Interview with Tony Kanal of No Doubt

Regarding progress—as you said you were doing some stuff I think sans Gwen last year when you were working on material for a new No Doubt record—have you scrapped that material or is it on the side?

No, it’s all there, and there’s a ton of ideas. We also started some new stuff with Gwen, and we also took some of that older stuff and worked on it with Gwen and added some of her stuff to it. It’s just kind of all there, and it was maybe two or three months ago during the writing process, we were like, ‘It’s time to play shows.’

To be honest with you, we’ve kind of tabled the writing, because getting ready for a tour of this size is an enormous amount of preparation. So all that stuff’s been put on hold, but I’m actually in the process of putting a small little studio together for my bus, because by default, since I’m the only one who doesn’t have kids in the band yet, I’m doing the studio in my bus so we can keep the writing process going on the off days and stuff like that.

I’m actually pretty excited about that, to kind of merge the two, to take the excitement and that high that you get when you get when you’re playing a show and be able to convert that into writing music instantly or within the next couple of days. So I’m really excited about having the studio in my bus and keeping the creative writing process going.

There’s no fear of burning the candle at both ends?

If it feels like we’re getting burnt out, the first thing everyone’s going to do is sleep. It’s going to be interesting to see what the dynamic is going to be on this tour, ‘cause it’s the first time we’re touring with a lot of kids, you know.
It’s the family tour.

It is the family tour (laughs). There’s something kind of beautiful about it. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, especially when you’re doing interviews and you’re reminiscing about all the things we’ve experienced as a band. We started in high school, we went through everything between playing in the garage together and struggling for many, many years before Tragic Kingdom had some success, we’ve got to see and experience so many things together that only the four of us could ever relate to.

We have all our families now and this No Doubt family keeps growing and it’s a blessing to think that we got to experience so many different facets of being in a band over all these years. I think this is another cool experience we’re going to have, having the kids out there is going to be a different dynamic. What was the backstage party room with the bartender and the DJ is now going to be a romper room with a lot of bouncy toys for the kids. It’ll be interesting to see how that all plays out this summer.

Have to watch your language.

Yeah, exactly (laughs). I guess we do, huh? I didn’t even think about that. I guess Kingston [Rossdale] and Ace [Dumont], they’re both around 3-years-old. I guess they would know. I didn’t even think about that.