In yet another installment of their interview with MTV News,No Doubt revealed that they enjoyed the process of making the album and that if they hadn’t set a deadline for finishing the album,they probably would still be working on it. They added that they didn’t really know that the record was done until they recorded the last song written,”Undone.” Best of all,Gwen said that the band would love to make another record (!!!),but that right now they are understandbaly trying to live in the moment and not think that far ahead.
No Doubt are aware you’ve been waiting a long time for their brand-new Push and Shove album, and they’re definitely sorry for the delay. But, hey, things could have been worse: By all accounts, they’d still be working on the album if they had their way.
“I get sad that it’s done. I enjoyed the process, even though there was a lot of torture involved!” Gwen Stefani told MTV News. “I didn’t want it to be over, especially when you hear music out there that’s inspiring and you’re like, ‘Aw, man, I should have written that!’ or you think, ‘I can do another one!’ It’s like kids; you have one, and they’re so cute, so you think, ‘I wonder what another one would look like!’ You just want to keep going.”
“We would have kept tweaking and adjusting and maybe rewriting, but we finally had a deadline,” bassist Tony Kanal laughed. “We would have kept going, but it was like, ‘OK, we’ve got to finish mixing the record by now, we’ve got to master the record by now.’ If not, we’d probably still be working on it.”
Still, despite the deadlines, No Doubt still had to hustle to finish Push and Shove on time — which was sort of par for the course. They battled writer’s block, suspended early sessions, went on tour, and finally, in 2010, decided it was time to get down to business. But even those studio sessions were marked by frequent rewrites and re-recordings, part of a process that seemed to stretch on forever.
“I don’t know if we ever felt, ‘OK, this record’s done,’ before we were done,” drummer Adrian Young said. “There were times where a song maybe felt done, and then we would go away from it and work on something else, and we would come back to a song and go, ‘That’s not quite right,’ and then we’d go off and experiment and re-record it again. And that happened with multiple songs. … We didn’t really know that the record was really done until we recorded the last song written, which was ‘Undone,’ which is weird. And at that point, we felt like we knew we had it.”
And though she was the first to admit “We don’t know what we’re doing!” Stefani said that, based on that last song she wrote, she feels like she’s got plenty left in the tank — so much so that, who knows, there may be another No Doubt album on the horizon, albeit one that won’t take four years to make.
“I think we would love to make another record, but we’re totally trying to live in the moment and not think that far ahead,” she said. “But ‘Undone’ came so easy. It was like I still wanted to write. So who knows, three years from now, maybe we can do another one!”