Shine December The World I Know Collective Soul

Shine Album: Hints, Allegations & Things Left Unsaid (1993)
December Album: Collective Soul (1995)
The World I Know Album: Collective Soul (1995)
by Collective Soul

Ed Roland, told the story behind Shine: "I had riffs - this was the late '80s and I was writing a lot of songs. I called it 'drone,' where you either drone the A or the E, and play a melody under it. So, I had a bunch of them that the band I was in at the time were playing. But I always had the 'Shine' riff, and I thought, 'That's a cool riff.'

Then I came home and spent the night with my parents and Dean, who is 10 years younger than me - I didn't even know he played guitar. So he was playing guitar, and I joined in. I just showed him the riff, and I was like, 'I need to finish this.' So, I literally just wrote it right there, with Dean, sitting in my parents' living room. I didn't think anything about it. I probably wrote it in 1989, and it wasn't out until 1994."

Because the word "heaven" shows up so many times in the lyrics, "Shine" has often been mislabeled as a Christian song, and Collective Soul is often perceived as a Christian band. The song was written by lead singer Ed Roland, who is the son of a Baptist Minister. Roland rejects the "Christian Band" label, explaining that one doctrine cannot speak for all of the band's members.

This song launched the career of Collective Soul. Ed Roland wrote it in 1989 when he was in a band called Marching Two-Step. That group petered out, and in 1992 Roland formed Collective Soul. The group was loosely knit, with members pursuing other projects as well. Their first album, Hints Allegations and Things Left Unsaid, was recorded as a demo for Roland, who was looking for work as a songwriter. The band played on the album, but doesn't appear together on any of the tracks.

The album was issued on an independent label in 1993; the Georgia State University radio station, WRAS, started playing "Shine," which was then picked up by WJRR in Orlando, Florida. Other stations followed suit, and a bidding war broke out for the band. In early 1994, they signed with Atlantic, which issued the album with lots of promotional push and released "Shine" as the first single. It was a hit, helping the album sell over 2 million copies in America. Their next, (self-titled) album was even bigger, with "December" and "The World I Know" charting as singles.

This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine
-"This Little Light Of Mine"

Oh, heaven let your light shine down
-"Shine"

We wondered if this "This Little Light Of Mine" was an influence on "Shine." "It could have been, but it wasn't like I sat down and thought of it," Ed Roland told us. "I'm sure I sang it a million times as a child, so it might have had something to do with it."

According to Ed's brother Dean (the band's guitarist), the chorus of Shine is basically a prayer: "Oh, heaven let your light shine down."

Dolly Parton, Phish, Pillar, and The Holmes Brothers have all covered "Shine." Dolly's bluegrass version, backed by Nickel Creek, appeared on her 2001 album Little Sparrow and earned her a Grammy Award for Best Female Country Vocal Performance.

The guitar riff contains dramatic pauses that bring the song to life when it's performed live. Fans fill the silence by screaming "yeah" when they hit.

Following the Virginia Tech massacre of April 2007, assassin Cho Seung-Hui constantly played Shine and even wrote the lyrics, "Teach me how to speak, teach me how to share, teach me where to go," on a wall. The band said that the innocent lives who were killed mattered more than the song did.

Dean Roland recalled in a 2005 interview with Bullz-Eye.com how because of its release date, this was commonly misclassified as a grunge song. "It came out at an odd time of grunge and this heavy content of music going on, so it was a little bit of an odd time for us to come out," he said. "In the beginning, I guess it was due to the timing, but we would get put in a grunge category, or grunge lite or something. We never even saw it as that. I totally dug a lot of that music, but I never saw this band falling in the realm."

In 2007, VH1 placed "Shine" at #42 on their 100 Greatest Songs of the '90s countdown.

Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins took umbrage with Shine, believing it appropriated his sound. He often trashed Collective Soul in interviews and on stage, although "Shine" dates back to the '80s, predating the first Smashing Pumpkins album. Collective Soul retaliated with the 1995 song "Smashing Young Man."

Corgan didn't let go of this feud; on the 2010 Smashing Pumpkins tour, they often played part of "Shine," before stopping so Corgan can say how much he hates the song can call it a "f--king rip-off of my band."

"Shine" is part of a clutch of songs from the '90s and '00s used in the 2023 Netflix series Beef. Other uses of the song include the series The Vampire Diaries ("I'd Leave My Happy Home for You" - 2015) and Little Fires Everywhere ("Picture Perfect" - 2020), and the 2019 movies Always Be My Maybe (2019) and Yes, God, Yes.

Collective Soul was a loose collective build around lead singer Ed Roland when their song "Shine" got the attention of Atlantic Records in 1994. The label signed the band and pushed the single, which took off, sending them on a whirlwind journey that found them on the road for about eight months. During this time, there was tension within the band and between Roland and their manager, Bill Richardson. This all inspired the song "December," which Roland wrote.

He explained: "We were going through a tough time with our first manager, and I just felt like at the time, a lot of stuff happened really quickly. You've got to remember, we had a hit song before we had a label or even a true band. So, that relationship started to deteriorate. And while we were in the studio, it came pretty natural. I just wanted to talk about how I felt I was being used and whatever I did was not good enough ever."

After the album was released, the band got into a legal tangle with Richardson that froze their earnings and took over a year to resolve.

The song is called "December" because that's the last month of the year. Ed Roland wanted to signify an ending, but wanted something more poetic and abstract than "The End" or "Finale."

At first, December didn't have a title. Roland told Songfacts: "That's the only song the band did not like. When I presented it to them, they hated it, to be honest with you. I talked them into it, we recorded it, and they did want the title in there somewhere, so I came up with the bridge, just to put 'December' in there. But it was basically a relationship breakup."

The timing was a little off on this one: the album was released in March 1995, and the song peaked in September. By December, it had fallen off.

"December" landed on the charts about a year after Collective Soul's breakout hit, "Shine." Both songs went to #1 on the Billboard Album Rock chart (later renamed Mainstream Rock). This was a time when hip-hop and R&B were dominating pop radio; many stations went in a different direction and played more rock-leaning songs by the likes of Green Day and Pearl Jam. Collective Soul found a welcome home on these playlists.

Ed Roland worked to make it in music for more than a decade before forming Collective Soul in the early '90s with a group of younger musicians, including his brother, Dean. Their first single, "Shine," was an unexpected hit, sending them on a lengthy tour in 1994 that pulled them far from their hometown of Stockbridge, Georgia. Much of their second album was written on the road around this time, including "The World I Know." Roland came up the lyric when he went for a walk on a rare day off in New York City.

"There was still some grit and dirt to New York City," he said in a Songfacts interview. "Especially around Times Square and Union Square back then. I literally walked out of the room, took a two-hour walk around New York, and just absorbed and observed from the highs and lows of what society was offering in the greatest city in the world.

Back then, there were still homeless people living in cardboard boxes. Then, somebody pulled up in a nice limousine, with fur coats on, and walked right by.

Just to be in that big city, I was looking at what the good was, what the bad was, but also, you don't know what good feels like until you feel bad. You don't know what bad feels like until you feel good. So, I was trying to use that whole imagery and using it with New York City as I walked around."

The World I Know is one of the few Collective Soul songs not credited entirely to Ed Roland. The band's guitarist, Ross Childress, is listed as a co-writer. The pair developed the song out of an instrumental piece Childress came up with.

The World I Know has an amazingly expressive video to go with it. It's about a businessman becoming disillusioned with the world and impulsively deciding to kill himself, before being saved by a pigeon who lands on his arm and cheers him up right when he is about to jump. He also draws a comparison to the ants scurrying for crumbs and the people in the streets. He ends up tossing his money to the crowd below.

Anyone pondering the Libertarian moral of the above story need look no further for the explanation than to band leader Ed Roland, confirmed Objectivist, who pulled the name of the band straight out of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead.

Collective Soul took a hands-off approach to their videos, letting the directors do their thing. This one was helmed by Guy Guillet, who also did the "Fu-Gee-La" video for the Fugees.

The 1995 eponymous album Collective Soul is not to be confused with their 2009 album, which is also self-titled. However, the second one is unofficially nicknamed "Rabbit."
Thanks to airplay on rock radio, this became the third #1 for Collective Soul on the Billboard Album Rock chart, following "Shine" and "December." The song also crossed over to pop and adult contemporary playlists, pushing album sales to over 3 million in America.

In 2008, David Cook performed The World I Know on the last day of competition on Season 7 of American Idol, where he faced off against David Archuleta. Judge Randy Jackson said he loved the song, and heaped praise on Cook's performance. Viewers agreed: He won the competition and his live performance was released as a single, going to #28 even though he only did the first verse and a chorus, for a running time of 2:12.

Ed Roland went through a phase of loathing The World I Know and came close to re-recording it with new words. "Right at the end of recording, I for some reason had lost my mind and hated 'The World I Know,'" he told Radio.com. "I decided on the last day of recording that I would rewrite the lyrics and the melody and put it over the music bed to 'The World I Know.'"

Fortunately, Collective Soul's engineer, Greg Archilla, talked some sense into him. "It's so funny to me that I was literally going to change that song that day, the last day, because we were getting ready to go on tour," Roland said.