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The first time I heard Shawn Mullins (Soul’s Core) his music hit home the way only a local songwriter from your part of the world can do. The language was familiar, the stories were the kind of stories I’d grown up hearing, and still seem uniquely North-east Georgia.

Fast forward to 2008, and Mullins newest offering, Honey Dew. You’d expect Shawn Mullins music and song-writing to have matured over the years, and that it has. But there’s still that sense of reality that’s missing in many mainstream artists’ albums these days.

“All In My Head” starts Honey Dew Off with a bang. This is a radio-friendly introspective song is a great way to start out the Atlanta Georgia (originally from Dawsonville) artists newest album.

“The Ballad of Kathryn Johnston” tells the story of inner-city troubles and a police shoot-out with the elderly Johnston, which left Johnston dead and the police to answer many questions.

“Homeless Joe” is a mix of Skynyrd’s “Curtis Low” and Arrested Devlopment’s “Mr. Wendell” and blends blues, folk, and rock into a unique mixture of Americana

“Cabbagetown” is perhaps the best song on Honey Dew, and represents the best of the “Old” Shawn Mullins and the best of what’s yet to come from this proud Georgia artist.

Its obvious that Shawn Mullins move to Atlanta has affected him as an artist in many ways. I’d dare to say Honey Dew could be an unofficial soundtrack to Atlanta that keeps you coming back to discover new parts of the music, like I discover new parts of Atlanta each time I bring myself to drive inside I-285. He tells his stories with the compassion you expect from someone living in rural America. One listen to Hone Dew will showMullins has not lost his soul.

You can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy.

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Shawn Mullins On Honeydew

SHAWN MULLINS ON THE SONGS OF HONEYDEW:

“All in My Head”: The song’s theme of self-examination belies the fact that it was written by Mullins and Hansen as a prospective theme song for the sitcom Scrubs. The original 2002 recording was lighter and more uptempo than this powerful new version, in which Mullins delivers an arching falsetto vocal in the chorus. “When we FIRST started the recording, I was having a block, and Gerry said, ‘Shawn, I’m tellin’ you, that shit’s all in your head, just like that song we wrote.’ And I said, ‘Man, we oughta dig that up.’ The next thing I knew, we were all sitting around working it up in a whole different groove.”

“Home”: “The first verse is about my dear friend Melissa Hadley, a musician in Athens and the funniest woman I ever knew, who died at 38 of ovarian cancer. The second verse came to me as I was looking at old pictures of Cabbagetown, a section of Atlanta that was once inhabited by Irish immigrant mill workers. In one photo, there’s a boy sitting in front of a dimestore, looking as emaciated as a POW. I got to thinkin’ that it wasn’t that long ago, right here in my hometown.”

“The Ballad of Kathryn Johnston”: Literally ripped from the headlines, the song is about an aged woman living in a crime-infested Atlanta neighborhood who got a gun to protect herself. When intruders broke down her door one night, the woman started firing, not realizing her assailants were police officers, who, it turned out, had targeted the wrong house in search of drug dealers. “Reading Dylan’s Chronicles inspired me to look for news stories, and this one really grabbed me. So little was said about it because that’s how things are in rough neighborhoods, which is what I meant by the line, ‘everything stays the same.’ But it all changed for me, because I connected with her. Sometimes I don’t feel safe, especially after we got cleaned out last year. But we don’t have a gun in the house. Even though I’ve got a little army in me [after college, Mullins was commissioned in the U.S. Army Reserve], I don’t wanna live that way.”

“Homeless Joe”: “There really is a Homeless Joe here in Atlanta, along with Shorty, Blind Bob, Wolf and other strumming, homeless troubadours. They’re living through their art, even though their lives are tough, without enough to eat or a place to sleep, and they’re viewed as winos on the street. The song is a celebration of those people who are following their bliss, even in the most difficult of circumstances. I’ve always connected with them; I see them as modern-day examples of the wanderer.”

“Leaving All Your Troubles Behind”: “This is the story of a girl who lives in a town in the North Georgia Mountains where there were once textile mills, but now the biggest industry is trailer meth, cooked up by the grandkids of moonshiners. There are a lot of people in small towns in the South that try to escape, and most of them wind up coming back. But not this girl; she’s seen enough to know that’s not where she belongs.”

“Fraction of a Man”: “A modern-day traveling salesman finds himself in Biloxi, and suddenly it hits him — ‘What am I doing with my life?’ That’s a really common thing for a lot of middle-aged American men, who want to follow their bliss and really go for it, but somehow they never do. This one leaves you with a reality check, with the

alcoholism, the loneliness, and the nomadic existence. It’d make a bummer of a movie.”

“See That Train”: “I love trains. My grandfather, father and brother-in-law all worked for the railroad, and I miss all the stories I used to hear. The song is about a hobo whose girl has left him asleep under a water tower and taken the train to Birmingham. I feel so unhip, because all the stuff I’m interested in is old. But there’s something about that America of yesterday that I long for; sometimes I feel like I was born in the wrong time.”

“For America”: “I wanted to have something on the record that would express what I wanted to say not as a protest song but more like Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger or early Dylan might have written. This song talks about the modern America and that feeling of what’s going on? Where are we headed? Where are our leaders? There’s a longing in the song for something that can’t be felt anymore.”

“Cabbagetown”: “It was a tough neighborhood until the late ’90s; now it’s one of the largest complexes of loft housing anywhere, surrounded by these rows of tiny shotgun houses where the mill workers used to live — now they sell for $400 grand. But this song is set in the late ’80s, when Cabbagetown was overrun by skinheads and junkies. It’s about a guy my age who wakes up one morning, looks around and decides he’s gotta get back to the mountains, where his grandfather came from. My family was full of sharecroppers and cotton mill workers — like my grandmother, who’s 93.”

“Nameless Faces”: “That one has to do with me leaving my family when I first hit the road. I really needed to get out of this little town where my first wife and I were living and play music and be with other people who were creating. I didn’t come home for a long time, and I lost contact with everyone, so it’s about my family trying to call me home.”

“Song of the Self (Chapter 2)”: “I wrote a song called ‘Song of the Self’ in ’95, right after I started going to therapy. I had a great therapist who showed me how to move on from my childhood demons, use them to my advantage and try to forgive. I hadn’t written another song like that since then, until this one. It just came to me early on in the process of writing this record. I sang these words into that little recorder, and it was exactly what I wanted to say. I’m talking to myself, but I’m also hoping that whoever listens can get something out of it. Because with all that’s going on, I feel like a little hope is a good thing.”

“Now That You’re Gone”: “That song is somewhat coming from me talking to my mom, but it’s also about my dad, who’s just had an awful time since she died. He’s remembering those times, especially in the second verse. The first is me imagining them dating, and remembering the stories they would tell about when they were childhood sweethearts in Lakewood Heights.”