Through trial and error and
using books like Gerald
Weber’s A Desktop Reference of
Hip Guitar Amps and Aspen
Pittman’s The Tube Amp Book.
For me, those books were like
finding the damn Dead Sea
Scrolls or something! [Laughs.]
Northeast shows were cancelled.
Things felt very unsettled for a
while, but we finally got into a
good groove and I permanently
joined the band in ’03. Things
have been pretty busy ever since.
What was it like to transition
from being the group’s tech to
being their guitarist?
The band called me out of desperation in 2001 when they had
parted ways with another guitarist. In less than two weeks, they
were going to travel to Australia
to play at the Goodwill Games
in Brisbane, and then on to
New Zealand for more shows. I
had, like, 10 days to learn lead
parts for the entire set and put
together a touring rig. I was
finally getting paid to play guitar, but it wasn’t all happy fun.
After the tour, we came back to
the US on September 10—the
day before 9/11—and all our
While many Collective Soul
songs come from the pen of
Ed Roland, you wrote and
sang lead vocals on “I Don’t
Need Anymore Friends.”
Yeah, I recorded that one with a
batch of songs that ended up on
my solo record. When we made
Afterwords, Ed asked if I’d like to
contribute a song, so I picked one
of mine that I felt would be most
appropriate for a Collective Soul
record—something somewhere
between poppy and rock-guitar-riff oriented. It was pretty close
to being finished when I brought
it in—it just needed some bass
lines and background vocals.
Lyrically, it’s just a nice little song
about how I felt at the moment.
We were out on tour a few years
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