Shawn Mullins

by Carl Wiser

On "Beautiful Wreck," beating the Devil, and his writing credit on the Zac Brown Band song "Toes."

Shawn Mullins is an old soul. He reads Steinbeck, listens to Kris Kristofferson, and uses social media sparingly. After years on the road as an independent singer-songwriter, he fell into the warp and weft of pop music with his 1998 hit "Lullaby," but he didn't stay long. Signed to Columbia Records, he released a follow-up single called "Shimmer" that by all rights should have done just as well, but somehow failed to chart.

By this time, Mullins' first marriage had buckled under the weight of his profession. Between his travels and his emotional turmoil, he had what he needed for batches of great songs. "Lullaby" came out of a conversation with a girl in Los Angeles trying to navigate the sometimes surreal city; "Shimmer" is the idea that we are all born to shine, but can get dulled and jaded along the way.

Mullins wrote another set of clever and insightful songs for his second Columbia album, but the label was hungry for a hit so he delivered a pop nugget called "Everywhere I Go" that he now refuses to play (more on that later). Released in 2000, it also failed to chart. He spent the next few years working with Matthew Sweet and Pete Droge in a group called The Thorns, then put out another solo album in 2006, this time on the Vanguard label.

Mullins kept traveling and kept getting married... and divorced. His 2015 album, My Stupid Heart, came after two divorces in a span of two years. On the title track, he blames it on his heart, which insists on playing for keeps (more on that later).

We got the full story on "Lullaby" in our They're Playing My Song series, so in this interview we spend time on some often overlooked songs in Mullins' catalog, starting with one of particular interest for our Song Places series.
Carl Wiser (Songfacts): Can you please tell me about "Talkin' Going to Alaska Blues"?

Shawn Mullins: Yeah. It was my first trip to Alaska. It was 2005 and I got invited to play a couple of shows up in Anchorage and then Juneau, and it was just that feeling I had.

I wrote the lyric while I was sitting on the plane. That's usually the harder part but it came fast to me. A lot of my songs are kind of journal entries, at least they were at that point... I need to get back to journaling - I tend to go at it from another angle now and it's not as easy for me. But I was sitting in the plane, and when you're traveling you get inspired about what's to come and what you're going to be doing and that freedom of going into a wild, wild place like that. Anchorage and Juneau are both towns that have got a wildness about them that I didn't even know really, but I expected it to be that way and it was.

Songfacts: Tell me about the Alaska experience and what it was like performing there.

Mullins: This place I played in Anchorage was called Chilkoot Charlie's. It's been there for a long time. I don't know how long but it's probably the oldest bar in Anchorage. It's a saloon, a honky-tonk to some degree, and it can get kind of rough in there at times. It's also a bit of a meat market, and a live music place as well.

But during my show it became this cool listening room - I don't know how, but it did. People were seated and listened and it was nice. I remember the next night, I sat in with a cover band that plays there - I think I played Friday night and then they were playing Saturday night, so I sat in with them and sang some stuff with those guys. They were doing Bad Company covers and just getting the crowd going. It's a cool place - I've played there a couple of times since. It was a wilder venue than I typically play, but I liked it a lot.

Chilkoot Charlie's in AnchorageChilkoot Charlie's in Anchorage
So Anchorage was an especially wild place. It seems like a lot of people are there because they're running from something in their past, and that's what I got from it. I don't think that's always the case but I know I met some folks like that. And then two nights later I was in Juneau, which is a port for cruises, but that didn't have much to do with my show - it was all locals that came, and that was another interesting venue. It had carpet flooring, so it had this real funky smell going on, and they had a bunch of TVs on the walls, so it's normally probably a sports bar and they do bare-knuckle fist-fighting in there sometimes - they have a roped-off ring. And again, for my show, it was a pretty tame audience. A certain clientele came out for that. I hung around the next night to see what it was normally like, and it was very different. So, they can pull off many things in Alaska when it comes to entertainment. They have a lot of different types of people there.

Songfacts: You have a line in there where you say, "Michelle's friend was anchored down." Is that based on a real story?

Mullins: That's a reference to Michelle Shocked's song "Anchored Down In Anchorage." It was her first big record, probably late '80s [1988]. In the song, she's writing letters back and forth to her friend who lives there but is from Texas where Michelle is from. The chorus is something like:

Texas always seemed so big
But you know you're in the largest state in the union
When you're anchored down in Anchorage


I thought that was a great line and I always loved that song. I have since played shows with Michelle Shocked and remember at some point I told her how I had referenced her song. She just kind of looked at me funny.

Songfacts: You said that you're not writing from journal entries any more. What are you doing?

Mullins: I'm not writing very much right now, to be honest. I've been in a dry spell. If my wife hands me a poem, I can write music to it easily - she's a good poet. But with the whole COVID thing, a lot of people were able to write and record, but I didn't do that, I kind of got inward and have been doing a lot of thinking. But I'm sure I'll come out of that - I always have.

I've been reading a lot lately, which I didn't do over the last year and a half - I watched too much television and too much Netflix, and that tends to not help my writing when I do that. An old songwriter guy, Hank Cochran, who wrote "I Fall To Pieces" and a whole bunch of other classics from that era, he told me when I was a kid writer - I was probably 21 - he said, "If you really want to be a songwriter, you've got to kill your television and you have to read, because in order to pour the words out you have to pour them in first." He said, "You have to have words floating around."

I guess that makes sense. I don't know if it feels that way to you as a writer.

Songfacts: I get that. If you're watching something on Netflix, you're getting this fully-formed story and there's nothing left to add to it. Whereas if you're just reading words you can create visual elements and fill in the blanks.

Mullins: Absolutely, and the senses become activated. That is your imagination.

So now that I've been reading I've been going back to stuff I used to read a lot, like Steinbeck. And then the next step is to actually put pen to paper and just do that couple of pages of brainstorm writing a day - don't worry about what it does and says, just get some words on the paper. Yeah, I've kept up with playing live as much as I could but the creative part has been a little dryer than I'd like.

Songfacts: When did you get married?

Mullins: Well, I've been married a few times. We've been married a couple of years now, and we got together in September of 2017. This is my fourth marriage. I never have been very good at that, so I'm hoping this will be better, and I realize the common denominator in all of those was me. But if I fall in love with someone, I tend to want to marry them.

Songfacts: You have a song on the same album with "Talkin' Going to Alaska Blues" called "Beautiful Wreck." That's an intriguing song. Can you talk about that one please?

Mullins: Absolutely. I co-wrote that with a few other guys when I was together with them on a writing project that preceded what became The Thorns, which was a band I was in with Matthew Sweet and Pete Droge. It was kind of a three-part harmony and acoustic band, and we were probably together about three years. Before that band was formed, Columbia Records, my management, and Aware Records were all trying to put together the right writers to see what would come out of that and maybe form some kind of a supergroup - I thought of it as an OK group, but it was pretty good. A lot of people like that record. When it finally came out, I think it sold 250,000 copies, which was a real failure in the early 2000s.

But, getting back to that song, Glen Phillips from Toad the Wet Sprocket was one of the original writer guys in that group, so we were experimenting with writing songs together. We wrote "No Blue Sky," which is another one I recorded that was also on the Thorns record. A song called "Blue As You" came out of that same writing session.

But Glen had a friend that was in a mental hospital from what I recall, and wrote that first verse. We all got together and he brought that first verse in, and when we tackled the first chorus it wasn't the same chorus as what you know now as "Beautiful Wreck," it was another chorus that none of us liked. So we threw that song out and continued to work on other stuff, and years later, I think it was 2005, I found that lyric in a big box where I keep notebooks of lyrical ideas. I noticed it wasn't my handwriting and I remembered that it was Glen's. I read it, and that first verse hit me. I thought, "Wow, we should have really pursued that idea of that second line, 'You make such a beautiful wreck.' That could have referred to a chorus and it could've been about something else altogether."

So I called Glen and asked if he would mind if I tried it again, on my own, and that's how that happened. I rented a cabin in north Georgia and tackled a lot of that 9th Ward Pickin Parlour record in a couple of weeks. I wrote the chorus of "Beautiful Wreck" and made it about something else, which is all the bars and clubs I play in. There's usually more than one, but there's always that lonely woman at the dark side of the bar, and then this is someone who knows her well.

Stephen King likes that song a lot. In Newsweek years ago he actually talked about that song, and he had a take on it that I hadn't really thought of. He said it's about a hopeless alcoholic that this person loves dearly and can't change, and I thought that was cool. But it's something that started as one thing and got finished as another.

Songfacts: Is the Milky Way a real place?

Mullins: I just made it up. I thought it was a cool name for a bar.

Songfacts: That is incredibly cool that Stephen King not only knows about your song but even mentioned it in a magazine.

Mullins: He knows who I am, which is really cool. It was in his Top 10 Desert Island Songs.

Mullins is on the writer credits for "Toes," a 2008 song by Zac Brown Band that sounds like a cold beer on a hot day. In the song, a guy from Georgia goes on a tropical getaway and lives it up with his "toes in the water, ass in the sand." It was one of the first hits for the band, going to #1 on the Country chart and selling 3 million digital downloads (Remember paying 99 cents a song?). As Shawn explains, it's a rare case of a royalty dispute where a contributor is trying to decline the credit.
Songfacts: What was your contribution to the Zac Brown Band song "Toes"?

Mullins: That's a funny story. When they were making their first record, it was going to be out on their own label, Southern Ground Records. Zac had a little plot of land near Lake Oconee, Georgia, and he had a little bar and restaurant with his dad. He didn't have much going yet, but he had a bunch of songs. When he and those guys wrote and recorded "Toes" and "Chicken Fried" and a few other tunes, he asked me to come by to have a listen. I'd known him since he was 14 and we're somewhat from the same area of Georgia. I drove over to the studio and was listening. I thought it all sounded great. The recordings were really good, and not using Nashville players - I thought that was cool. He was using his own guys from Georgia and it just gave it a different sound, kind of like Charlie Daniels' band would have done years ago - West Texas guys have this other flavor that wasn't so manufactured sounding.

So I loved the recordings but I remember when I heard "Toes," there was something about the lyric near the end that I gave him some advice on, and that's really all I had meant to do. I told him when you've run out of money in the song, you follow it with your standard chorus:

"I've got my toes in the water and my ass in the sand."

I said, "But you wouldn't have your ass in the sand anymore because you're back in Georgia, and you're down by the lake, and we have red clay here." All our lakes are kind of muddy. I said, "You ought to say something like, 'Put my ass in a lawn chair and my toes in the clay, not a worry in the world and PBR on the way.'" So you're drinking redneck beer instead of those fancy drinks on the islands: "Life is good today, life is good today."

He was like, "Oh man, that's great! I love it." I said, "Yeah, consider something like that."

I didn't plan on being a co-writer - it was a freebie as far as I am concerned. Those people I can't stand, the ones who come in and then take part of the song. But it was probably a couple of months later, maybe even a little bit longer, he called me and said he had gotten a record deal and a publishing deal and they were trying to figure out publishing loyalties between the people that had helped to write it, and he wouldn't feel right about not giving me a piece of that because they had been performing that song and they recorded it the exact way that I threw it out there. We argued about it for half an hour, and I was like, "Zac, I wouldn't feel right about that." And he was like, "Come on man, it's the payoff verse at the end. You've got to." He kept trying to give me an even split and I didn't want it, and we ended up settling on something less than an even split that he was OK with and I guess I was OK with, and it did actually help me out quite a bit over the next few years.

Songfacts: Wow, that story fits right in with the theme of the song where the idea is that you can be drinking a PBR on a lake in Georgia and having just as much fun as you would if you were drinking tequila on a resort in Mexico.

Mullins: Yeah, and that's Zac for you too in a nutshell. He is so full of positive energy. I just saw him these last couple of weeks. We were hanging out in California and he's doing so well. He's gone through some hard times, but he's come out the other side. He's got this wine company now that's putting out like 20,000 cases a month, and all these different businesses other than the music thing - he's just kicking ass. He's not only an entrepreneur but he lives to the fullest and has always been like that.

A perk to interviewing songwriters is being able to ask them what they're really singing when we can't discern a lyric. In Shawn's song "And On A Rainy Night," from his 1998 album, Soul's Core (the one with "Lullaby"), we've never been able to fill in this blank:

So he fills all the holes
With good wine from Muscle Shoals
And the _____
These streets were bound to cross
Songfacts: You were talking about Steinbeck earlier, and one of your songs that's Steinbeck inspired is "And On A Rainy Night." There's a lyric in there I could never understand. It sounds like "sense of million."

Mullins: No, it's sinsemilla, it's marijuana.

I used to be a big pothead. And that's part of my issue too: Being sober I wonder if that's why I'm not writing. I used to write my ass off, but I'm getting older and I can't do that anymore.

I think of how much I wrote, but that was 22 or 23 years ago when I wrote all that stuff from Soul's Core. But there were a lot of other issues like more of a sense of desperation and hunger and living out of your van and staying with friends or at campgrounds and meeting up with homeless folks and making friends with hobos. It was a different deal and I still am attracted to that stuff, but my back hurts too much to pull it off.

Songfacts: Yeah, that happens to everybody though, Shawn. In our 20s we're out there coming up with these ideas and hanging out with hobos, then later on you just can't do it.

Another one of your geographic songs is "California." Can you talk about that one and if there was any particular inspiration for it?

Mullins: I wrote that with Chuck Cannon, and whenever we write together, there's typically some starting place that doesn't have anything to do with where we end up. Chuck, some of what he wrote might turn you off, like he wrote some Toby Keith hits. He didn't write the "boot up you ass" one, but he wrote "American Soldier" and some others that are quite good.

But he's a wonderful, wonderful songwriter and when we get together it's pretty special. We'll stay up all night and tackle something and then we'll keep working on it and keep working on it. This one started when we were talking about the Prince song "Little Red Corvette," and how he's saying her body is basically the red corvette. I just started strumming that pattern and singing the melody, and Chuck just came right out with it. He mentions a town in "northern Mississippi" and I thought it was great because if you're a southerner, the only reference to northern Mississippi would be the North Mississippi All-Stars. Mississippi is so south, you don't even think of the word north in it, but there is northern Mississippi.

And I came back with, "She was raised on the Puget Sound, a third generation hippie," and then we just took off from there - we usually answer each other's lines. Sometimes Chuck will give you a whole stanza though. It's crazy how good he is. He'll think for a little bit and then the next thing you know, you've got a brand-new stanza that's pretty much there.

Yeah, that story was not really about anyone in particular. We just know there are a lot of broken dreams out there. I never lived there but I spent enough time in Hollywood back in the day to get a feel for it. I played the Viper Room a bunch of times and spent plenty of time walking up and down the Boulevard and got to see the underbelly of it all. Then I also got to see the richer Hollywood Hills end of it all. Where we shot the video for "Lullaby" was in this really cool house up in the hills, and Dominique Swain starred in that video. I got to know her just a tiny bit - she had a pet ferret on the set with her, which was pretty weird. But I had enough experience in that area and Chuck had enough imagination, so between the two of us we wrote that fairly quickly.

On the bridge, we wrote:

You can see them down on the Sunset Strip
Trying so hard to be so hip


No matter the age we're in or the decade, that's always the case. I was thinking of '80s rock or that glam-metal theme - the stuff a lot of people were listening to when I was in high school. I'm a huge Van Halen fan, but a lot of the other stuff I didn't think was that great.

But we finished it up and I remember the ending of that bridge that leads into the last chorus, it kept going - we had like four more lines, and it just seemed too much. It talked about the glitterati and all this stuff, which was cool, but we decided to cut it off so it's a listenable song, so that someone can take it in in under four minutes.

Mullins' follow-up to Soul's Core was the album Beneath The Velvet Sun, released in 2000. Shawn Colvin and Shelby Lynne each sang on a track, but the first single was the radio-friendly "Everywhere I Go."
Songfacts: The "Lullaby" video, you're in it but you're not really the star, Dominique Swain is the star. But then when you get to your next album, the first single "Everywhere I Go," the video is all you. But I notice you never play that song. Why is that?

Mullins: Columbia, they were great to me, a great company, but I was feeling pretty pressured to have a pop hit. And the reason I don't play that song is because I was sued over it by one of the writers, and I tend to just have a bad taste in my mouth and don't feel like it's as much me. It's not one of the best things I've done.

I like the video quite a bit though. I think it's beautiful, and not because I'm in it, but because Dave Hogan1 is just a master of videos and film and direction, so he was great to work with. We got to travel all over for several days shooting that.

But I was definitely getting pressured. The label had advanced me a ton of money and they needed to get that money back, and publishing too. I won't say that I felt threatened, but it was damn near it. It was these guys in expensive suits up at 550 Madison Avenue in New York, and they're like, "Don't fuck this up."

I had delivered a whole other record without that song on it, and they heard nothing that I could go to the radio with.2 Their words were, "We need something we can knock down the doors at radio with." That's their job, that's the business they're in, and I'm not putting them down for it. They were good to me in a lot of ways so I wanted to do a good job. So I went ahead and co-wrote two songs with a couple of guys, one who is a dear friend of mine, but another guy who is really more of a session player in Nashville, and he didn't write anything. He came up with chord structure, but he didn't write any words or a melody. So when it came time to deal with publishing splits, I was advised to talk to him about taking less than a third because he really didn't write a third, and that caused serious problems. We ended up in court and I lost because the law says however many people are in the room, if there is any discrepancy about who wrote what or how much, it is automatically split. That was still not well known in the rock-pop world. It was very well known in Nashville, which this guy knew, and I've never been a Nashville guy necessarily.

So that's why I don't play it, and it cost me a good bit of money just to pay that guy off. It sucks because he was one of the greatest keyboard guys around and a really quirky guy and different. I liked him very much, but I was advised poorly and I took that advice, and it made him very mad.

Songfacts: Well the song itself is a delightful little pop nugget, and the lyrical content is something we can relate to - you want that person that is grounding you everywhere you go. Was there anything that was going on in your life that led to that?

Mullins: Probably. I was traveling without my wife a lot, which was always the case. That's why I've asked my wives since then to travel with me. I've always had the dream of it being like Willie Nelson's band where you've got the whole family with you and they're on the bus just rolling down the highway. But most people can't pull that off.

You know, Willie Nelson is on his fourth marriage. I remember him in a Katie Couric interview, she said, "So you've been married four times, it must take a really strong woman to be married to Willie Nelson," and he said, "Yeah, I've had four strong women." So I can relate even though it's not quite the same.

But it's difficult. The wife has to deal with songs that were written about former wives - it's not easy to hear that every night. And they've got to put up with it all being about you.

Since the Columbia Records days when I was wined and dined a lot - on my bill really - it's somewhere in between where I started and where the height of it was. It's not camping anymore, but we're at the Holiday Inn Express or whatever and that's fine. You go for a nice clean motel room that is safe and you're renting a van to do a region at a time. You fly into the region and rent a van or SUV and then do eight or 10 dates and then get back on a plane and head back home. It's not easy, but it's what I do and it's not always easy on me either, but I'm used to it to some degree. There's a part of me that comes alive out there.

Part of it is the audience, of course. I'm getting to connect with an audience every night that has come to see me, so I feed off of that a lot. The rest of it kind of sucks. I'm going to try on this road trip to have more fun. If we have two hours to spare, let's go to a state park and take a little hike. Those are the kinds of things I didn't do for a long time because I was just in a manic state of let's go, let's go, let's go.

Songfacts: Which do you prefer, performing to 5,000 people as an opening act in an arena3 or playing to 300 as a headliner in a smaller venue.

Mullins: The headliner thing in the small venue. When I was a little kid I was a Kiss fan and I saw Queen live at a 15,000 seater. That was unbelievable, and maybe I dreamed of playing bigger places, but once I started playing coffeehouses and then moved up to clubs and small theaters, that's a comfortable place for me.

I never know how Springsteen does what he does, how he can put out that much but also bring everybody in. I did a short run with Tedeschi Trucks a few years back, which was really fun. They were probably 2000-seat theaters, and I did it by myself - I was solo on stage and then they'd follow me with a 17-piece band. But their crowd was so cool and so nice to me.

When I'm opening for Indigo Girls, which I still do occasionally, the same kind of thing, it'll be a bigger crowd. I enjoy that but when it's your folks and they've come just to see you, even if it's 100 people or 50 people, which sometimes it is if it's a tiny little place, I really enjoy that. They know the songs and they'll sing along with you. It feels good, and I feel like I'm doing some good.

Songfacts: Did you open for Destiny's Child at one point?

Mullins: We were on series of radio shows back in '98, '99. It was not only them, it was Backstreet Boys and 'N Sync.

Songfacts: One of those radio packages.

Mullins: Yeah, I was part of a few of those, maybe more than a few. I remember the one at Madison Square Garden [The Z100 Jingle Ball, 1998] the most because I had left my wallet at the hotel and I couldn't get into the place. The guy wouldn't let me in. He didn't believe I was who I was, which was really funny because I had like the #5 song in the world at the time and the security guy was like, "Sorry, I need your ID."4

But there were a bunch of great groups, and I got to know Justin Timberlake a little bit because we did a few things together. He was an amazing presence even then. I was going to be very surprised if things didn't continue in some way for him specifically. I thought the other guys were great too, but he was a great conversationalist and just had a great presence about him.

Songfacts: What song by another artist had the biggest influence on you as a songwriter?

Mullins: A song called "To Beat The Devil" by Kris Kristofferson.

Songfacts: Oh wow, great song.

Mullins: Yeah, I had been hearing it my whole life so it was almost like the song was written for me and my journey. I've had a lot of downs and ups, and I feel fortunate and lucky to have had that happen in the late '90s because I'm not qualified to do much else and that helped a lot.

But it's the whole idea of beating that internal devil and coming out the other side a better man, and knowing that a lot of people are not going to get what you do and that needs to be OK. There's something in the chorus about that:

If you waste your time talking
To the people who don't listen


So I've always made it a point to play to people who are listening. But yes, that song I've known since I was a baby. I was born in '68, I think that record came out in '71 or '725 and I always would play that on my dad's record player. That particular song spoke to me and it influenced my sense of spoken word mixed with a melody and a chorus. There are other artists that did that a lot too, but Kris did that on some of his early records quite a bit.

August 25, 2021

Get tour dates at shawnmullins.com

More interviews:
Amy Ray of Indigo Girls
Paula Cole
David Gray

Photos of Mullins by David McClister; Chilkoot Charlie's photo provided by the venue

Footnotes:

  • 1] Dave Hogan has directed videos for Dave Matthews Band, Sheryl Crow, Big & Rich and many other big names. His most famous video is "U Got the Look" for Prince. Check out our interview with Hogan to get the full story. (back)
  • 2] When he recorded Beneath The Velvet Sun at Crossover Studios in Atlanta, Mullins had the hutzpah to ask Elton John, who was also recording there, to duet with him on Elton's "Border Song." Surprisingly, Elton was up for it and they recorded the song, which was slated for release on the album but didn't appear until 2003, when it showed up on the compilation The Essential Shawn Mullins. (back)
  • 3] In 1998, Mullins was an opening act on tour for Chris Isaak and, in 1999, for Hootie and the Blowfish. (back)
  • 4] Other artists denied entry into their own concerts include Bob Dylan and Paul Simon, who wrote a song about it. (back)
  • 5] "To Beat The Devil" was released on Kris Kristofferson's debut album in 1970. (back)

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