Collective Soul: What Happened To the Band Behind 'Shine', 'December' & 

The history of the band Collective Soul.

0:00 - Introduction/Early Years
2:44 - Birth of Collective Soul/Shine
4:35 - Signing to Atlantic/First album
7:27- Self Titled Album
10:06 - Legal Problems
11:07 - Later Years

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Collective Soul is a band I’ve always always associated with Hootie and the Blowfish and Matchbox Twenty.. All three bands had a number of hits in the 90’s but they never got much respect. Coupled with matchbox twenty, collective soul was sometimes dubbed as a faceless band -a group wiith a bunch of hits. People knew the songs, but couldn’t pick the band members out of a lineup.

Adored by radio, hated by critics Collective Soul would be one of the most successful bands to emerge out of the mid to late 90’s. I want to thank Trevor for suggesting this story. I actually ran into him at work one day and he said Sidd when are you gonna do collective soul, so here it is Trevor. Enjoy.

Early Years

The band’s history begins with the Roland brothers Ed and his younger sibling Dean. Growing up in Stockbridge Georgia, an atlanta suburb, their father was a baptist preacher and the head of the local youth choir. They grew up in a strict conservative household only being allowed to listen to christian humns, elvis and jerry lee lewis. Their father majored in music in college and got involved in some record burnings too before he became the head pastor of the biggest church in town. The boys sundays mostly revolved around the church going to sermon in the morning and then returning in the evening for choir. They’d spend their saturday nights with their mother who played piano and their father rehearsing hymns for the following day’s service.


Ed would tell the LA Times about Stockbrige’s music scene revealing It’s a small place, only about 20,000 people--There’s nowhere to play there, but it’s close enough to Atlanta, which is really a cool place. The music scene is very diverse. There’s the R&B; scene, the Indigo Girls folk scene and a rock scene. Being from Georgia you would expect Roland to have been influencedby the likes of Molly Hatchet and lynyrd skynyrd, but he would admit to earofnewt that his influences weren’t southern rock bands, but california rock - fleetwood mac and the eagles. He’d cite other influences like elton john as well.

Both brothers soon got into guitar playing and following high school Ed moved to Boston to attend the Berklee School of Music and study guitar.. The experience was a culture shock for Ed. He got exposure to artists he had never previously heard of and credited jamming with professional musicians as making him a better guitar player and expanding his musical horizons.

It was after a year he’d return home landing a job at a local 24 track recording studio called Reel 2 Reel which was owned by Will Turpin’s father. It was now the 80’s and he was also playing with two local musicians Shane Evans and Ross Childress in the local act Marching Two Step. The idea for Ed was to get a major recording contract and it was a long time coming. He’d spend nearly 12 years chasing that dream playing clubs in the southeast and recording ideas but nothing seemed to get the attention of record labels.

Marching two step’s time came to an end and Ed was about to give up on his dream of being in a successful band. It was now january of 1993, but the band’s manager pushed him to try his hand at getting a publishing deal whereby he could write songs for other people or score film and television. He’d spend the next 3-4 months coming up with a demo tape. But some of those songs were up to five years old.

Roland would toy around with his own musical ideas while he was off work in the recording studio. Meanwhile, during the day he’d producing, mixing, and engineering local Atlanta artists.

Roland soon had a demo, 90% of which he created himself. The demo would consist of nearly a dozen songs and one of the last songs written would be called Shine. Roland would remark how the song was considerably longer than anything else on the demo.

That demo would end up being Collective Soul’