taken from: Canada.com

Hayley talks about touring with No Doubt, fayleys and being the chick the media focuses on

No doubt about Paramore’s rise. -by Heath McCoy

When Tennessee pop-punks Paramore first joined No Doubt on that band’s comeback tour back in May, singer Hayley Williams remembers seeing a gang of young girls in the front row all doing their very best imitation, style- wise, of Gwen Stefani.

It was a scene that Williams, 20, could certainly understand.

Growing up, she was a big No Doubt fan who found herself in awe of the band’s dazzling, charismatic frontwoman.

“I look at Gwen Stefani and she’s barely even a real person she looks so amazing,” said Williams in a phone interview. “She’s an amazing woman to have done as much as she’s done and to be impacting so many people still . . . I really hope to follow a career path like that.”

Of those dedicated Stefani-ites, Williams couldn’t help but notice that “they didn’t really know who we were.”

But the Gwen-gang kept turning up at shows, Williams says, and after awhile she began to feel like they had also become Paramore fans.

Meanwhile, there’s been another group in those crowds that seems to be growing in number steadily and those young women have a different look.

Instead of Stefani’s platinum blond, they’re sporting bright orange locks in homage to Williams herself. It’s something she’s seen increasingly over the last year or so and she still doesn’t quite know what to make of it.

“It’s odd to look out there and see a bunch of Mini-Mes,” says Williams. “You’re wondering what possessed them to do such a thing . . . It sort of does a reverse psychology on you. You’d think you’d be like `Hey, all these people want to look like me. I feel pretty cool.’ But actually it makes you feel more self aware and I’m not really fond of that.”

“I wake up in the morning and sometimes I just want to wear a T-shirt and blue jeans and now I have to force myself to do that, because I can’t care what people think, you know? . . .

“It’s very hard to see why people would come to shows dressed like me when they could aspire to look like Gwen Stefani.”

As taken aback as she is though, Williams can’t help but feel like such a phenomenon is a sign of huge things to come for the band she joined in high school.

Indeed, Paramore’s last studio disc, 2007’s Riot!, has hit platinum sales of one million in the U.S. As for the group’s next record, Brand New Eyes, set for release in late September, it was produced by the highly sought after Rob Cavallo, whose studio credentials include Green Day, My Chemical Romance and Avril Lavigne.

With all of this, Williams can’t help but feel that Paramore is on the verge of a major breakthrough.

“I feel it’s the calm before the storm, I really do,” she says. “We’re so stoked. I can’t wait for everybody to hear (the new record).”

Part of Williams’ love for Brand New Eyes comes from her insistence that making the record “saved our band.”

She’s vague about the exact tensions that existed, but it was widely speculated when the band cancelled its European tour last year that Paramore was close to splitting up.

Many assumed that the root of the problem was that age-old malady of mostly male rock bands fronted by attractive females. We’ve seen it before from Blondie to No Doubt. The media shines the spotlight on the chick and the dudes get bent out of shape.

That certainly seemed like the issue when MTV.com quoted the band’s guitarist and Williams’ co-writer Josh Farro saying: “We are a team. We are a band. It’s not just Hayley – it’s not her band.”

Williams acknowledged as much.

“I got the most frustrated about it because I just wanted to be one of the dudes,” she says. “With people focusing on me, yeah, there’s times I shy away from it and I’m sure the guys don’t always love it. But we take it in stride. As long as people are listening to our music, that’s what we care about.”

As Williams’ sees it, the band’s real grief came from growing pains. “After being so close-knit for so long (and living) under a magnifying glass, we needed some room to spread out and learn who we all are individually. We didn’t have that room before and this record gave us that.”

Much of the credit for that goes to producer Cavallo, whose approach is described by Williams as “nurturing.”

“The best thing Rob did for us is to let us play and not really keep his thumb on us,” she says. “He never overstepped and tried to steer us in a direction we weren’t completely sold on . . . He let us try things. He knew it was crucial for us to figure out who we were . . . It gave us a chance to talk about the inner struggles we might have had and the problems between (us as) friends. Once that was laid on the table there was nothing but honesty . . . I feel like for the first time ever (on record) you can hear all five of us.”

One bond that exists between the members of Paramore which helped them to carry on is their shared Christian faith, something that comes through in songs such as Hallelujah, Miracle and Let The Flames Begin.

Williams says that at times, while rising up through the punk-pop ranks, the band did feel like they were “the minority” among their peers, which may have solidified their unity.

But she stresses that while Paramore takes pride in their faith they “don’t want to be pigeonholed as a Christian band.”

“Our music and our message is so much wider than being just for the Christian public,” Williams says. “We don’t want to preach . . . We just want to play our music. I’m not singing songs about God and my relationship with God. I’m singing about life.

“But (Christianity) is a part of us and it’s very real. If people want to know Paramore, that is a part of us.”

Calgary Herald

Canadian tour dates (With No Doubt):

July 13 – Winnipeg

July 15 – Calgary

July 16 – Edmonton

July 18 – Vancouver

Tags: Articles, Hayley Williams, No Doubt, Paramore, Tour

taken from: Ohio.com

Singer Gwen Stefani reunites pop band, although technically it never broke up

By Malcolm X Abram
Beacon Journal music writer

Old alt-rock bands don’t break up forever.

Sure, we may never see a reformed Husker Du or the Smiths grace the stages of Coachella Festival or All Tomorrow’s Parties where many defunct bands such as Faith No More, My Bloody Valentine and other beloved alternative/indie rock bands reform.

But if fans wait around long enough, one of those seminal bands from their salad days is likely to reunite to take a lucrative victory lap (see Pixies, the), or to see if the band members still hate each other more than they enjoy making music together (see Jesus & Mary Chain, the) or perhaps because their solo efforts didn’t quite perform up to snuff, commercially, (see Stapp, Scott; Bridge, Alter and Creed).

No Doubt, the Orange County quartet that rode a mix of ska, alt-rock, dancehall, reggae, pop and their lead singer Gwen Stefani’s cutesy voice and general fabulousness into an impressive decade-long run of multiplatinum success that included hits such as Just a Girl and Hey Baby, never actually broke up.

The group simply went on an extended hiatus (see Fugazi) in 2004 following the release of a single collection (also a standard sign of a band’s ending) that included its awful, but successful cover of Talk Talk’s It’s My Life, while Stefani did what everyone expected — she started a successful solo career.

Stefani was already well on her way to becoming a fashion icon in the eyes of many fans. The singer’s solo albums and tours not only established her as a solo artist but as another music/fashion mogul.

Her first solo album, the heavily ’80s dance and synthpop-influenced Love.Angel.Music.Baby, was a quintuple-platinum-selling success and helped launch Stefani’s successful L.A.M.B. fashion line. (It’s an acronym for the album title. That’s called synergy, folks.)

Love.Angel.Music.Baby included the No. 1 single Hollaback Girl, an answer song to Courtney Love, who referred to Stefani as a cheerleader.

Other hits on the album included What You Waiting For? and Rich Girl, based on the dancehall duo Louchie Lou & Michie One’s 1993 reworking of the classic Fiddler on the Roof tune, If I Were a Rich Man.

Stefani’s initial solo success, followed by an equally successful arena tour featuring the Harajuku Girls, her ever-present phalanx of hip, Asian dancers, fueled the assumption that No Doubt might not record again (see Sync,’N), despite No Doubt bassist and Stefani’s former lover Tony Kanal’s presence on a couple of the tracks.

Stefani’s second solo album, the equally stylized The Sweet Escape, was less beholden to the sounds of the ’80s, but was not received as well critically or commercially, though it still earned Stefani another platinum plaque.

Also during that time, Stefani, who has always been vocal about her desire to have a family, gave birth to two sons with her husband, Gavin Rossdale, who was the lead singer/guitarist of the rock band Bush.

Kingston James McGregor Rossdale was born in 2005 and Zuma Nesta Rock Rossdale was born in early 2008.

Meanwhile, the other band members, all of whom are 40 save Kanal who will turn 39 this year, were also getting on with their lives, though not quite in such a public manner.

Guitarist Tom Dumont produced singer/songwriter Matt Costas’ debut album, Songs We Sing, and expanded his family matching Stefani — dual baby boys with the birth of Ace Joseph Dumont and Rio Atticus Dumont, born in 2006 and 2008, respectively.

Drummer Adrian Young toured with reunited ’80s group Bow Wow Wow and appeared on albums by Unwritten Law and Scott Weiland, singer of the reunited Stone Temple Pilots.

Kanal worked with Stefani on several tracks from her solo albums and produced American reggae singer Elan Atias’ debut album. He also worked with Pink on her 2008 album Funhouse.

Though there were never any publicly aired problems within the group, as members’ lives grew outside of the band, the rumors and assumptions continued.

”Everybody’s making it like there’s all this tension, you know, like I stepped away from the band and now they’re jealous of me, and look, maybe there is a little bit of that,” Stefani told Elle Magazine earlier this year.

”I wasn’t even married,” Stefani said about the band’s last studio album, 2001’s Rock Steady. ”Now I’m a wife and a mother of two. It’s a really different role. I always referred to No Doubt as a marriage, because that’s what it’s like to be together for so long and go through what we’ve been through.

”I can’t really have that relationship with them anymore,” she continued. ”My priorities are always going to be my husband and my family now. That’s a huge, huge thing.”

Indeed, many bands that manage to stay together for years find that the lust for collective success that fueled members when they were young and hungry is replaced with the responsibilities of adulthood, parenthood and ”creative” freedom. But according to Dumont, it was Stefani who initiated the reunion.

”At first, there was a little bit of an unknown,” Dumont told the Fresno Bee in April. ”Like, have we grown apart? Are we going to get along?”

Apparently, the answer was yes.

”We’re kind of like siblings,” he said. ”That’s the way I look at it.

”We have that kind of bond and friendship. We’ve been through this incredible thing together, even though there are periods where I didn’t see Gwen for months on end, or might not have seen Tony for a month or so, we would hang out again, or we would go out to dinner or go to a bar, and it was just like brothers and sisters.”

The band’s original idea was to have an album ready to tour behind, but Stefani’s second pregnancy was not conducive to creativity.

”I don’t know how other women feel, but I lose connection with myself because my body becomes this other vessel for this other human, even after a few months, you don’t have your body back, you’re not yourself,” Stefani said to the Bee.

”I was feeling not very modern, not very creative,” she said.

So the band has hit the road in an effort to reacquaint itself with its fan base and to also get members on the same page.

Members say their creative process takes time. They are hoping to jump-start their creative juices by taking a portable studio on the road for the first time to do the basic work for what will hopefully be the band’s sixth album tentatively planned for a 2010 release.

Tags: Articles, No Doubt

taken from: Brandneusense.com

Touring and motherhood takes up all the energy of Gwen Stefani these days. With the recent get together of her band No Doubt who is on tour in the US and Canada, the stylish mother of two is juggling motherhood and the rock star life.

Gwen admits, “I am exhausted, I’m not going to lie, with the babies and the records, the tour, designing.” She adds, “There’s so many things going on but I’m good. I’m happy and so grateful that we’re still able to be doing this so that makes it all worth it.”

The ska punk rock band which emerged in the 90’s have temporarily broken up only to regroup years after to do what they do best: rocking out. However rumors of tension and jealousy have erupted and Gwen does not deny that there may have been kinks they all had to sort out first. ‘Some fights aren’t what they seem’ is all the stylista can say.

The band tried making new records for an album but had to put it on hold for the tour. The band which consist of bassist Tony Kanal, guitarist Tom Dumont and drummer Adrian Young also have families of their own. It was more difficult for them to create new records than their 2001 release Rock Steady.

Juggle multiple things in your life just like Gwen Stefani– in grace and style. Check out the goods over at brandneusense.com and hover over Religion, Gwen’s clothing style of choice.

Tags: Articles, Gwen Stefani

taken from: Glamour Vanity

Don’t believe those who claim Gwen Stefani and Gavin Rossdale are going to Splitsville.
The recently emerged rumors about the couple having allegedly broken up are absolutely and “completely, 100% false”, according to Gwen’s rep, HollywoodScoop.com reported exclusively.
Media reports that surfaced earlier said Gavin was dating other women, and the couple split some time ago but decided not to make it official till the end of No Doubt tour.
Happy the couple are still going strong after all these years. Gwen and Gavin is a rare example of a stable Hollywood relationship as they’ve managed to go though all the ups and downs together and still look blissfully happy in every picture.
Gwen and Gavin met in 1995 and married in 2002. They have two sons, Kingston, 3, and Zuma Nesta Rock, 9 months.

Tags: Articles, Gavin, Gwen, Rumors

taken from: Straits Times

I really don’t like posting this kind of stuff because it’s stupid, but the post after this will make this post better )

Gwen Stefani to get divorced?

NEW YORK – MEDIA outlets in the United States are circulating rumours that singer Gwen Stefani and husband Gavin Rossdale may be getting divorced.
A source revealed to celebrity watcher website Hollywood Dame, that Rossdale has been dating other women, after a conversation with one of his alleged girlfriends.

Hollywood Dame reported on Friday that the source claimed the girl has been dating Gavin, and had even produced photographs of the pair together.

Fuelling the rumours is Gwen has been spotted without her wedding ring recently, according to bloggers around the net — AP

Tags: Articles, Gavin, Gwen, Rumors

taken from: Entertainment Weekly

Guitar Hero and Rock Band have already made historic strides in the field of allowing people who lack all musical ability (like me!) to pretend that they are awesome and talented. But this march of progress is only getting started. In September, The Beatles: Rock Band will let folks like me become not just rock stars, but the biggest rock stars ever. And in October, the newly announced DJ Hero will help us play like we’re the illest of turntablists. Rolling Stone reports that DJ Hero’s plastic turntable doohickey will feature “three stream buttons, a crossfader and effects dial,” which you’ll use to cut, scratch, and mix over 80 tracks, including mash-ups of artists like the Foo Fighters, the Beastie Boys, Rick James, and Gwen Stefani.

Sounds pretty sweet, no? Between this and the upcoming Beatles game, I’m starting to think seriously again about clearing out space in my tiny, crowded living room so I can install some fake plastic instruments. Anyone else psyched for DJ Hero? While you decide, click just below to check out a performance that Jay-Z and Eminem did earlier this week to promote DJ Hero, which will feature exclusive tunes (!) from both of them. (Thanks to Rap Radar for the footage.)

Tags: Articles

taken from: Kansas City

No Doubt and Gwen Stefani are back and looking for inspiration

By MIKE OSEGUEDA
McClatchy Newspapers

Let’s make this clear right from the start — No Doubt never broke up.
Yes, it has been five years since we’ve seen the ska/pop band together as one, but guitarist Tom Dumont was sure they would re-form.

In fact, he had … No Doubt.

“It was always very clear. We were not breaking up. Hiatus is the best word,” Dumont said.

Lead singer Gwen Stefani and the band announced their reunion last year, but they left zealous fans clamoring for tour dates until earlier this year.

While No Doubt was on hiatus, Stefani’s star status grew. She made two popular albums, which included the hit singles “Hollaback Girl” and “Wind It Up,” and toured extensively.

Stefani also had two children. After her second — Zuma, born in August of last year — No Doubt became her musical focus again.

It was Stefani, Dumont says, who urged the band to hop back on the road.

“You know what would be fun?” Dumont recalls her suggesting. “Let’s just go out next summer and play a bunch of shows.”

As you can imagine, coming off a long hiatus is no easy task.

“At first, there was a little bit of an unknown,” Dumont says. “Like, ‘Have we grown apart?’ ‘Are we going to get along?’ ”

Pretty quickly he figured it out.

“We’re kind of like siblings. That’s the way I look at it,” he says. “We have that kind of bond and friendship. We’ve been through this incredible thing together, even though there are periods where I didn’t see Gwen for months on end, or might not have seen Tony (Kanal, the bass player) for a month or so, we would hang out again, or we would go out to dinner or go to a bar, and it was just like brothers and sisters.”

While they clicked personally, they didn’t necessarily click creatively.

The original plan was to have new music ready for the tour. The band had been meeting for writing sessions while Stefani was pregnant last year, but Dumont says those weren’t too fruitful.

“For us, for some reason, making records has always been a process,” Dumont says. “ ‘Tragic Kingdom’ took two or three years. It’s just slow for us. We’re not extraordinarily prolific.”

In a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, Stefani said pregnancy and creativity didn’t mix for her.

“I don’t know how other women feel, but I lose connection with myself because my body becomes this other vessel for this other human, even after a few months, you don’t have your body back, you’re not yourself,” she said. “I was feeling not very modern, not very creative.”

That’s why it made sense for the band to tour first, then worry about a new record. They wanted to get “reacquainted as a live band,” Dumont says.

So the band is bringing a portable studio on the road and hoping that inspiration strikes while it plays its past hits.

“That’s kind of what this is about. Let’s go out and get that incredible gratification of playing shows and have fun together again,” he says. “Hopefully that will inspire us and help us figure out what we want to make a record about.”

Dumont isn’t too committal about No Doubt’s future.

He knows that without new material, No Doubt runs the risk of living too much in the past.

“We don’t want to do this for nostalgic reasons,” Dumont says. “We do want to have fun and have people be stoked, but we hope we have something new to offer the world in the next year or so.”

And after that? No one knows yet.

“We all have a really good time doing this,” he says. “We get along well, and we’re friends. I don’t see why we can’t do this for 20 more years. But it’s not going to be every year for 20 years.”

NO DOUBT’S HISTORY
No Doubt got its start in the Orange County, Calif., ska scene in the late ’80s but didn’t take off until the ’90s.
1992: Released self-titled debut album to little fanfare.

1995: Released “Tragic Kingdom,” which generated the hits “I’m Just a Girl” and “Don’t Speak.”

2000: Released “Return to Saturn,” which included the singles “Ex-Girlfriend” and “Simple Kind of Life.”

2003: Released singles compilation, which included a cover of Talk Talk’s “It’s My Life.”

2004: The band completed its tour and then went on hiatus. Later that year, Stefani released her debut solo album “Love. Angel. Music. Baby.”

2006: Stefani gave birth to her first child and released her second solo album, “The Sweet Escape.”

2008: Stefani gave birth to her second child. No Doubt announced plans to reunite, record new material and tour.

Tags: Articles

taken from: CNN

LOS ANGELES, California (CNN) — If a kewpie doll sang in a band and had two kids, she’d be Gwen Stefani.

The pop star and style icon turns 40 this fall, but she still uses words like “you know” and “like” at least five times a minute. That’s part of Stefani’s charm, and her carefree teenybopper mentality is one of the many reasons fans are excited about her first tour with No Doubt in half a decade.

It’s been 14 years since the quartet busted out of Orange County, California, with its signature sound of sunny, ska-influenced pop. In 2004, No Doubt went on hiatus as Stefani launched the first of two successful solo albums. In the meantime, drummer Adrian Young and guitarist Tom Dumont worked on side projects and watched their families grow. Stefani and her husband — former Bush frontman Gavin Rossdale — welcomed two sons, while bassist Tony Kanal is the only member to remain single and child-free.

No Doubt is currently in the midst of a 53-date North American tour, for which they’ve dusted off such classic hits as “Just a Girl,” “Spiderwebs” and “Bathwater.” Each member now travels in their own individual tour bus — a must for an entourage that includes kids, toys and nannies. Watch No Doubt in concert, at rest »

CNN: You’d hear rumors every once in a while that you guys were breaking up, or had broken up. Were those annoying, or did you kind of roll your eyes and say, “That’s part of the game?”

Adrian Young: I think we expected it. And there might even be some people that will think that we broke up, and that this is a reunion tour — and it’s just not the truth. We went 17 straight years without stopping, and we started having families, and we were burnt and we needed to do our own thing for a while.

CNN: What was it like to get all four of you together in a room again?

Tom Dumont: It’s kind of like an old glove. It just fits.

Young: Like an O.J. glove?

Dumont: No, no, no. I know it’s a weird analogy, but in the sense of — you know, it fits.

Tony Kanal: You know when somebody says “glove” now, you immediately think of O.J.

Young: “If it fits, you must acquit.” That’s our band motto now.

Dumont: We’re not going to quit. We’re just great old friends. It’s almost like we’re brothers and sister, and it’s great to be having fun together again.

Young: I feel more like we’re married.

CNN: I hear it’s a little bit different this time. Instead of sharing a tour bus, you’ll each have your own individual buses.

Kanal: This will be our first time on separate buses, only out of necessity. Everyone’s bringing their family.

CNN: Are you just trying to get away from the kids, is that what you’re saying, Tony?!

Kanal: No, no, no! I would love to be on the bus with them.

Gwen Stefani: Tony’s going to be making kids on his bus.

Kanal: Yeah, maybe my girlfriend and I will be in the process of starting our family.

Stefani, Young and CNN (in unison): Really?!

Kanal (ignoring everybody’s reaction): But by default, I’m putting a studio on my bus. Because I don’t have a crib on my bus — they have cribs on their buses — I’m putting a studio on my bus so we can keep writing if the inspiration comes, and we feel like doing it.

Stefani: We’re just putting the studio out there so we can pretend we might go out there and write songs, but we’re really just going to have fun. … We like writing songs, as well [but] I have to tell you, it’s a very tortured process. There is nothing more rewarding when you know you’ve written a hit, and you know this magic happened.

CNN: Did you guys really go to group therapy?

Kanal: No. … We had some self-imposed therapy sessions where we were trying to write music, and we were sitting in the room together, and a lot of stuff came out, and you know, it was kind of an emotional venting. We got rid of a lot of stuff. It was good.

Stefani: We spent a lot of time together in the last 12 months. Right when I came off tour (from her second solo album, “The Sweet Escape”), we started to write, and I was pregnant (with her second son, Zuma), and we did a lot of eating, a lot of chatting — and then we had this magic 15 minutes from 4:45 to 5 o’clock where music would actually come out for a minute.

One day, I was like, “Argh! I’m in this room still! Let’s go on tour!” And everyone was like, “OK!” It was very spontaneous, and it’s all kind of geared towards getting out there … and getting inspired, and hopefully coming out of the other side and making an album.

CNN: Gwen, when you were off doing the two solo albums, did you feel guilty at all? Because I know you all were trying to get back together for a couple of years.

Stefani: I’m one of those people that I have to follow the inspiration when it strikes. …

These guys are just very supportive. We’ve been together forever — forever, forever — since we were kids, and this is just the one time in our lives we’ve had a break from each other. Everybody did their own thing. And I think all of us doing our own thing makes us even more grateful for each other, and kind of definitely not taking each other for granted — not that we ever did before. … But it’s even more intense right now.

CNN: Things have changed since the last time No Doubt was on the road, and there a lot of people who don’t have that disposable income to spend on tickets for concerts.

Young: One of the things we did for this tour for some of the venues is we have $10 lawn tickets for people that maybe want to come to the show, but they’re strapped — and we’ve never done that before as No Doubt, and it feels really good to do that.

CNN: I was calling this a reunion. Was that bad?

Stefani: We don’t really care. We’re just so happy that people want to come out and see the show, whatever they want to call it. We’re just happy that people still are even talking about it. … Even if you didn’t really like our songs, or you had this kind of idea about us, come see us live, and we’ll slap you around. You might have some fun, you know.

Tags: Articles, Tour

taken from: OC Register

Not even a strange cameo by No Doubt’s Adrian Young, in clown makeup and banging on some stand-alone drums, didn’t help pick up the ensemble’s performance.

Click the link above for the full story!

Tags: Adrian Young, Articles

taken from: Celebrity Beauty Buzz

Singer/Fashionista Gwen Stefani reveals her top five beauty secrets in the September issue of Glamour magazine. Gwen has been known for her platinum blonde hair, and fire engine red lips – she has such a love of pink, she even wore a pink wedding dress when she wed rocker Gavin Rossdale in 2002.

1. “When I want my red lipstick to look more subtle, I apply it straight from the tube. For a more matte look, I’ll put some power on top,” Gwen says about switching up her signature look.

2. “I’m into the Marilyn Monroe thing!” To get her liner pefect, Gwen’s makeup artist traces liquid over pencil. Good idea!

3. Gwen uses a peach skin-corrector pen to cover up dark circle. Try Dior SkinFlash (I use LoLa Cosmetics Creme Concealer in ‘Fair’)

4. To moisturize Gwen keeps it simple and soft, “I straight-up love Johnson’s Baby lotion.” I wonder if she shares it with son Kingston!?

5. Gwen knows the importance of wearing SPF, unfortunately from years of sun damage growing up in California. “Growing up in California, I was a lifeguard and spent too much time in the sun.” She now wears SPF 50 daily to keep her porcelain skin white and wrinkle-free.

Tags: Articles, Gwen Stefani