New Doubt

Two questions have been fired incessantly at the members of No Doubt in the months leading up to the release this week of their new album, “Return of Saturn.”

First, will they repeat the phenomenal success they had with “Tragic Kingdom,” the breakthrough 1995 album that has sold 7.5 million copies in the U.S. and turned the group’s telegenic singer Gwen Stefani into the sexy but clean-cut idol of young navel-gazing rock fans around the world?

Second, how will they react if lightning doesn’t strike twice?

As Stefani and her three cohorts--guitarist Tom Dumont, bassist Tony Kanal and drummer Adrian Young--consider those questions in a sparse North Hollywood rehearsal studio, they respond politely, thoughtfully and articulately, despite having done so repeatedly during a recent two-month battery of interviews with European press.

Their unanimous answer to the first--another mega-hit album is their hope but not their goal--helps answer the second: Whatever happens they’ll be just fine, thanks.

That’s not to say the four musicians didn’t heave a collective sigh of relief at modern-rock radio’s rapid acceptance of the new album’s first single, “Ex-Girlfriend,” which helped allay fears that fans might have lost interest during the two years they’ve been locked away working on the successor to “Tragic Kingdom.”

“I was a lot more nervous two months ago,” Young says.

No Doubt having new doubts? Definitely. But also new realizations that can come with such self-questioning. And for lyricist Stefani, a new level of maturity and reach in her songwriting.

All four acknowledge the remarkable concurrence of work, talent and timing that sent “Tragic Kingdom” to the top of the sales chart for nine weeks in 1996-97.

“We knew that the planets all lined up and the sun shone on us,” Dumont says, two days before No Doubt headed to Chicago to start a tour that includes a sold-out Universal Amphitheatre show on Friday. “We knew that kind of stuff just happens once.”

Besides, adds Stefani, “trying to sell as many records as before or be at the top of the charts is stuff we can’t control. The stuff we can control is to go in there and try to make a record that we can be proud of, and feel like we can go out and share with people and tour with for a long time.

“I think we did it!” she says, beaming, equal parts pride and surprise in a voice characteristically effervescent despite a lingering cold. “We feel so good about it--we’re all kind of shocked at the chemistry we had together, and the amount of growth from ‘Tragic Kingdom’ to this record. It’s a huge step for us, not a little baby one.”

That step has taken Stefani into deeper emotional territory than ever.

“After making this record, I feel like it’s OK if I call myself [a writer] now,” she said, curled against the arm of a sofa in an otherwise bare studio next to the one where the band is practicing, her once platinum blond hair now dusted flamingo pink. “After ‘Tragic Kingdom,’ I couldn’t bring myself to because [songwriting] was so new to me, even though I’d already been in the band for nine years.”

The dual turning points were the departure of her brother, songwriter Eric Stefani, who left the band before “Tragic Kingdom” came out (to pursue his burgeoning career as an animator on “The Simpsons”), and the end of her seven-year romance with Kanal, with whom she remains close friends.

“My brother was the real creative force behind the band,” she says. At her feet is her Lhasa apso Maggen, her constant companion of 14 years. “After he left, and after Tony and I split up--after ‘the amputation’ as I call it--it was like suddenly the responsibility [of writing lyrics] was in my lap and suddenly I had a story to tell.”

She soon discovered--to her delight--that she now had a career, not just a hobby.

“I’m on this tour, and I think for the first time I realized, ‘God, I feel really good doing this [and] even though I’d been doing it a long time, I had this realization that I was actually good at it and it was real and it wasn’t like play time. . . . I think everyone gets to a point in their life where they grow up and go, ‘Wow, this is me now. I’m not just a kid. This is what I’m doing.’ ”

What she’s doing in many of the songs on “Return of Saturn” is wrestling with the complications of life as an adult. The title alludes to the 29 1/2 years it takes Saturn to orbit the sun, the same amount of time Stefani feels most people need to figure out who they are.

So although “Ex-Girlfriend” covers classic Stefani/No Doubt territory in charting an ill-fated love affair, “Simple Kind of Life,” “Marry Me” and “Six Feet Under” tackle issues of childhood dreams deferred, mortality and the modern woman’s dilemma of career versus family.

During the two years she was writing those songs, what was going through her mind was “Oh God, this is it. I’m an adult. This is what it feels like and it sucks,” she says with a world-weary laugh. “Nothing’s good anymore. When I eat chocolate it doesn’t make me feel any better like it used to.”

She’s not yearning for a life of domestic bliss, just to come to terms with the loss of youthful illusions about what constitutes happiness in life.

“A lot of people are kind of not getting it right and saying, ‘Oh, Gwen’s getting broody and she should just settle down and get married and have a normal life,’ ” she says. “But that’s not really the case.

“I’m happy that I’ve gotten to experience all these things. My eyes are open. I look forward to all that [marriage and family] stuff, and I think I could do it well, but it is complicated to try to understand. . . . How did all those things I really thought I’d be good at get so far from me and how did I get so self-centered and so faithful to my freedom?

“Everybody goes, ‘Oh this is such a personal record, aren’t you scared [to reveal those feelings]?’ No, because I’m talking about normal life things that everyone goes through. . . . I just happened to be writing this album when it happened to me.”

The four longtime friends set about making “Return of Saturn” after taking a two-month break following their arduous but eye-opening 2 1/2-year world tour in support of “Tragic Kingdom.”

The songs they first came up with sounded too much like “Tragic Kingdom II,” which wasn’t at all what they had in mind.

“If we had wanted to maintain as much success as possible,” said drummer Young, “we would have hired a team of songwriters to write us 10 new ‘Don’t Speaks.’ We had no interest in that.”

So they started writing more songs, Stefani struggling to make her lyrics stronger and wider-ranging by reading Sylvia Plath and Joni Mitchell, among others. The rest of the band buckled down to come up with a more varied musical canvas on which to paint her lyrics, one not so strongly tied to the punk-ska textures they’d started out focusing on.

When the two came together, Kanal said, it constituted a seismic shift for No Doubt: No longer were they kids just trying to prove themselves, but musicians who could leave their egos behind and focus on the betterment of the songs.

Helping guide them through the maturation process was heavyweight producer and songwriter Glen Ballard, who signed on to produce “Return of Saturn” after Stefani, Dumont, Kanal and Young had written about 40 songs. Ballard said he stepped in “to perform triage on this huge body of material they’d collected since ‘Tragic Kingdom.’ ”

“They don’t take themselves too seriously on the surface, but they’re utterly serious about making good music,” says Ballard, who produced both of Alanis Morissette’s multiplatinum albums and co-wrote “Man in the Mirror” with Michael Jackson, among other highlights on his lengthy resume.

“Whatever images people have of hugely successful rock bands coming back into the studio after a hit album and playing around or using it as vacation does not apply in any way, shape or form to this band,” Ballard says in a separate interview. “They were quite disciplined.”

He attributes that discipline to nine years spent in the trenches before “Tragic Kingdom” transformed the little Anaheim ska band that could into an international sensation.

That success financed their exodus from Orange County: Stefani and Kanal moved to houses in Los Feliz, Dumont and Young to Long Beach and Lakewood, respectively.

The long period of dues-paying also manifests itself in the absence of ego displays, personally or professionally. The group may have to its credit one of the most popularalbums of the ‘90s, but you wouldn’t guess it from the size of the theaters No Doubt is playing early in the “Return of Saturn” tour--mostly 1,200- to 3,000-seaters.

“If you’re going to go out and be playing a lot of new material, you want to be playing to a small-core fan base, especially before people have had a chance to spend some time with the new record,” says No Doubt manager Jim Guerinot. “This is the time for the band to get out and have fun before they launch a whole big tour.” That big tour is coming later this summer, and will include an Aug. 5 date at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre.

In the fall the quartet performed a string of even smaller shows in clubs and on college campuses.

“I see that as just smart management,” says Gary Bongiovanni, editor in chief of the concert-industry tracking magazine Pollstar. “Any time an act takes time off, there’s a question as to how strong the audience response will be when they return. It’s always better to sell out at a smaller theater and turn people away until you go back out and reestablish a good connection with the audience. Then do the arena-level shows.”

In Kanal’s view, there’s no shame in moving slowly.

“It’s almost like starting over,” he says. “That’s why we’re going out and doing small clubs again and reconnecting with the audience, and doing all the same things that we did along every milestone of the band over the last 13 years: to try to build that energy and that excitement again. We’re not taking anything for granted. We’re willing to put in the work.”

BE THERE

No Doubt, Universal Amphitheatre, 100 Universal City Plaza, Universal City. 8:15 p.m. Friday. Sold out. (818) 622-4440. Also Aug. 5 at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre, 8808 Irvine Center Drive, Irvine. 8 p.m. $25. On sale Saturday. (949) 855-2863.

Today at 7 p.m., KROQ-FM (106.7) will broadcast a live performance from the Virgin Megastore in Costa Mesa. Sold out.

*

“Everybody goes, ‘Oh this is such a personal record, aren’t you scared [to reveal those feelings]?’ No, because I’m talking about normal life things that everyone goes through.”

GWEN STEFANI

No Doubt singer-songwriter