No Doubt About It: A Deeper Sound Emerges

Gwen Stefani, looking like a hip Heidi in blond braids and a casually fashionable outfit of zippered jacket, blue denim jeans and leopard platform sandals, is kneeling, not sitting, on a red couch in a hallway outside a Hollywood record-mastering studio.

Snuggled beside her is a Lhasa apso named Maggen, her companion of 14 years--one year longer than Stefani has been singing for No Doubt. Sitting or milling about are guitarist Tom Dumont, bassist Tony Kanal, drummer Adrian Young and adjunct member Gabriel McNair.

No Doubt has been waiting three hours for technicians to transfer 14 new, fresh-from-the-studio songs to a reel-to-reel master tape: the final, pre-manufacturing artifact of a labor that, at this point, has gone on for 18 months.

The mastering engineer, Bernie Grundman, whose credits include Prince’s “Kiss” single and Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” album, at last is ready to give the album, tentatively titled “Artificial Sweetener,” a final dash of subtle audio flavoring.

The mastering process allows an engineer to electronically enhance or alter the final audio product that has come out of the recording studio. The resulting “master tape” is then dubbed onto a videocassette-like tape. Copies sold to the public are duplicated from that second tape, while the original master goes to the record company’s vault for safekeeping.

It says something that all of No Doubt’s members are here for this largely technical process, along with the album’s producer, Glen Ballard (Alanis Morissette’s producer and songwriting partner). Attendance at mastering sessions is considered optional, says Grundman’s assistant, Steve Procaccini, and most musicians don’t bother. “To have the whole band come in is very unusual.”

“We always feel compelled to be at everything we do,” Dumont says later. But in the mastering phase, there isn’t much No Doubt can do.

“It’s [all about] Bernie’s voodoo,” says Ballard, who had Morissette’s two latest albums mastered here. “It’s his custom-made electronics and his great ear.”

Orange County-based No Doubt is seeing through the last step in a process that began with the members sharing a rented house in the Hollywood Hills, trying to write and record a fresh batch of songs that would prove the critics wrong and an estimated 15 million record-buying fans worldwide right.

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At first, No Doubt had trouble living up to its name.

“A lot of the stuff we were doing sounded like a caricature of ourselves,” recalls Stefani, who became the band’s signature face and fashion trendsetter as its 1995 album “Tragic Kingdom” turned into a pop phenomenon. Critics scoffed that the peppy record lacked depth, but the Anaheim-bred No Doubt topped the album chart for nine weeks in 1996-97.

“There’s been a lot of pressure because everyone’s paying attention this time, for better or worse,” Dumont says. “And we put pressure on ourselves: We tried to prove that we really do know how to write songs, and that we are good musicians.”

Any expectation that No Doubt will match “Tragic Kingdom’s” impact on the charts is unrealistic, says Jim Kerr, alternative editor for the trade publication Radio & Records. But he thinks the band will get a good shot at another successful record.

“It’s not a bubble gum-pop band that is going to go away in a year,” he says. “They do so many things well. No Doubt will get their shot at both pop and alternative radio, and where it goes from there is up to the audience.”

No Doubt’s new music pours into the softly lit mastering studio at a comfortable volume, coming out of the dark from speakers hidden behind a wall of black fabric. Stefani chews gum steadily; her right knee pumps lightly to the beat, and the right ear of the dog napping on her lap rises and falls in time. Everyone listens closely. Young at one point plays air drums with a grin and a flourish.

As the tracks play, one change is obvious: Nobody will mistakenly call No Doubt a ska band anymore. The fast-stepping Jamaican beat that was one of its signatures is gone; there’s a bit of slower reggae still in the mix, but mostly No Doubt is rocking like an early 1980s new wave band or playing ballads with touches of Beatles influence.

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In its formative years in the late 1980s, No Doubt played pure ska and benefited from it: Southern California had a substantial pocket of ska devotees. But Dumont says that by the early 1990s, No Doubt had fallen under the spell of eclectics on the L.A. scene, notably the Red Hot Chili Peppers and the wide-open, anything-goes approach of the ska-funk-rock-soul band Fishbone. Stefani was finding her way as one of the few female performers in the punk-saturated Orange County rock scene.

With “Tragic Kingdom,” No Doubt honed its sprawling sound into coherent pop hits. But most critics dismissed it as a lightweight. The band toured for more than two years, took just two months off, then set about writing a follow-up.

But No Doubt’s old bugaboo, musical sprawl, popped up again. That’s where Ballard came in. He was hired in February, a year into a project that began with “Tragic Kingdom” producer Matthew Wilder, and was to have continued with A-list producer Michael Beinhorn until he was sidetracked by another commitment.

“Writing the songs wasn’t the problem,” Stefani says. Overdecorating them was. Ballard “put all the songs on diets and helped us to slim them down and tighten them up.”

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To deepen her reach as a lyricist, Stefani kept a journal and read poetry and fiction; Dumont says that as No Doubt launched its final six-month recording push with Ballard, she was reading everything she could find by or about Sylvia Plath, the emotionally stark writer who became modern American poetry’s most famous suicide.

The results, at first listening, sound moodier than the “Tragic Kingdom” fare; Dumont says No Doubt may try to write a few more rockers to balance the album, which means it will now come out early next year instead of November, as originally planned.

One new song, “Simple Kind of Life,” is far above anything on “Tragic Kingdom.” Beautiful and instantly memorable, the song calls to mind George Harrison’s wistful side and R.E.M.’s urgent jangling on “Losing My Religion.” A conflicted Stefani forsakes her usual vocal theatrics to sing intimately and touchingly about what it’s like to arrive at the doorstep of 30, her lifelong dream of being a wife and mother deferred, with feelings of selfishness welling up.

As the master reel rolls--the process would take all of one day and half the next--a different form of parenthood is drawing near. Stefani sums up No Doubt’s long, not-quite-finished creative process in decidedly reproductive terms.

“At first, you don’t know if you can even get pregnant; we hadn’t been creative for so long [while on tour]. Then we were doing a lot of second-guessing, sitting in a room going, ‘Is that good? Is that good?’ Then [Ballard] brought back a lot of our confidence. And now,” she says excitedly, “it’s, ‘Oh my God, the baby’s here, and we want to show everyone!’ ” *