For the past couple of years, it was pretty quiet around No Doubt, especially if you consider the media hype the band enjoyed--or suffered--after the release and breakthrough of their album Tragic Kingdom in 1995. Almost five years out of the music business is a pretty long time and a lot of bands don't manage a comeback.
     Return To Saturn is the fourth album for the Orange County ska-pop band. Of their three previous albums: 1992's No Doubt, 1995's Beacon Street Incident, and Tragic Kingdom, the latter was their biggest success. In its wake, the band toured nonstop before finally taking a break and then returning to the studio. It took them two years to finish writing and recording these songs. What might seem a rather unusually long time for another band is absolutely normal for No Doubt. After all, they've been together for 13 years and have only released four albums so far.
     Singer Gwen Stefani explains, "Each of us comes from a different musical background and so sometimes it's really hard to find a mutual ground. We're a band, so everybody should be happy with a song. I don't know where the time went; it just slipped by. After we spent two years straight on the road, we were really exhausted. We're definitely a live band and we enjoy playing live; that's always been our strongest point and where we got most of our fans from, but being on the road all the time is really uncreative. It's a crazy life!"
     Bassist Tony Kanal agrees completely. "If you've been on the road for over two years and you come back home, everything is different. Your whole surroundings are different and you need time to get used to it again. You have to get down and sort out your private stuff and all that. You’ve got to get used to having a home again and not waking up in a different hotel room every morning.
     "We're a band that works more like a family and that's one of the reasons why certain things simply take longer. Like, we can't really write songs while we're on tour because too much is happening around us. Especially after the success of Tragic Kingdom, so much happened that we hardly got a minute to ourselves. It really took some time getting used to the new situation, and then we kind of had to relearn being creative again."
     It's always been rather hard to find a label for the sound of No Doubt. They mixed in as many influences as the band members could think of and never cared for a certain style. For the first time Gwen wrote some songs for the album and seems rather proud.
     "I just feel this sense of accomplishment, and this lightness has come over me since the album has been finished," she explains. "Being in the studio was really something I had to get used to again. While you're on tour you don't feel like you're a person, you have to function no matter how you feel, but if you're going to write songs how you feel becomes important again. It's quite a switch! After we got back from the tour I got really depressed, not because I didn't want to be home again, but because everything was so different and it was such a hard time getting used to it again!"
     Gwen wrote all the lyrics to the songs and says it took a lot out of her, sometimes almost too much, but that has a lot to do with the way she writes. "Whenever I write lyrics, I live through them. In a way, they reflect a certain period in my life and I live through that period again, relive the whole thing, and that's pretty hard, but I want to get better. I want to write lyrics that make sense. I want to say what I feel and what I think, maybe because there are not a lot of female artists who voice what I feel! Writing lyrics is kind of like writing a diary or reading your diary and living through phases of your life again. I can only write about things I know."
     No Doubt doesn't give much thought to whether Return To Saturn will be a huge success or not. They’re just happy with the result. Tony claims that it's mainly an album for the band. "We've always made the sound we like, and if other people like it as well, it's great,” he says, “but we have to like what we do. I think it's the best album we could possibly make, but we have no influence on how the people like it. But we want our fans to know why we recorded the album the way we did, because I think it's sad if people listen to something and they don't know what went in; they don't know the background."
     Return To Saturn boosts a rather impressive studio lineup: Glen Ballard (Alanis Morissette) produced, Alain Johannes (Eleven, Chris Cornell) recorded and Jack Joseph Piug (Black Crowes) mixed. It's obvious that No Doubt wanted the best, but again, Tony Kanal stresses that the reason is not commercial success.
     "Of course we're going to be happy if it sells, but if it doesn't sell it's not the end of the world and we can't really change it. We're realistic about it and we already made our money. I don't mean to be arrogant about it or anything, but we don't need it to be a big success. It was an album we did for ourselves. Of course we hope that people like it, simply because we like the album and you always want other people to appreciate something you're proud of, but the point is that it's absolutely beyond your control.
     "I think it all boils down to the fact that we didn't change, success didn't change us. We're the same people we were, only older, but that's natural. We love being musicians and I can't imagine that I'll ever do anything else, or want to do anything else, but now we can afford it. If it would have been just for the money we could have easily written another copy of Tragic Kingdom, but that was exactly what we didn't want to do. We went through some rather tough times and survived as a band; we survived our success. Sometimes I really think nothing can happen to us anymore!"
     Gwen agrees with Tony and confesses that she doesn't really waste a thought on what's going to happen in the future. "In case Return To Saturn should flop, it won't be the end of the world for us. Of course we'll be sad because we think it's a great album, but I don't think it would be a reason to split. We toured long enough without having a big success and we didn't get successful overnight. We're proud of our new album and that's what really counts. I think if we wouldn't have had any good songs it would have been ok as well just to stop. It would have been sad, but not the end of the world. I think we all thought the same: that we had our 15 minutes of fame and a lot of bands don't even get that much out of it.
     "Right now I look forward to being on tour again and playing live. Even if I might become tired of it after a while, right now I really do look forward to it. I hope our audience will still like us!"