After basking in the fadeout of a long-term personal and management crisis, members of Collective Soul decided they needed a place to get away to work on pre-production for the band’s third record.

A log cabin just outside of Stockbridge, Georgia, the home of Collective Soul, seemed the perfect setting. It had a kitchen that could be easily transformed into a recording studio and just enough space for frontman Ed Rolland to set up a bed.

The band began scratching out demo work in January and kept the fire burning, literally, through March.

“It was just a log cabin, so the heating pretty much sucked,” explained drummer Shane Evans from his hotel room in Cedar Rapids, where Collective Soul played Friday evening.

“We had to keep the fire burning all the time just to keep the drums warm,” Evans said. “Even though we were just doing demos, we agreed if there was something good enough, we would keep it.”

Evans said the cabin experience was pummeled with constant struggles, from bugs crawling everywhere to fans discovering their location.

“But it was refreshing in a way,” he said. “It was fun and not fun at the same time. We worked our tails off.”

The result (as the first single confesses) is a precious declaration — a declaration of the band’s freedom and of getting back everything, mentally and physically, the band lost during its 1996 lawsuit.

“The band went into the recording wanting to make a statement,” Evans said. “There’s lyrics in the song [‘Precious Declaration’], ‘What’s yours is yours, what’s mine is mine,’ that wraps everything up not just for us, but for anybody who is getting taken advantage of.”

Evans described the recording of Collective Soul’s latest release, “Disciplined Breakdown,” as a healing process. “It was therapeutic for all of us,” he said.

The record has also come to mean great things for critics, who argue that Collective Soul, by completing a successful trio of records, has engraved its name into rock ‘n’ roll history.

“I don’t know; I think every record is important to a band,” Evans said. “If you put out a record and you’re not proud of it, you’re doing yourself a great injustice. It takes a lot of courage to open yourself up to music.”

Collective Soul entered the road to stardom just three years ago when its debut “Hints, Allegations and Things Left Unsaid,” strongly supported by the summer anthem “Shine,” caught the ears of many, including coordinators of Woodstock ’94.

In 1995, the band released a self-titled disc which would end up on the Billboard Top 200 for 76 weeks. Collective Soul also became the first band to earn Billboard’s Music Award for Rock Song of the Year two years in a row (“Shine” and “December”).

After opening gigs with rock pioneers Van Halen and Aerosmith, the band closed out 1996 on its own tour.

“[Touring and recording] are two totally different environments,” Evans said. “When you’re on the road, it’s like you are in a shell. It’s really hard to keep in touch with what else is going on in the world.”

Evans does manage to pick up a newspaper every now and then, in between chatting with his four best friends — Rolland, his brother Dean (guitar), Ross Childress (lead guitar) and Will Turpin (bass).

“We were good friends before there was the band, and I’m sure we will be good friends if there ever isn’t the band,” Evans said of his high school classmates. “There’s no sibling rivalry or anything like that [between brothers Ed and Dean], but you can tell there’s a bond between them.”

Ed and Dean aren’t the only ones with a strong bond. In the band’s bio, Turpin explains how “growing up together has made it so we even think alike. There are times we’ll all show up to dinner wearing the same shirt.”

Collective Soul played at the Civic Center in Des Moines last Saturday.