first round game
(6) Collective Soul, “The World I Know”
ISOLATED
(11) Michael McDonald, “Lonely Talk”
157-24
AND WILL PLAY ON IN THE 2ND ROUND
Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the song/essay with the most votes at the end of the game. If there is a tie, we will play a one-hour overtime (and repeat until we have a winner). Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/4/26.
DON’T KNOW WHAT GOOD FEELS LIKE UNTIL YOU FEEL BAD: JAMES CHARLESWORTH ON “THE WORLD I KNOW”
[EXT. JERSEY CITY – EARLY MORNING]The Colgate Clock in the pre-dawn gloom. A mournful dirge on acoustic guitar. A harried BUSINESS MAN in suit and tie checks his watch as he trudges along a chain-link fence backdropped by the Hudson and the skyline of lower Manhattan. Through his eyes we rise from a subway station into the steel canyons of the city, its windblown sidewalks and sewer grates. At a bodega, he procures a plain bagel and a steaming coffee.From his place on the periphery, where he’s been eying the Business Man with a pensive sort of curiosity, ED ROLAND, lead singer and songwriter of Collective Soul, gazes earnestly into the camera and, his long hair lifting in a slight breeze, begins to sing.ED ROLAND (singing)Has our conscience shown?Has the sweet breeze blown?*
In the fall of 1994, on an afternoon his newly famous band had been flown by private jet to New York City at the behest of NBC to perform as live musical guests on Late Night with Conan O’Brien, preacher’s son Ed Roland stepped outside a midtown hotel room and went for a long walk up and down Broadway. As usual, he had the beginnings of a song in his head.
“It was a different New York City then,” he would remember later. “There was still some grit and dirt… especially around Times Square and Union Square. There were homeless people living in cardboard boxes. Then somebody pulled up in a limousine with a fur coat on and walked right by.”
It’s easy to picture him, tall and traversing the city in the trench coat he dons for the video, long hair ablow across his drawn equine face, a handsomeness that will one day make him pop up on Playgirl’s annual list of the sexiest rock stars. But in the video he looks less like a sex symbol and more like some prophet or professor or wiseman, this son of a Baptist minister and Elton John devotee who has always insisted on “the separation of Church and rock ‘n’ roll,” but whose songwriting style is undeniably laced with the spiritual, woven with references to heaven and littered with allusions to guiding lights and paced with the rhythms of a church choir. When Ed Roland was fifteen, he was in a car accident that killed his best friend; when he was twenty-three, he lost his other best friend to a heroin overdose; for a full decade he struggled to find his place in the music industry before finding massive success almost accidentally at the age of thirty. If nothing else, the man who strode those streets and avenues of Midtown that day was one attuned to the highs and lows of the world, the struggles and redemptions that contour our lives and give them depth and meaning.
“I took a two-hour walk,”—he would say later of the day he wrote the song that would become his band’s second biggest hit—“and just absorbed and observed from the highs and lows of what society was offering the greatest city in the world. I was looking at what the good was [and] what the bad was. But also, you don’t know what bad feels like until you feel good. You don’t know what good feels like until you feel bad.”
*
[EXT. MANHATTAN – MORNING]The Business Man waits in line to board a bus. Preoccupied with his copy of the Times proclaiming headlines of despair (“War Victims; Camp Children Starve”), he fails to notice a woman next to him begging for change.ED ROLAND (singing V.O.)Has all kindness gone?Hope still lingers on...From his seat on the bus, the Business Man observes as the woman turns and trudges off. He winces, and his face shifts toward the camera, eyes meeting ours as if imploring us to absolve him of his guilt.ED ROLAND (singing V.O.)I drink myself of new-found pity...*
I was drunk the first time I saw the video for “The World I Know.” Not the festive carefree drunk you see glamorous actors pantomiming in movies; not the vividly and artistically rendered fever dream drunk you read in certain books. Rural central Pennsylvania: October 1995. At the height of Collective Soul’s fame, I was an eighteen-year-old part-time pizza delivery boy living at my parents’ house, unenthusiastically enrolled in my first semester at the local branch campus of the state university, and on the day in question I had skipped my Friday afternoon classes with a couple friends to drink a case of Stoney’s at one of the friends’ father’s house while he was at work. The Stoney’s was a rare splurge. Typically in those days we subsisted on forties of Silver Thunder malt liquor that could be procured for $1.25 and tasted like gasoline with a pound of sugar poured in, or glass flasks of fortified wines like Cisco or Mad Dog 20/20. I don’t remember what the impetus was for the Stoney’s: one of us must have aced a test, or more likely failed it (my major was D.U.S., i.e. Division of Undergraduate Studies, i.e. I’m mostly here for the parties). What I remember about that afternoon, as I sat on the couch watching the opening frames of the video, was thinking “ugghh jeezus, fucking Collective Soul…”
I was not a Collective Soul fan. It wasn’t necessarily that I hated their music: they had some pretty cool guitar riffs, and at least one of my friends was the owner of their self-titled second album, which had come out earlier that year. It was more that something about their music struck me as—how do I put it?—too mainstream for my taste. Maybe a little too uplifting? In the aftermath of the dissolution of grunge I had returned to my metal roots and was passing through the doorways of Green Day and Rancid into more obscure hardcore melodic punk rock. All I knew about Collective Soul was that they were a Christian band (they’re not) and that their song “December” from earlier that year was hotly rumored to be “about a blow job” (it’s not).
Probably my dislike for Collective Soul was rooted in something else entirely: a manifestation of internal anxiety that had something to do with low self-esteem, something to do with the insecurities of adolescence: an unwillingness to look unguarded emotion in the eyes combined with a mistrust of anyone who purported to have found something that made them feel less lonely and uncertain. It was this same anxiety that had made me turn to alcohol. I’d started drinking in my mid-teens, somewhere around the time I began to realize that the thing that was holding me back was this nervous stress that shuddered through my body like an electric current anytime I found myself in social situations. Best I could tell, the kids I saw with bottles of Icehouse or Red Dog or Zima or Mickey’s wide mouths in their hands seemed not to suffer from this affliction. I crossed the threshold with reluctance and fear—I’d heard stories all my life of family members who’d struggled with alcohol, stories told in the guise of humor but always underneath I could sense the warning—and then from the first sip these admonitions were forgotten and my life with alcohol became a long straight road with a series of green lights turning yellow that I had to accelerate through, the pedal floored so I could make it before those red lights of my reservations and my guilt arrived.
That was my situation on that day I sat on the couch at my friend’s dad’s house watching the video for “The World I Know,” three years into an entertainment that had become a habit that had become a dependency. Picture me there: dingy flannel shirt and loose jeans, feet up on the coffee table and watching obliviously as the morose Business Man in the music video navigated the day-to-day drudgery of his morning commute. Years later, after I’d left home and embraced a new identity as a grad student studying creative writing at a liberal arts school in Boston, I would have been quick to identify these opening scenes with the world-weary Business Man as an easy example of what we liked to call a Last Chance to Change Story: a moody tale of a protagonist mired in a mournful state of mind, clearly on his way to some reckoning or epiphany or catharsis that would confront him with the opportunity to face down his ennui and his angst and his malaise and either find a way to overcome it or succumb to it.
But on that day in October ’95—half-drunk, my GPA hovering around a 2.0—I lacked the perspective to identify such narratives, let alone recognize them in myself. Picture me: clad in my backwards baseball cap and clutching a brown Stoney’s bottle. The world I knew was so small then, not much larger than the ten-mile radius stretching from my parents’ house to the local branch campus of the state university. What did I understand, back then, about last chances to change?
*
[EXT. MANHATTAN – MORNING]ED ROLAND (singing)All the words that I’ve been reading /Now have started the act of bleeding into one...The newsprint blurs as the Business Man’s eyes fill with tears. In broad daylight on a city street, he weeps. A metal fire escape scales a yellow brick brownstone, and it is at its base that he tosses aside the newspaper. Halfway up the ladder of the fire escape, he discards his briefcase, its contents spilling out upon the concrete sidewalk. He pulls off his suitcoat and sends it parachuting down...[EXT. ROOFTOP – MORNING]Alone, surrounded by the city’s anonymous rooflines and water towers, the Business Man spins in a rotating spiral of grief, raises his palms to his face while his tears roll down.*
In the summer of 1993, the band that would become known as Collective Soul, which was not really a band at all at that point, released its debut album, which was not so much an album as a collection of demos conceived and recorded largely by one man in the basement of his home in Stockbridge, Georgia. At thirty years old, Ed Roland had by this point mostly given up on his dreams of rock stardom. After fronting a series of bands in the Atlanta underground scene to middling success, he had settled on this last-ditch effort of throwing together a demo tape and putting it out on a local label in the hopes of selling the publishing rights.
The story likely would’ve ended there, were it not for a DJ at a college radio station at Georgia State University in Atlanta who took a shine to the opening track—which happened to be called “Shine”—and put it into regular rotation. The song itself was a bit of a curiosity: with its droning drop-D guitar riffs and shifting dynamics and healthy dose of Eddie Vedder-style yarling in the choruses and the double-time outro (“Shine on meeheeheeya! Meeheeheeya!”), it was nothing extraordinarily new per se, but there was a certain novelty in the delivery, a freshness in the combination of influences. Within days, it became the station’s most requested and most played song, and when station management contacted Ed Roland to see if his band could play some local shows, he accepted—despite the fact that he did not have a band—and then cobbled one together consisting of his little brother and a couple other musicians who’d contributed to the demo and a friend or two he knew from cub scouts and little league baseball. Other radio stations around the south picked up the song and experienced similar overwhelmingly positive reactions, and as the calendar turned to 1994, “Shine” rose up the Billboard charts so fast even Atlantic Records could not ignore it. They signed Collective Soul, rereleased Ed Roland’s basement demo without even bothering to remaster it or update the chintzy cover art, and sent the band on a year-long cross-country tour opening for Aerosmith. They secured them a prime-time slot on the main stage at Woodstock ’94 in front of 300,000 people, and then, just a month later, with “Shine” peaking at number 11 on the Billboard charts—less than two years after Ed Roland had recorded it by himself in his basement studio as a last ditch effort to salvage a fleeting dream—the spot on Late Night with Conan O’Brien.
“The World I Know” is Ed Roland’s tribute to that journey, an ode to that afternoon in New York City when he had the opportunity, for the first time, to look back on how far he had come. It may have been written on a piece of hotel stationery when he got back from his two-hour walk spent observing the highs and lows of society—jotted down before he took the elevator to the lobby to catch a limo to Rockefeller Center—but it was formed in the grief of his adolescent loss, forged in the decade of struggle he’d overcome before the light of opportunity shined down on him. Ed Roland had no way of knowing, of course, that his band’s moment of massive fame was already on the downswing, that although they have released a total of thirteen albums over their undeniably successful thirty-year career, they would never again achieve the success they’d stumbled upon with “Shine.” And yet from its mournful opening dirge to the soaring major chords of its powerful chorus, “The World I Know” succeeds in achieving something more lasting and memorable and heartfelt than any of the heavy riffs and yarling of their first and biggest hit.
That afternoon at my friend’s father’s house, I knew nothing about Ed Roland or his journey (I thought he was in a Christian band who’d recorded a song about a blow job). I had not yet arrived at any such crossroads or catharsis or epiphany as the Business Man. I didn’t know anything about last chances to change or looking down from tall ledges. Perhaps it was just that I was half-drunk, or perhaps I really had bombed a test and was already feeling—somewhere in the hard to access regions of my teenage-boy brain where accountability and ambition lived—a sense of dejection and failure. Maybe it was adolescent hormones or some other circumstance weighing on me that I can’t recall now. But something about that particular song and that particular video on that particular day—when I watched the Business Man’s story and then saw how it ended—spoke to me through the soundproof walls of my ignorance, made me acknowledge something deep in my heart that forced me to turn away from my friends and twist my backwards baseball cap around to hide my eyes so they couldn’t see the emotion I was fighting, an intimation I did not yet have the serenity or the courage or the wisdom to understand or act upon, a fleeting comprehension that, while I could not yet see the light at the far end, I could at least recognize, maybe for the first time ever, the presence of a tunnel.
*
[EXT. ROOFTOP – MORNING]At the edge of the building, the Business Man removes his shoes and sits cross-legged at the ledge, looking down from this dizzying height.CLOSE UP ON BUSINESS MAN’S FACE: He nods, accepting his decision and his fate.The Business Man climbs a guardrail and lifts himself to stand upon the cornice of the brownstone. His arms stretch out and the camera angle rises behind him to show us the endless uncaring city as he leans forward into death......and a pigeon lands on his arm.*
On a raw and rainy night in September of last year, my fiancée and I drove an hour north from our home outside Boston to see Collective Soul. This was no Woodstock ’94 with a crowd of 300,000, no live performance on Late Night with Conan O’Brien for an audience of millions. Nope, this was a show for two thousand damp souls in a hangar-like venue in an off-season beach town a block from the Gulf of Maine. Yet it was a room full of Collective Soul fans—a group of which I suppose it is now fair to call me a member—a venue packed with people mostly our age and capable of looking back on those years in the mid-90s when Collective Soul had their heyday, each perhaps with their own stories of how this band’s strangely uplifting music touched them. Folks ready and willing to sing along, early in the show, when the band dialed up the drop-D riffs of “Shine,” the song that had flung them all those years ago into stardom. And folks who seemed to understand intuitively what was coming when, near the end of the evening, after the band had worked its way through their more recent catalog, Ed Roland inconspicuously exited stage right and ducked down a short staircase, accepted from a roadie an acoustic guitar that he slung over his shoulder, then trotted back up the stairs to take center stage beneath the floodlights. A field of held-aloft smart phones rose up before our eyes and Ed Roland—sixty-two years old now, gray hair tied back in a ponytail beneath a white cattleman’s hat, eyes shielded by sunglasses—strummed his guitar and, after a few measures, began to sing…
Last year I celebrated a quarter century of sobriety. That’s not true—I didn’t celebrate it. It just happened, without fanfare or deep reflection. I’ve been sober so long now that most of my closest friends can’t comprehend at all the person I was when I first saw the video for “The World I Know.” My wife, who was still my fiancée on that day she stood singing along with me in the crowd at the Collective Soul show, can barely fathom the teenage version of her husband whose indiscretions I infrequently describe for her. Redemption seldom resembles anything so obvious as a pigeon alighting on a shoulder; for me in my drinking days there were countless harbingers and omens, innumerable instances of the world trying to tell me what I was doing was stupid, reckless, reprehensible. In the end it wasn’t an avian intervention but flashing police cruiser lights, handcuffs, twenty-eight days at a treatment facility in the Pennsylvania woods.
Watching the story of the Business Man on that long ago day in my freshman year of college did not make me stop drinking, but still every time I hear “The World I Know,” a part of me is brought back to that day—and for a moment I can see that teenage version of myself, his ignorance and his confusion and his potential. Every time I hear that moment when the final chorus finishes up and the opening theme returns—altered this time from minor to major, the substitution of just one note in the chord progression turning that mournful dirge of the intro into a redemptive and joyful conclusion—I am able to access some small piece of that now unrecognizable person I once was. I am able to look the unguarded emotion in the eyes. I am able to acknowledge the bad and, in doing so, I get to embrace the good.
*
[INT. HAMPTON BEACH CASINO BALLROOM]When the second chorus arrives, the music stops. Ed Roland ceases his strumming and raises both arms as if in a summoning. The band stands silent around him, not even clapping to keep the beat. The only sound that fills the echoing space of the ballroom is a chant almost religious:2,000 VOICES (singing in unison)So I walk up on high / and I step to the edgeTo see my world below...Have to laugh at myself / while the tears roll downCuz it’s the world I know / well it’s the world I know...*
Why does “The World I Know” deserve your vote in this tournament of sadness? Because the best sad songs are not the ones that leave us mired in mournful hues and tones, but those that dip us down deep into our sorrows and our griefs, immerse us in them and make us feel them so fully that they threaten to drown us, only to lift us up, still dripping, into the light. And because in life—real life—there are no last chances to change. There is always still time to make a difference, to alter a course, to carve a new path.
No matter how dark this world we know might become, it is never too late to persist. Never too late to do everything we can to make the world we know a place we’re happy to call home.
Has all kindness gone?
Hope still lingers on…
James Charlesworth (pictured here with his 1983 Nissan Pulsar that he bought for $500, c.1994) grew up eighty miles east of Pittsburgh and lives in Boston. He is the author of a novel, The Patricide of George Benjamin Hill, and four previous essays for March Xness.
Adult Contemporary Poetics: gabriel palacios on Michael McDonald’s “Lonely Talk”
We’re subject to brutality we spectate and commit. It feels like there are few moves left sometimes: we listen to the bearded public officer make the big-boy-grown-up-in-the-room case for government-rebranded-as-scam-sober-living-home-bad-faith-conservatorship to place kidnapped public wealth in care of certain Thiels, we listen, don’t expect to change our minds, wouldn’t choose to testify against ourselves, we listen and feel musculature tense up in our forearm. We think that we control all that. Steeped deep so long in hot postmodern waters, rendered so adult contemporary that we know better, sadly, than to trust the bold emotion, violent impulse, stray dumb thoughts we’d trusted heretofore to compel us? Where to go?
Stray thoughts: surrender. Abandon. Leather. Squealy guitar note clusters and castrati wails. These were a few of the childish things of rock n’ roll to be put away in 1990, the year that Michael McDonald released the simmering, sophistijazzy exorcism of carnality that is “Lonely Talk.” 1990 saw the crystallization of a new Adult Contemporary cultural antechamber. What thirtysomethings wanted was to watch themselves stress out over marriage and important-person careers on TV, it was said. The September of their years. These thirtysomethings, just babies in their beards and blazers, we might scoff in retrospect, cultural consumers older wiser than any before. But the second generation of Rock had aged out of Dance Party USA with a surplus of vinyl record dollars in fist.
“New York Grief ’86” is a raw synthpop demo recorded forty years ago by Montreal artist Princess Demeny with her late partner Jean Mineau during a brief window of unhospitalization as Mineau battled a cancer that would soon prove terminal. The verses of the song are asymmetric in structure and the melody’s a bit smeared, though in an arrestingly destabilizing way. A Rickie Lee Jones expressive way. The synthesizer textures are a time-lapse of flickering 8mm footage of skyscrapertops. A new kind of habitat, a new system of enclosures had improvised itself around us through the century and only in an unfinished song could we pause to appreciate it.
Rescued and released by archivally-minded label Seance Centre in 2021, “New York Grief” stands as an outsider music artifact today. Its slurred-up demo-ness is its life-force just as the power of “Lonely Talk” lies in its refinement. Later, in 1989, the track was properly re-recorded with Montreal New Wave band Vini Vidi Vici.
(Don’t even sweat it—this fuller-fledged version was in fact no less demo-spirited, by some miracle. A period of bounding technological leaps in synthesis unfolded in the years that gave us this tune, synthesizer technology by 1989 had evolved into something digitally luminous and department store Christmaslike and yet “New York Grief” lost none of its mercury in that passage.)
The first thing you hear in “Lonely Talk” is a skittering, syncopated rhythmic breakdown with cascading, distorted guitar. And what glorious guitar textures we get from guitarist Michael Landau. The guitars feel, in the most glowing way we could ever mean it, acid washed. It sounds to us like Landau still wears the residue of Aqua Net in his hair, but it’s being rinsed away by the downpour of overtones and accents and the slide toward the less-ostentatious decade.
We simmer for a minute in the sparkling harmonic content. Not a lot of notes being played, just all the right ones. Landau has a whammy bar but he wields it so judiciously. The grown up, post-Dance Party USA exhalation of the lyric is signaled here.
The first verse begins a thread we really love, but it’s abandoned by line four, which begins:
From a promise to a lie, from lies to regret
Turn your back on truth, baby
And that's always what you get
And ends:
'Cause a man could drown in a love so deep, baby
See?
We don’t know.
We don’t know what happened there.
Maybe it’s just that McDonald couldn’t bear to articulate this line of tormented thinking one line further. We can understand how "man could drown” sentiment had to be said somehow, to bridge us to the central declaration:
I'm not begging you to stay
It's just lonely talk
You don't hear a word I say
You just turn and walk, baby
Negations all around. The pop hook itself refuses, structurally, its pop hook station.
It be’s like that, sometimes we like a song or dance or viral outburst simply because we would not, could not ever be capable of expressing it. There’s a key change here. This chorus makes a sharp left we find it hard to get on board with.
But think about it: perhaps the thing we don’t like is just that we weren’t visioned enough in that moment to predict it.
The departure isn’t quite like “Back on the Chain Gang,” where the chorus rains its vulgar light on all the interesting shadows built before and trivializes the verse. Gives up on its promise. We don’t know. We used to feel that way about it. Might not anymore.
The temple of Adult Contemporary songwriting circa 1990 was big enough to house some doubt or nuance. McDonald here is fragmenting his own setup to prepare us for its epiphanic reveal: The begging, the caterwauling soulfully while seated at the ivories—it’s just the lonely talkin’ again—to echo the Whitney Houston song of a few summers prior.
We’re dropped down into this place:
When I'm on my knees and praying
To the Lord above
When He listens to my prayer
He knows that it's just lonely talk
Rorschachically, in the third line of that verse we thought we heard “nobody listens to my prayers.”
We’re back inside the tension after that. That breakdown where it started. The ringing open string and trembling guitar is frayed sounding, disintegrated. A hollowed-out, too self-aware impersonation of the standard rock n’ roll bravado-shred vernacular. Moments like this, and in Michael Penn’s “No Myth,” just before the guitar solo, where instead of some pre-climactic “Take It, CC!,” or “It’s Slash, ladies and gentlemen!,” we get the most tentative, shit-eating ad-lib imaginable, “ooohhh-kayy…” We hear a tension in Princess Demeny’s most demonstrative and fragmented turns in “New York Grief.” Demeny’s speaker in the aftermath of sleep terror and hypnagogic confusion warns the dying, “Don’t give me New York Grief/Thieves/Switchblades/Suitcase/Paralyze/Lock your door,” as screen is wiped mid thought into a slurred and shouted string of paranoid utterances.
Do AI singers slur? Say two things at once? Say one thing, while another, more complex thing’s erroneously perceived?
We guess they will. But it won’t work.
What we’re hearing, the doubt, in “Lonely Talk”—it could be mushy caterwauling. Beard. Some harm carried over from the past, as filtered by our future ears. That doubt. Poets try to dress it up.
We’re not sure if there are any further lyrics here to teach us temperance or how to dress against desire. It’s just a slow vamping dissolve-retreat from here on out. Hail mary spell we whisper against primal-selves, vestigial amateur frenetic grunge-love. McDonald knows just what he’s capable of praying and gives the big man a heads-up. Keeps himself together. Broken jewel case held together by a glossy outer cellophane.
Photo by Lisa Palacios
Gabriel Palacios is a poet-songwriter from Tucson. He is the author of A Ten Peso Burial for Which Truth I Sign (Fonograf Editions 2024) and the forthcoming Lunar Hilton Elegy (Kuhl House Poets/University of Iowa Press, 2026). As Spanish Trail Motel, he produces soundpoetry and music available on all streaming platforms. His work across books and recordings concerns the vaporpoem, a study of the decayed textures of place, media, and memory.