Will Turpin has a soft spot for Blender, Collective Soul's final release for Atlantic Records.
"I thought it was a great record," the Atlanta-based band's bassist reflects. "We created some really exceptional things on there."
Most fans who had followed the band since its monster 1994 Atlantic debut would disagree, citing such detrimental factors as ill-advised, overproduced dance-pop and a guest appearance from Elton John that seriously damaged the reputation of a band that had been embraced as the South's answer to grunge a few short years and over a dozen hit singles earlier.
"Well," Turpin counters, "I think Blender got bogged down in a time when our relationship with Atlantic was dissolving. It got to be a real political thing: They knew it was our last record on the contract and they didn't really spend a lot of time or money on us.
"I personally think it was kinda weak for a band that had continually made them money for almost a 10-year period."
Of course, that was five years ago. A fair bit of water has passed under the bridge since Blender, with the band facing threats from external forces such as two failed marriages and internal forces such as the departure of original guitarist Ross Childress on the eve of a tour.
Turpin looks back on the period of record label, personnel and personal turmoil accurately as one of "a whole lot of divorces."
That the band has survived such blows is stated clearly by vocalist El Roland in Better Now, the optimistic opener to Youth, the Blender successor that marks a return to the band's rock 'n' roll roots.
To an exuberant no-holds-barred backing of powerhouse riffs, assertive drumming, horn section accents and even a chorus of "Yeah Yeahs," Roland proudly announces he is "Newly calibrated ... (and) happy as Christmas."
He and his band are clearly happy to be making music again. Happy to have new guitarist Joel Kosche along for the ride. Happy to have again found the muse that can take them from fist-pumpers like Counting the Days to acoustic-based ballads like Perfect to Stay.
Happy to have outlasted the "grunge" label that dogged them through early hits like Shine and World I Know.
"It's amazing to me that people actually still write that," a bemused Turpin says of the tag.
"I thought we separated ourselves from the grunge. Yeah, we came out during the grunge era, and yeah we were influenced by what was going on at the time. But I was wearing plaid and long-underwear shirts before I'd heard of Pearl Jam; it didn't mean we were a grunge band.
"It's all these labels and stuff that people use to identify with a certain era or a certain sound. I think there are a lot of grey lines; nothing's really black and white when you try to describe music."
Moreover, nothing is black and white in any aspect of the music business.
Youth, for instance, marks a new beginning for the band in that it is Collective Soul's first release for its own label, El Music Group.
Yet, in an apparent irony that is all too common in the biz, the album is being distributed on both sides of the 49th Parallel by companies owned by Warner Music -- the same Warner Music that controls the bitterly divorced Atlantic Records.
"Yeah, we're an independent label but we outsource the same stuff a major label does," Turpin confirms.
"But we actually own the licensing to these songs. It's a major-label framework, but the guys in the band are the presidents and vice-presidents. That means there's more risk involved on our side, but at the end of the day we're involved with what's going on daily as opposed to being in the dark half the time and not having any control.
"You know, I don't really have a lot of bad things to say about Atlantic or even about the corporate world in general. It's just one of those necessary things.
"I couldn't go back and say that we should have been on an independent label from the start -- we needed Atlantic at one point."
