The following is a Track by Track description of the songs from "Collective Soul," courtesy of Atlantic Records.

Simple - Ross wrote the music; lyrically, it's about how everything in life is simple -- to feel angry is simple, to feel good is simple, to feel miserable is simple. It's real easy to fall into self-pity, but at the same time it's very easy to wanna love somebody, and it's very easy to be loved. Maybe it's a little simpler to just find love -- universal love, that is.

Untitled - When I first wrote it, it didn't have any words, so I wrote 'Untitled' on the set list and just mumbled jumbled words. Basically it's about how no individual has the right to tell another individual what they're to believe in or who to love. How could I title that?

The World I Know - You have to go through bad times to realize there is goodness, and vice versa. It's like a circle, a catch 22. I wrote these lyrics when we were in New York for a while, our first time there as a group. What better place to witness the extremes of goodness and badness? It's the cycle of life, I guess you could say. Ross also co-wrote this one.

Smashing Young Man - Shane wasn't there when he cut this. He'd already gone home, because we thought we'd finished the record. But during the sessions, he had been in there one day goofing off on the drums, so I sampled him and just looped his little funky drum pattern and wrote the song basically around that.

December - It's about a relationship - not one I've been in - when you don't fall in love, but you get used to someone and it becomes this fake source of love. It's the whole idea of 'Why drink the water from hands/Contagious as you think I am .' Someone's complaining about you, yet saying they love you and this and that, and they really don't -- you have to just move on with life, go where you're happy.

Where The River Flows - Basically a similar theme. Using a river as an analogy for life. It sounds corny, but I pictured it as a river. It's like, all right, I'll park it here for a while, but that's not quite what I want, so I'll see what's going on downstream.

Gel - The coming together of mankind. That and prank phone calls.

She Gathers Rain - The last one we wrote for the record. I wanted to expand lyrically on this album and try to write story-telling songs, narratives. This song is about someone who wanted love, but she didn't want people to tell her where to find love. She gave love and she expected the same thing in return. I used rain as a form of baptism, for lack of a better word, to describe how she felt at that time, freeing herself, like a source of salvation, like she's moving on.

When The Water Falls - This was the first one I wrote as a narrative. It came from something that happened years ago: there was a little girl in a store who asked, 'Where does the sun go when it rains?' It's about a child and their inquisitiveness about simple things that we understand. I'm a lot older than my little sister, and I can remember when I was 16 or 17 she was a little baby, and it was cool to watch her grow up and ask questions. It's really a neat process, and I haven't experienced it since, and I don't necessarily want to experience it anytime soon (laughs).

Collection Of Goods - To be honest with you, I wrote it in about five minutes because I had to fax all the lyrics to Atlantic (laughs). I had the title; I loved the title. It comes back to that universal theme -- celebrate the good things, grab the good things in life, hold on to those things. Let the bad things slide on by if you can.

Bleed - When I was a child, a girl came over to my house to see my dad, who was a minister. She was waving a gun and threatening to kill herself. I had a couple of those kind of incidents as a child. The song is basically about myself as a kid, thinking, 'Why the hell is she over here bothering me and my family?' My mother ran me to the back of the room thinking that this girl's gonna lose it and shoot everybody in the house. I wrote it based on what I could remember as an 11-year-old kid: 'Why bother me with your problems? We all suffer.' And it still does come down to the individual to overcome that. You need support from everybody, but it still comes from within yourself to overcome pain or whatever you're going through. She didn't kill herself. My dad calmed her down. I guess she's doing OK nowadays.

Reunion - It's a homesick blues song, written in the midst of a long tour. We actually got Al Green's gospel choir to sing back-up on it. One of them was an engineer from the old Stax label. And the whole vibe was just great. Too much for me.