musical. Back then, as a young man, it was all about the energy. from the slapping to the fingering to his beautiful melodic soloing, he’s phenomenal.
I don’t want to sound immodest, but I feel I’ve made that change myself. One thing that helped me was listening to The Cure. The bass work of Simon Gallup and Michael Dempsey showed me you don’t have to play crazy, complicated lines to have beautiful, melodic bass parts that say so much.

What was recording Return of Saturn like?
We got home from the Tragic Kingdom tour, took two months off, then started writing in February ‘98. We rented a house in the Hollywood Hills and we set ourselves a work schedule: Monday through Friday, from one in the afternoon until we were exhausted. It was surprisingly strict. We wrote a bunch of stuff, went in the studio that summer, and recorded seven songs. But we realized it sounded too similar to Tragic Kingdom – we hadn’t pushed our selves hard enough. We wanted to grow as songwriters, as musicians. All the bands we’ve ever admired always seemed to grow and take chances from record to record, and we didn’t feel like we had done that, so we scrapped it. We started writing again, looked for a new producer, and spent all of 1999 recording the album with Glen Ballard.
One thing the Tragic Kingdom success afforded us was the financial and creative means to make this record the way we wanted to. When we record Adrian’s live drums, I play with him for the energy – but I like to redo my bass parts sitting at the board with the producer. That way I can really concentrate on everything and make sure it’s the way I want it. Sometimes I’d spend days sitting with Glen and trying one thing after another. I’d put down bass lines, then a week later say, “Fuck it – it’s way too busy,” or, “I could improve on that.” That’s part of why it took so long. But it was great to be in a creative environment where you can try different things and then decide, Tragic Kingdom was completely different. We made that over three years while we were all going to school and working day jobs. We all wanted the backup plan; I was studying psychology at Cal State Fullerton. It was a struggle – we were pressed for time and money. Once in a while the record company would give us money to record some songs. This time we were able to take our time.

There are places on the album where you play just a few notes for a bar or two.
You hit a certain point where you realize space is just as important as notes. You hear so many amazing bass players say that all the time, but ultimately you have to realize it for yourself. It’s like being a father: You can’t go to school to learn how. It just comes with life, from watching your dad or watching other men do it, and then being there for your kid.

How do you write?
Usually I sit in a room with Gwen and play bass while she sings, or Tom will play guitar with Gwen. Once in a while it will be all three of us, and on this record Gwen wrote a few herself. It’s a very organic process, just bouncing ideas off each other. We bring them to the rest of the band and start building from there. We’ll try everything, every way – rock, new wave, reggae – staying open-minded to see which style fits the particular song.
Tom’s the one who really studied music theory in high school and college, so he’s the one I always ask, “If we’re in this key, can I do this?” I have a basic grasp of that stuff, but I always have to refresh my memory. But it’s not like somebody’s just handing us changes. In fact, when we’re writing songs, we don’t even talk about changes – we’re talking about making music and asking if it feels good. It’s more about how it makes you feel than what key it’s in.

What’s your musical relationship with Adrian?
It was a big deal when our original drummer left in ‘89. Adrian was a bundle of energy when he auditioned, a true California kid we had seen at shows. He told us he’d been playing for years, but in fact he had learned every song – every beat and every hit, part for part – from our five-song demo tape. At his audition he played them perfectly. We said, “You’re in,” but very quickly we learned he’d been playing only a few months. He tricked us.
Our first recording experience with him was in 1990. We borrowed some money from somebody and actually got Flea to produce for us. It was when Flea was on the cover of Spin: I was 19, and it was a really big deal for me. It was Adrian’s first studio experience, and it was horrendous. We recorded two songs we never released. It wasn’t Flea’s fault; we just weren’t ready – I remember Flea trying to show Adrian how to play beats. But that experience helped make Adrian the great drummer he is today. He’s versatile, he’s hard-hitting, and he can pull back.

What does the future hold for No Doubt?
We don’t know what’s going to happen, and that’s the exciting thing. I think we’ll make another record. We hit this really cool songwriting place we’ll probably want to explore a bit more. But when we finally do decide to hang it up, there’s going to be a lot more in life to explore.

What advice do you have for young bassists?
If you’re enjoying yourself and passionate about what you’re doing, stick with it. It sounds so cliché, but it’s what we do.

Tony’s Tools

Tony Kanal retired the Yamaha BB1600 he played from 1987-86, but Yamahas are still his main axes – now a pair of BB3000s. For Return of Saturn Tony played Ernie Ball Music Man StingRay 5-strings on “Ex-Girlfriend,” “Simple Kind of Life,” and “Too Late.” He also has a Fender American Standard Jazz as a backup. “I change strings every day,” says Tony. “I use standard-gauge GHS Bass Boomers on my Yamahas, Ernie Balls on my Ernie Balls, and Fenders on my Fender.” On his Yamahas he never dials the tone knob all the way up to the treble position, and for a more reggae tone he rolls it off some.

On stage Tony has three Gallien-Krueger 800RB heads – one is the amp he bought in the 80s, and one is a spare. His road case also holds a two-channel Samson UHF wireless unit, a Korg DTR-1 tuner, and a Furman power conditioner. For easy live instrument switching, Tony has a Yamaha 4 and an Ernie Ball 5 each plugged into the Samson’s two channels. An A/B switch sends the signal to the tuner, and from there it’s split from a DI to the house, and then to two 800RBs, one for each bass. For the 4-string, the amp’s mids are set to the center and bass and trebled dimed; for the 5-string, the mids are also at noon, and the bass and treble are at 3:00. The head’s output goes to a custom Gallien-Krueger speaker cable A/B box, which determines which head will feed Tony’s Ampeg SVT 8×10 speaker cabinet.

In the studio, Tony used the same G-K and SVT setup for playing along with Adrian; then he would head into the control room and sit at the board with producer Ballard and engineer Alan Johannes. They tried various amps – even guitar heads to get different bass sounds, and they even made some after-the-fact amp adjustments in Pro Tools using Line 6’s Amp Farm. The only stompbox effect Tony used on the album was a ProCo Rat on the “Comforting Lie” chorus.

Gwen Stefani

The diva from No Doubt puts her soul into her music. Here’s what’s behind those amazing lyrics.

Onstage, Gwen Stefani is a total glamazon and a serious moshing machine. But out of the spotlight, she’s just a girl- which means that, like every other girl, she knows what it’s like to feel jealous, insecure, confused… and totally in love. Gwen shares some of the experiences and ideas that inspired the very personal songs on No Doubt’s new album.

On our last record, I finally realized that I had a skill – I could use songwriting as an outlet for whatever I was going through at the time. On Return of Saturn, everything’s about the last couple years of my life. A lot of the songs are about sad times; writing about them makes me feel a lot better – it’s like I got something good out of something bad. My writing talks about exactly how I feel. This is me. This is my life.

Such a cute girl/I’m so jealous/ I wish I looked exactly like her – “Staring Problem”

Everyone has insecurities. I certainly do! If you read my lyrics, you can see loads of things I have problems with. When girls come up to me at shows and they’re like, you’re re so beautiful!” or “You’re so inspiring I’m always like, “God, if you only I’m just like you! l’ve been through everything you’re going through, they think I don’t have bad days or fat days, but of course I do. Like most people, I have to check on my weight every day. In fact, I wouId like all the girls who see my picture in CosmoGlRL! – with the professional lighting and makeup – to know: None of the pants fit! They were all too small!

A girl in the world barking up the wrong tree/A creature conditioned to employ matrimony – “Marry Me”

I’ve always been pretty traditional. When I was in kindergarten and someone ask me what I was going to be, I drew a bride. And I always played Barbies with the idea of being a wife and having children. I was conditioned to believe marriage is a career. You always wonder who’s going to be the one to marry you. You think, ‘Have I met him? Is this the guy?” I still look forward to having a family, but now I know that’s just one side of me. Still, sometimes I think about how self-centered I am. I mean, my band is my family, but it’s also about me, me, me. I’m praying that having children in the future will save me from my vanity.

Your wildness scares me…/ You say you can’t stand the restrictions/ I find myself trying to change you – “Ex-Girlfriend”

We girls want to cuddle up to somebody and try to see if we can help them in some way. Most of the time it isn’t good for us. I don’t think you can change someone, and I don’t think you should try. But I always try! I’m pretty crazy in my relationships. But I don’t know – I’ve had only two real ones: Tony [Kanal, No Doubt’s bassist] and Gavin [Rossdale, from Bush]. My relationship with Gavin is my first adult relationship. We e-mail each other love letters every day. He gets me out of my self-absorption. ‘Cause usually I’m like, “Go, go, go! The energy! The band!” Gavin balances me out and brings me down to earth. When I’m with him I realize that I need that other person to share daily things with. Like during the CosmoGirl! shoot he called me and I was crying, “Oh, my pants aren’t fitting me!” and he was like, “You know what? You always look good.” I like the intensity of being with someone for a while and feeling so comfortable we can talk about anything. It’s hard to get to that point, you know?

I’m so ashamed, I’ve been so mean/ I don’t know how it got to this point/ I always the one with all the love – “Simple Kind of Life”

You know how sometimes where you’re really honest with other people and you speak your mind, it can come off as being mean? With my boyfriend, I need to be completely honest at all times, because otherwise I’d be lying to him about how I really feel. I don’t know why, but when you love someone and know them well, you tend to be hardest on that person. You should be the nicest and sweetest, but there’s a lot of times when you use them as a punching bag because you know they’re the one person you can trust to be there for you, even if you’re being a really big jerk.

So why do we choose the boys that are naughty?/ I know I can’t tame you. ..but I just keep trying./ Why do the good girls always want the bad boys? – “Bathwater”

I was always a really good girl. In high school, my best friend and I didn’t drink or do drugs; we weren’t into that scene. Then all of a sudden she started partying and doing things with guys, and it was pretty hurtful to me because it was like she was moving ahead of me; she was on a different level. It was a shock – I felt like I was being abandoned. Later, I went out with a really bad boy who was always getting in trouble. I played piccolo in marching band, and my bandleader didn’t like my boyfriend. He told me, Gwen you’re walking a fine line.” I was like, ‘What are you talking about?” But after high school, that guy actually got really bad. It’s weird – you always have these guys who are like the sweetest guys and they’re always doing stuff for you, but you don’t want to go out with them.

I kinda always knew I’d end up your ex-girlfriend/ I hope I hold a special place with the rest of them/ And you know it makes me sick to be on that list – “Ex-Girlfriend”

When you fall in love, some kind of weird chemical thing happens that makes you believe that no one else in the world is more connected than you two are. It’s human nature to want to be unique, so the idea that your boyfriend might have had other girlfriends before you is sickening. You don’t want him to have loved anyone as intensely as he loves you. His past history can make you uncomfortable. It’s like, “You were hanging out with someone else? How dare you!” But whenever you date someone, then obviously for the rest of their lives they’ll be able to go, “Well, I went out with this person, this person, this person, this person, and then there was Gwen, and then this person, this person .. .“ The jealousy part of life can totally take over, so you have to try to have control over it. But it’s difficult: I still have problems with jealousy.

So many different faces/ Depending on the different phases/My personality changes – “Magic’s in the Makeup”

That song started out as words in my journal. It’s not literally about makeup – although that can be magic – it’s about trying to find the real Gwen. Which one is the best one, the good person? It’s about the different faces we all have and how certain people bring out certain things in you. Like maybe you and your hairdresser, for whatever reason, cannot stop talking. You just have everything to say to each other. But then you meet someone you kind of admire or have a crush on, and suddenly you don’t know how to speak and you can’t act like yourself! It’s good to know that everyone does that. I mean, I have so many sides. When I’m around Tony, I’m a totally different girl, because he’s a boy I’ve known for 13 years and he’s my best friend and we like to get silly with each other. And when I talk to my boyfriend, I turn into a real girly girl. There are just different faces that you show, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that!

A lot of times, a song says more to you after you’ve written it than when you’re actually writing it, because suddenly you see all these themes. I love that. I wrote this album because I needed to figure some stuff out, and I definitely feel lighter and clearer than I’ve ever been before.

They came from within: the intra-band battles, that is. But now that No Doubt have emerged from a rocky hiatus with Return of Saturn, only Gwen Stefani’s internal conflicts still rage. By Chris Willman

There’s a war being waged for Gwen Stefani’s soul. On one shoulder sits Suzy Homemaker. On the other, Suzi Quatro. The rocker in Stefani seems to be winning out over the family gal by an Orange County mile. Which doesn’t mean that No Doubt’s new album, Return of Saturn, isn’t ringed with massive layers of doubt about the domestic road not taken. ”Who will be the one to marry me?” she asks in the album’s dreamy centerpiece track. In ”Simple Kind of Life,” Stefani not only daydreams about giving up show business for a more tranquil station in life, she even imagines the birth-control screwup that might take her away from all this careerism. ”I always thought I’d be a mom/Sometimes I wish for a mistake…/You seem like you’d be a good dad.”

No need to buy her off-again, on-again significant other, Bush frontman Gavin Rossdale, a copy of Dr. Spock just yet, though: This is fantasy, she insists. ”When I was 21, I was ready to get married. Girls are always thinking of that. We’re programmed,” Stefani explains. ”But I have to clarify this, because everybody gets it wrong. ‘Marry Me’ is not about the fact that I want to get married. I don’t want people to think, ‘Oh, she’s turning 30 and getting moody and wants to settle down!’ It’s more about how I used to think that’s all I ever wanted, and the confusion of realizing that I am more faithful to my freedom than I ever thought I could be. And that’s scary.”

So she’s Just a Career Girl after all. And what a career: Probably no band that ever started off with as unremarkable a debut as 1992’s ho-hum ska-fest No Doubt has ever gone on to craft a follow-up as successful as 1995’s Tragic Kingdom… or an album as good as Return of Saturn, which, even as we don’t speak, is bringing round a lot of formerly dismissive critics. You don’t even have to be having an early midlife crisis to succumb, though it helps. For all of the quartet’s new-wave revivalism, the disc fits squarely within rock’s grand tradition of confessional singer-songwriter platters, meaning there are plenty more ante-upping admissions of insecurity, confusion, and mortal anxiety where those delusions of familial bliss came from.

The ante that Interscope Records might prefer to see upped is the 10-times-platinum figure the peppy Tragic Kingdom managed in America (15 million internationally). Rarely does that kind of commercial lightning strike twice – ”Never,” guitarist Tom Dumont corrects us – but if you press the band, they’ll admit selling half that many would be affirming enough. They’ve had a good enough start, selling 202,000 copies the first week out, and becoming the first female-fronted band to make a significant impact on alt-rock radio in well over a year. But even the modest goal of halving their previous success may stand as a challenge in the ever-younger-skewing pop climate into which No Doubt step, banging out anthems about grown-up ”growing pains,” taking on the concerns of the VH1 demographic in a total TRL world. And that’s scary.

It was definitely my least favorite two years of my life,” says Stefani, settling onto a couch in Interscope’s new digs, which were no doubt largely subsidized by… No Doubt. She’s recalling the period spent writing and recording Saturn, during which “it was hard to figure out which of the Gwens is the real Gwen.” Straddling 30, as she just did, “you start to feel like, this is me, this is what I am: All those years of blossoming, and now it’s time to…perish.” She laughs, not meaning to sound quite so morbid. “At the time, I didn’t know what the feelings were all about. I was like, Why do I feel sad, and why is it that when I eat ice cream, it is not helping?” It was Rossdale who told Stefani she must be going through “Saturn returns,” an astrological concept that explains (in case more obvious theories about scary round numbers don’t suffice) just why facing the big three-oh tends to be a self-analytic drag.

Some folks cure their first midlife crisis by buying an SUV. Stefani dyed her hair Easter-egg pink, with blond highlights. She’s color-coordinated today, curling up with her morning coffee in a pink velour sweater Ed Wood would kill for. She will not go monochromatic into that good night.

“I’d never experienced any kind of depression,” she explains, describing her initial bafflement at developing a taste for Sylvia Plath. “I’ve always been a happy-go-lucky, passive type who attached myself to one person and lived happily through them. But I got to a point where I was going, oh my God, maybe this is what an adult feels like – and it sucks! And maybe nothing will ever be as exciting as it used to be when I was going through puberty. But,” she adds, caffeine-cheered, “I feel a lot lighter now.”

She’s hard-pressed to explain her cure, other than experiencing the same postpartum elation the whole band felt when the album was done. There was no small pressure on this humble Anaheim, Calif., foursome, who’d quietly enjoyed a cult following on the So Cal scene from their ‘86 inception until Tragic Kingdom took to the stratosphere circa 1996. Says producer Glen Ballard, “It’s a pretty regular occurrence that the follow-up album for a huge album can be the least fun album for any artist. They were beginning to feel like that was going to be the case. Everybody dreams of having that kind of problem, but the truth is, once you get there, it’s not fun. I insisted that they have fun. And… they kind of came around.”

Not before some false starts. Following 27 months of touring, they took just two months off before going back into the studio with Tragic producer Matthew Wilder in February ‘98. Half a year and a half-dozen or so tracks later, producer and band amicably parted. Six months after that, they picked Ballard (of Alanis fame) as their new coach – or doc; he describes his first task as producer as “performing triage.” Sifting through tapes, Ballard found the weary band weighed down by 40 demos, and whittled the list to a workable 20 or so. Eventually, they cut two dozen tracks to arrive at Saturn’s 14. Did we mention money was no object?

But time was, to some minds. Due dates passed, but as bassist Tony Kanal argued, “What, are we trying to capitalize on the momentum of Tragic Kingdom? It’s been years!” They mixed and mastered one version of the album last summer, only to have Interscope execs suggest they soldier on further still in search of a single. Band members weren’t sure they wanted to accept that advice from a company that initially had so little faith in Kingdom it had sublicensed the album to a smaller label. Stefani gamely offered to keep writing, resulting in a contretemps with drummer Adrian Young and especially Dumont, who firmly informed the singer that he was done. A short cool-off vacation ensued, during which Dumont sent Stefani his own demos as a peace offering, and the group came back together to record a final track, “Ex-Girlfriend,” which has turned out to be one of the best rock singles since rock was in vogue. (And which set the terrible precedent of proving a record label right.)

There was also a tension – a healthy one, they insist – between, on one side, ex-lovers and ongoing confidants Stefani and Kanal, who steered toward a more reflective tenor, and the lyrically unconcerned camp of Young and Dumont, who were less than stoked by the prospect of touring behind a bunch of soul-searching ballads. “Whenever it seemed like it was getting too mellow or melancholy,” admits Young, “I probably was irritating everybody, making sure that we didn’t let it fall below the line of not rocking. That was something I was constantly pounding on, telling Tom, ‘Put more distortion on your guitar!’ trying to sneak in fast tempos here and there.”

Ex-girlfriend” is not, as many assume, about Stefani’s relationship with Kanal, a la “Don’t Speak,” but written during a fallow period with Rossdale. (“There’s a little bit of Tony still [in some lyrics], too,” Stefani says.) “Of course [Gavin] is gonna be all over the album, because certain things in my life are off balance, and I write about those. The relationship definitely suffers because I’m doing the band the whole time. But,” she says, “I’m all over his album, not necessarily in a good way.”

Perhaps the woman doth protest too much. Among the more likable and least pretentious of rock stars, this 50-miles-southeast-of-the-Valley girl probably would make a good mom, come to think of it. She’s not so sure herself.

“Anyone who knows me knows having a family has always been the most important thing to me. I wanted to be a mother – which is an unconditional giving of love – and a supportive wife, and suddenly, I can’t even be a good girlfriend, because I can’t seem to find the right time to call. I want to do it all, but I can only do one thing good, and right now I’ve chosen to do this. Being in a band is a bit of a selfish choice.” Maybe it’s just the coffee talking, but she seems a little blue about the big life picture and positively elated about the smaller one – that is, the year about to be spent on the road – all at once. For the time being, just call her Suzy Houserocker.