Collective Soul has sold - what? - six million albums? Seven million?

Figure that a band earns about $1 for every CD sold. So you'd think that even with all the expenses, these lifelong friends from Stockbridge, Georgia, might have some loot socked away, enough to afford a nice place to live, a new car, maybe, perhaps a round of golf now and then, and at least enough to record in a proper studio.

You'd be wrong.

In a sterling example of a rock band getting screwed by the music business, the members of Collective Soul spent the last three years broke and living at home with their parents. All the band's cash was frozen, explains guitarist Dean Roland (songwriter Ed Roland's kid brother), because their former manager, Bill Richardson, sued for a bigger slice of the pie.

"We lived off $150 a week for three years," recalls Roland. "People freak out when they hear that, but it's true. We're just now starting to see a little bit of money."

Last year was an intensely frustrating time for the band. Collective Soul was barred from touring, using label money for a studio or releasing an album until the court case was settled. The band members had to take matters into their own hands. With Ed Roland wearing the producer's hat, they recorded their new album, Disciplined Breakdown, in an old gambler's cabin outside of Stockbridge.

"It's about two miles from the town square but at the same time it's in the middle of nowhere, four acres of land and a cow pasture in the back," says Roland. "We just brought in the equipment, set (Shane Evans') drums up in the kitchen and lined the amps up along the wall.

"It was different, but it was fun. We created our own vibe, and things were relaxed from the point of view that there was no deadline. We were just going as we pleased.

"We didn't know if we were ever going to get to make a record. So we were trying to deal with that. We didn't have any money. That's one of the reasons we were in the cabin. We couldn't finance the studio. We financed it ourselves."

In stores today, Disciplined Breakdown is ironically the best album Collective Soul has made yet, the follow-up to 1995's self-titled album, and the debut, Hints, Allegations and Things Left Unsaid - a prescient title given the events that followed. Reflecting the feelings of the band members throughout their legal ordeal, Disciplined Breakdown comes across as an honest mix of modern rhythms, backwoods soul attitude and the always clever song-craft of Ed Roland.

"This record's more organic, I think," Dean says, "more raw, not quite as polished as the last record. But at the same time, one of our loves as a band is to go in a studio and make a really quality record. We don't take the musicianship lightly."

The album title, Disciplined Breakdown, "refers to all the legal stuff we were going through, trying to focus on the music and having all this outside interference. I think each one of us went through our own individual breakdown or meltdown, but at the same time, we had to be controlled and sane about it."

Some bands would've just broken up, but Collective Soul had been together long before anyone outside of Georgia ever heard of them - before they were even a band at all, in fact.

"We grew up in the same town, went to school together, we grew up with each other, literally," says Roland. "It's a good bond and a good chemistry in the band that derived from that. I think, if anything, the bond has strengthened. We've endured a lot of things together, and I think that made us stronger as a band. We had to rely on each other."

And perhaps now that the legal wrangling is over, they'll be able to afford that round of golf.