With his long brown hair pulled back in a pony tail, a pair of bookish glasses resting somewhat precariously on the bridge of his nose, Ed Roland a kind’a looks like the neighborhood school teacher. But when he lets his hair down- both figuratively and literally- Collective Soul’s rambunctious leader is quickly transformed. Suddenly he becomes the swaggering, eminently sexy rock and roll star who has played a pivotal role in helping these Southern rockers sell more that five million albums over the last seven years.

The transformation is amazing, Ed begins to talk and think louder, move a little faster and think just a little quicker. But while his look and approach may change, his attitude clearly does not.. It doesn’t seem to matter if Ed is passing backstage about to perform in front of 10,000 fans or hanging out in a small cafe in a nondescript mid-western town, he remains one of the most down-to-earth performers currently inhabiting the rock and roll world.

“This didn’t happen overnight for this band,” he said. “ I had a long, long time where I was more or less resigned to the fact all I’d ever be was a guy who wrote songs for other people to record. When that happens, you don’t allow yourself to ever get a swelled head. You appreciate all the things that happen to you that much more. You never take anything for granted.”

Of course, when you have had past million album success like Lies, Allegations & Things Left Unsaid and Collective Soul, you can at least begin to take a little bit of your notoriety for granted. For Ed and bandmates Ross Childress, Dean Roland, Shane Evans and Will Turpin their success has never been built on a particularly flashy image or upon any outrageous off-stage exploits. Ed is first to admit that such trappings often serve as little more than a house of cards for rock and roll bands- temporary aberrations that allow such groups to briefly scale the heights of industry success before crashing unceremoniously back to earth. Rather, Collective Soul’s calling card has always featured top-notch song craftsmanship and first class musicianship, qualities the band believes are primarily responsible for their continued string of rock and roll good fortune. And now, with the release of the band’s fourth album, Dosage, Ed and the boys seem primed and ready to add yet another illustrious item to their fast-growing list of platinum-covered accomplishments.

“At our heart, it’s the music and the songs that have remained the most important thing,” Roland said. “But that doesn’t mean that we want to stay in the same place. I think the songs on Dosage are quite different than anything we’ve done before. There’s a bit more aggression, and a lot more of an edge, to a lot of things we’ve done this time. And lyrically there’s a bit more of an edge too. These songs are about different aspects of life, which is what are songs have always been about. this time, however, we delive a bit more into the questions of right and wrong, good and evil. It’s the key fight of life.”

Roland and his bandmates certainly entered their latest studio sessions well armed for the task at hand. With Ed having written 35 new songs since the group ended their most recent late last year, Collective Soul felt more committed than ever to making sure that Dosage was their ultimate musical statement. With various legal and personal problems (most involving a messy breakup with their former manager) that marred the recording of their last album, Disciplined Breakdown, now thankfully behind them, the CS gang wanted to treat their latest recording sessions as a “fresh start” in the music world. But true to Ed’s artistic nature, while he felt far more up-beat and optimistic than during their group’s previous stint, the “dark side” of his his writing soon began to make its presence felt. Rather than fight the urge to turn his back on all such negativity, Ed chose to use it as a primary motivation behind the music featured on the group’s new disc.

“I don’t think this is a negative album at all,” he said. “But i used whatever negative feelings I may have had to counterbalance the positive emotions we’re bring fourth. You’ve got to find the right ‘dosage” of those elements. When you’re either too positive, or too negative it’s not necessarily good. You need a balance of all things in life. You know, when you’ve been around awhile, you get to see a lot of things and do a lot of things. You learn that life is all about counterbalancing the various elements that comprise it. Maybe when you can’t do that with your life very easily, you try to do it with your music.”

With their album now out, the Collective Soul boys have turned there collective attention to the tricky problem of planning their next tour. Having recently headlined their own theater-sized road outing, and in the past having served as opening act for areana-staples like Aerosmith and Van Halen, Roland and company must now decide how best to tackle their latest list of potential tour trials and tribulations. Do they again want to open for an arena headliner? Do they want to venture back into the same theaters they just played a year ago? Do they want to try something new? these were questions facing Collective Soul as their fall tour was being planned, and the answers were far from easy to obtain.

“It’s hard to figure out what’s best right now,” Ed said. “We’d love to think that we were big enough to go do our own arena tour, but that’s unrealistic. With four album’s worth of material, we know we don’t want to open for anybody. So the question becomes something of a dilemma. I imagine we’ll kind of let the situation dictate to us. We’ll probably start off relatively small, going back to some of the same theater-sized venues we played last time. If the album begins to take off, well adjust accordingly. Hey, considering how a lot of really good bands are struggling to even find a way to go on the road, we’re really lucky. We know how good we have it, so you’ll never hear us complain. We’ve gone through some great things and some tough things over the last few years, but we’ve learned that the most important things is that we live to tell about it- and we have.”