Songoftheday 5/9/22 -For a long time I was in love, not only in love I was obsessed...
"Simple Kind Of Life" - No Doubt
from the album The Return Of Saturn (2000)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #38 (two weeks)
Weeks in the Top-40: 4
Today's song comes from the band No Doubt, whose breakthrough album Tragic Kingdom sold over ten million copies, scored an "official" top-40 pop hit with "Just A Girl", as well as too big radio hits in "Spiderwebs" and "Don't Speak", with the latter topping the pop radio chart for sixteen weeks, helping to force Billboard magazine to change their rules on allowing album tracks not released as commercial singles to place on the Hot 100 pop chart. In 1999, three years after the release of that record, the group was struggling to finish a follow-up album, and in the meantime put the song "New", written by their lead singer Gwen Stefani and guitarist Tom Dumont, and produced by Jerry Harrison of the Talking Heads on the soundtrack to the movie Go. The new wave throwback got a good reception at rock radio, peaking at #7 on Billboard's Alternative Rock chart, but pop radio wasn't biting, and it only "bubbled under" the Hot 100 chart at #123, though in the UK it made the top-40 at #30. Nevertheless, the song would appear on the new album, to be titled The Return Of Saturn. It was followed by "Ex-Girlfriend", which Stefani co-wrote about her tumultuous romance with Gavin Rossdale of the rock group Bush. Despite a bigger radio push, and a music video directed by then-hot Hype Williams, the song again "bubbled under" the Hot 100 at #111, while at Alternative Rock radio it spent two weeks at #2. It also was a decent hit overseas, reaching the top ten in Iceland (#6), Spain (#9), and Australia (#9), and top-40 in New Zealand (#11), Belgium (#15F), Finland (#15), Sweden (#18), Switzerland (#19), Italy (#21), the UK (#23), Germany (#34), the Netherland (#35), and Ireland (#40).
With the album in fear of tanking from lack of exposure, No Doubt's record company Trauma/Interscope had to up the ante by releasing a physical single for their third try, "Simple Kind Of Life". Written by Stefani alone about her desire to step away from the spotlight when she was with Rossdale, the song was produced by Glen Ballard, famous for helming Alanis Morissette's triumphs. It's a more subdued stab at a mid-tempo jangle-rock ballad, and they were rewarded for it with a boost back into the pop top-40, if only in the lower regions. For the music video, they substituted Rossdale with No Doubt bandmates Dumont, Adrian Young, and Tony Kanal, the latter confusing the public since he was famously Gwen's ex from way before...
"Simple Kind Of Life" became No Doubt's second "official" top-40 hit on Billboard's Hot 100 pop chart in July of 2000. The song also rose to #14 on Billboard's Alternative Rock radio chart, and got to #18 on their older-skewing Adult Top-40 format list. Internationally, though, it reversed their fortunes on their previous two singles, stalling in the lower half of the chart in the UK (#69) and Canada (#52). The Return To Saturn album, released in April of that year, spent a week at #2 on the Billboard 200 sales tally, going on to sell over a million and a half copies, a hefty sum but far less than their previous opus. At the Grammy Awards in 2001, The Return Of Saturn was nominated for Best Rock Album, losing out to the Foo Fighters' There Is Nothing Left To Lose.
A fourth single from the album, "Bathwater", brought the band back to their ska-punk roots, though rock radio took a pass, and it rose to #39 on the Adult Top-40 format. In 2004, the song was re-released in Europe with a remix from Dumont as the "Invinicble Overlord" mix. That version peaked at #6 in Ireland and #17 in the UK as a "double A-side" with their cover of "It's My Life". No Doubt will no doubt be back to this series.
(7/10)
(Click below to see the rest of the post)
Here's the band appearing on The Late Show with David Letterman to promote the single...
...and live in concert in Munich, Germany in 2000...
Finally, an acoustic take from a show in 2012...
Comments