Mr. Edgar Eugene Roland, Jr. Arrives At The Top Of The Sonic Cloud
Photographs by Corinne D. Sullivan
Audio engineer, songwriter, and unearthly supreme vocalist Ed Roland turned sixty yesterday. I’d like to send a belated birthday wish from The Article 27 Music Project.
Ed Roland has walked the walk. He changed everything about the ways vocals, notes and musical scales could be organized to form deeply rooted rock and roll music. His style has now almost become a genre of its own. And Roland walked the musical road he dreamt of in his mind, sometimes seemingly on his own, still winning the gold and platinum records due to his highly acceptable series of musical results.
If there ever was a patriot in the shadows, it would be forever Ed Roland championing music and freedom of speech. Into legendary status he goes this week of his birthday, as the favored Whiz Kid of old-fashioned technical audio skills. Wikipedia boldly claims Roland was an engineer at Real 2 Reel Studios in Stockbridge, Georgia, for eight years. By 1993, Roland created a masterpiece that primarily is solely his own doing: Hints, Allegations, and Things Left Unsaid. That’s some history to think with when you listen to his band symphonies from 1993 to today. It’s easy to be wonderstruck by the Ed Roland sonic magic.
In the mid-90’s, around the time of the release of Hints, Allegations, and Things Left Unsaid, I met the soon-to-be seriously loved and extremely big-time band Collective Soul in Portland, Oregon, almost on accident. It was just when they were being led out into the main spotlight provided by the major moguls of the music industry. As for myself, that night, I was trailing on the heels of Mary Frances, a reformed Haight-Ashbury hippie who had insisted my BFF and I accept her two extra tickets for Collective Soul. I was able to walk up to the stage in that Portland nightclub and stand at Ed Roland’s feet for more than two hours of an outstanding musical presentation.
Roland’s albums are a series of personal reflections, stories about God, and his own intuition, all set to ultra-harmonious rock and roll, mixed and mastered with such precision the band can’t fail. For me, it lies inside all those extra notes. That’s where he tells us he’s always been a deeply skilled chamber musician and orchestrator but never needed to say so. The scintillating works of Ed Roland are pleasing on the ears, tells me!
I regret that I failed to finish this happy birthday wish yesterday. Also feeling guilty it has taken me thirty years to say anything at all about meeting such a great man. All I can say now is, thank-you for being a real-life hero upon the stage, a man who takes everyone to another dimension, performance after performance, almost like you are smiling while our feet leave the ground.
My wish for you is a slew of seriously happy birthdays arriving many decades into the future, on time, in honor of a man going up into music’s history as never late, ever, anywhere in the song.
Written by Corinne D. Sullivan
