Collective Soul’s bass player, Will Turpin, whose band’s new documentary, Give Me A Word: The Collective Soul Story, hits the 2025 movie schedule on video-on-demand and Blu-Ray on July 8th, has some thoughts on bands that get annoyed with playing their hits. If any band would understand this, it’s Collective Soul, who had a slew of giant hits in the 1990s that fans of the band still love hearing the band play in concert. I had a chance to speak with Turpin about the documentary, the band’s long history, and just what it’s like to play hits like “December” and “Shine” all these years later.
Collective Soul Really Cranked Out The Hits In The ‘90s
Even for Gen Xers like me, it’s easy to forget just how huge Collective Soul was in the 1990s. Their first two albums, Hints Allegations and Things Left Unsaid and Collective Soul sold millions and millions of copies worldwide. Both spent months on the charts, and three decades later, the band still sells out concerts all over.
Bands that have so many huge hits early in their careers often form a love/hate relationship with those songs. Understandably, as lead singer Ed Roland says in the rock documentary, usually artists want to keep looking forward with their life’s work. Looking back, and playing the “old songs” becomes a grind for artists, and sadly, that means sometimes bands come to resent those hits, despite the passion fans still feel for them.
excellent documentary features the band live in concert as thousands of fans sing along with every word on all the old hits, and everyone’s joy, from the band to the fans in the last row, is palpable, like a great concert film. That’s just how it should be.