Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Mullins revises solo act at Buffalo Bill’s

Who: Shawn Mullins.

When: 7 p.m. Friday.

Where: Whiskey PeteUs showroom.

Tickets: $24.95.

Information: 385-1232.

A peculiar thing happened to singer/songwriter Shawn Mullins while on his indie-music journey. He had a Grammy Award-nominated hit song.

Suddenly Mullins was no longer touring cross country in a van selling CDs out of the back. Instead he was traveling through airports, where he was recognized as that guy who wrote that song about the girl who "grew up with the children of the stars. In the Hollywood hills and the boulevard."

The Atlanta singer with the gravelly voice was all over radio.

"It was exciting, but I didn't enjoy it as much when it was happening," said Mullins, who will be performing Friday at Whiskey Pete's in Primm.

"I think I enjoy it more in retrospect."

For Mullins, who grew up listening to the likes of Woody Guthrie, Kris Kristofferson, Joan Armatrading and Rickie Lee Jones, the pop stardom was a change.

Following "Lullaby" came a not-so-successful trio effort, the Thorns, in which Mullins was paired with Matthew Sweet and Pete Droge. The trio spent two years on the road with no income and negative results.

Now the 36-year-old songwriter is revisiting his solo acoustic past, writing daily the lyrical stories he's most familiar with.

At Whiskey Pete's, Mullins will perform new songs and play some of his old stuff, but only tiptoe around "Beneath the Velvet Sun," an album that got radio play but left "a bad taste" in his mouth.

"I'm kind of in another place than when I was right before the Thorns," said Mullins, who talks openly in a soft, polite Southern voice. "The direction I'm going now is more like a solo acoustic direction. It's very simple.

"I've been writing a lot, recording."

Regarding the Thorns, Mullins said, "Looking back, it wasn't really worth it. I think we would have all preferred to stay home and make our own music. Everyone thought it was going to be huge, this multi-platinum project. But it just didn't happen.

"Everyone really tried. It was almost the curse of the Thorns. We'd go through a town and a week later a tornado would go through and demolish the building we played in."

Music man

Mullins grew up in Atlanta and formed his first rock band when he was 12. By age 16 he was mixing his own music. He released albums on his own SMG label, including an album while in the Army in the 1980s.

Then he met Kristofferson in 1994 at a Martin Luther King march in Atlanta. Mullins gave him a CD but didn't expect to hear back; in a couple of months, Kristofferson called.

"He fired me up. And I really needed it. At the time I was just kind of working odd jobs to keep going."

Eventually the two became friends. Mullins refers to Kristofferson as a "surrogate father."

"It was really good for me to have somebody like that twice my age and been there and done all that. For a lot of writers it would have been like Bob Dylan called them. It couldn't have been any cooler for me than to have him call.

"Nothing comes out of his mouth that isn't something you shouldn't write down."

In the 1990s an alternative radio station began playing "Lullaby," a song about a girl who grew up in Hollywood, Calif., which spread like kudzu throughout Georgia and other Southern towns. More stations picked up the songs, and soon Columbia came calling. "Lullaby," released in the album "Soul Core" in 1998, became a Top 10 hit, and the album sold more than two million copies.

"Shimmer," another song on that album, was added to the "Dawson's Creek" soundtrack. But the mainstream success wasn't really what Mullins, who hoped for a career in alternative radio and smaller clubs, had anticipated.

"For the first couple of years it was really hard for me Q the change of life," Mullins said. "Of course, the money was a lot different. I think it kind of helped to scrounge for a while and save. I went a little crazy and bought a few cars, but nothing really crazy."

The Thorns

Critics seem to have a tough time liking his music. "Lullaby" was referred to by one critic as musical wallpaper and another Portland, Ore., critic chastised him for not having musical depth and referred to him as a "one-man version of Hootie and the Blowfish."

"Beneath the Velvet Sun," featuring the song "Everywhere I Go" and the collaboration of featured singers Shelby Lynn and Shawn Colvin, had less success.

"It was too slick," Mullins said, referring to the production. "It was OK. But I think my fans got it kind of like I got it, kind of like, THmm, this is interesting.' I was probably too young."

But Mullins doesn't appear to be concerned about pop success or failure.

He says that there may be another record with the Thorns (who were created by a manager that Mullins and Sweet share).

"Greg Latterman (president of Aware Records) really wants us to do another one," Mullins said. "We'll probably do one, I just don't know when it will be. We'd definitely do it differently."

The Thorns' self-titled album was compared by fans and critics to to the harmonies of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, even though the group was listening more to the Beach Boys, early Bee Gees and the Beatles. It received lukewarm criticism and didn't turn out as the group had hoped.

"We sat on this porch in in Santa Ynez, Calif., and wrote all these songs and demoed them with coyotes in the background," Mullins said. "We probably would have been more successful had we done that.

"We weren't at a place with Columbia where we felt we could fight for it. We didn't want to lose the contract. It ended up being more of a pop-produced album, which was cool too."

But the group did cover the Jayhawks' gem "Blue," which revived the song briefly on the radio.

Despite the trio being composed of solo singers and songwriters, Mullins said the songwriting and harmonizing were easy.

"The first couple of days was tough," he said. "I remember us almost breaking up a million times. Eventually we got over the ego stuff. "We'd write two songs a day and the harmonies would happen as the songs were written. This was all co-written from the get-go. It was good for me personally to go through that creative thing and share that with those two people. The chemistry was great."

Mullins said he also writes poems and short stories, but will keep writing songs.

And what about the Hollywood girl from "Lullaby" who whose parents "threw big parties and everyone was there. They hung out with folks like Dennis Hopper and Bob Seeger and Sonny and Cher"?

Well, Mullins said, "She still comes to my shows when I play."

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