The sharp ringing of the telephone is almost startling. "Hi," says the voice on the other end. "This is Ed Roland from Collective Soul." The singer/guitarist/songwriter's voice is amazingly calm despite the fact he and the rest of the members of the Atlanta-based band have been on such an amazingly tight schedule recently. Having just returned from touring Japan, Australia and New Zealand, Collective Soul is in New York at the moment. Yesterday the band completed a video shoot for their second single, "Listen", from their latest release, Disciplined Breakdown. And tonight they'll storm the stage of Irving Plaza along with opening act Darla Hood. Sandwiched in between these obligations lies yet another: telephone interviews with the press. "We had this morning and early afternoon off," says Roland, "but they put us to work." Cranking out one interview after another, primarily with foreign journalists, Roland seems to have kept his sense of humor despite the endless shots of questions from inquiring minds. He sounds as pleasant as if he were talking from the living room of his own home. Roland simply seems relaxed, which ends up being a reoccurring theme of his conversation. "It was real laid back," he says, referring to the filming of the video. Roland laughingly dispels all of the stereotypical ideas of what goes into making a music video. "No smoke machines, no naked women running around, no big hair. It's just real laid back. By the end of the day everybody's just sitting in lounge chairs and hanging around.

"You know, videos are really hard to explain. Any time you get a treatment from a director, you just look at it and go, 'Hmmm. O.K.' Because it's hard to write down your visual ideas. Whereas if you have a melody of a song, you can hum it and people get an idea. But visually you can't just start making pictures, because if you do it's very expensive. You just kind of go with the flow and trust the director. But so far so good."

And so far has been so good for Collective Soul. They nearly came out of nowhere in 1994 with the hit single, "Shine." It snagged the Billboard #1 Hot Album Rock Track title for that year, as well as the Billboard Music Award for Album Rock Song of the Year. "Most bands get a chance to at least kind of make a record and grow," Roland explains. "With us, the single had already charted before we had even signed to a label. We were doing it on our own. We had a lot of catching up to do. And we're still doing a lot of catch up. It takes a lot of time to develop product and to develop artists. Honestly, the last show I think we did in Atlanta was at The Point, and it went real well. What's The Point, 200 people?

"To go from that to all of a sudden making a video and being on MTV; to touring around to 1,000 to 2,000-seat clubs and people showing up; and then you're out touring on major tours, doing Woodstock. You know, most bands get a little bit more time to prepare. We were like, 'What's going on?' No one could be ready for that. I don't care what band you're in. You think you can, but there's no way. That just comes with on-the-job experience. Yeah, you can sit in a basement and rehearse your whole life and say, 'O.K., I'm ready now' and get out there. But it's a totally different lifestyle. So, no, we weren't ready. We've never lied about that. We were prepared to be the best that we could be. We had a lot of growing to do, and we still do. But at least we keep our heads straight, and we know what our goals are. And we want to get better, and that's all you can do."

Collective Soul has had another chance to do just that with their third album, Breakdown. It's made up of 12 tracks, ranging from the guitar-driven first single "Precious Declaration," to the horn-laced rocker "Full Circle," to the mellow groove of "Forgiveness." Some bands opt to tackle an album project by holing up in a house and letting the album organically come together. Breakdown was recorded, for the most part, in a shack in the band's hometown of Stockbridge, Ga. Gone were the luxuries of a state-of-the-art studio. In fact, drummer Shane Evans had to resort to setting up his drum kit in the kitchen. "We basically put four mics around him," describes Roland, "and we ran the cables up to the bedroom upstairs, and the engineer would stomp on the floor to let us know he was recording." But this situation, Roland says, wasn't necessarily by choice. "It was out of necessity," he says, "because we were going through the lawsuit with our ex-manager. So we rented a cabin that was on 40 acres of cow farm. And that way we could rehearse and make as much noise as we needed to without disturbing anyone. The legal system had shut us down. We couldn't tour. We couldn't get proper funding from the record company to go into the studio because of the legal system. It wasn't because they didn't want to; it was because they just couldn't. So we rented this cabin, loaded all the equipment in there and started recording into a computer just to throw ideas down. Basically it was our therapy. We were just trying to keep sane. You know, we didn't know if we'd ever even be able to perform again. We didn't know if we could ever use the name Collective Soul again. We didn't even get a chance to sit down and realize what we had done the last two years before we were hit with having to [realize] we may never get to do it again. So our therapy, once again, was just playing. I think it just became a more relaxed atmosphere when we put the guitars on and played. And we were there nine months before the lawsuit was resolved. And we kind of looked back, and we had almost 30 tunes written."

Through their small beginnings in Atlanta, their whirlwind success and their recent legal troubles, the family atmosphere within the ranks of Collective Soul is something to which Roland attributes keeping everything in tact. "We were friends before we were a band," he says. "And you almost have to be, I think, to survive what we've gone through. But we know when to be there for each other, when to leave each other alone, and when necessary, when to beat up on each other. It's part of it."