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Buy Honeydew

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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.”

(more...)

By Joe Samuel Starnes

When Joe Samuel Starnes, novelist, and friend of The Georgia Jukebox offered to write a review of The Drive-By Truckers Philadelphia show for the jukebox, we were honored he'd use our website to publish thoughts on one of his (and our) favorite bands.

I grew up near Cedartown, Georgia, in a white clapboard farmhouse that had been in my mother’s family for generations, sitting on a low hill at the end of a red dirt driveway about half a mile from the paved road, not too far from the Alabama state line. We were so far out in the country that if anyone drove up our road you knew that they were: a) coming to see you; b) lost; c) hunting for somewhere out of the way to drink and smoke something illegal and/or consummate an illicit relationship that would have brought worlds of hurt down on their heads if they had taken it into their bedrooms at home.

Today I live in a Philadelphia row house where the sidewalk passes right by my living room window and in the afternoon Catholic school kids pass by cussing at each other like demented sailors and expectorating loudly in the street. Sometimes late at night from our third floor bedroom with the windows closed tight and the curtains drawn we can hear drunks caterwauling, either singing if they are happy or cursing up a hell storm if they are not. There aren’t enough letters in the alphabet to list the possible intentions of people walking past my door.

It has been a quarter of a century since I called that house out in the country home. For the past eight years I’ve been in the Northeast, but that vast space of pine trees and hardwoods and fields where in the summertime the whippoorwills and bobwhites called all night still resonates deep inside me. Cedartown was a place where I knew just about everybody and everybody knew me and my parents, and if they were old enough, they knew my mother’s parents before (often that familiarity was a good thing; other times, when people were up in your business, not so much). I think about my home there all the time, the good and the bad. And I’ve never heard a band that takes me back to that place and captures that world, the vivid stories of small town southern lives, as the Drive-By Truckers do in their songs. These two divergent worlds of mine merged happily Thursday night, March 27, when DBT played Philadelphia, packing the spacious Fillmore at the TLA (formerly the Theatre of the Living Arts) on South Street and kicking out a great show of songs both old and new.

I could write a long string of fat sentences about how damn good the band sounded, how tight the guitars, smooth the keyboards and strong the drums, as well as the juxtaposition of Patterson’s high, slightly raspy voice and Mike Cooley’s deep tone, a voice that somehow manages to mix humor, lonesomeness and a little bit of threat into one sound. Shonna Tucker’s sweet voice often comes in and rounds it all out. They are a fantastic rock band with streaks of the best elements of country music; imagine if the Rolling Stones were from North Alabama and had a touch of Johnny Cash. But instead I want to focus on the stories in the songs, the great attention to detail and rhyme that bring these stories to life as much as any poem, fiction or movie. A lot of bands write songs that have lyrics that sound pretty and paint you an image or two—a DBT song, however, takes you somewhere, and you enjoy the ride. They know how to write a line, and they know how to tell a story as well as anyone recording today.

They opened the show Thursday with “Goode’s Field Road,” Hood’s song from the near the end of their new record, “Brighter than Creation’s Dark.” It’s a relentless rhythm in the voice of a man in serious trouble about to meet his maker in a murky deal that has gone bad, or more likely he’s planning to end his life to avoid going to prison, but the listener is never told exactly “what went down on Goode’s Field Road.”

Keeping in sequence from the album, they played “A Ghost to Most,” a Cooley specialty with one of his many unforgettable lines: “But skeletons ain’t got nowhere to put their money/nobody makes britches that size/and besides you’re a ghost to most before they notice/that you ever had a hair or a hide.” Literary critics could write long articles about this one and never quite decipher the ultimate meaning, concluding, if they are honest, that it’s cryptically fascinating, not to mention a little dark but also funny as hell. According to Hood’s liner notes on their web site, he overheard a friend ask Cooley what the song meant and he replied, “It's really hard for me to find a suit that fits me right." Ultimately, asking the band what some of their songs mean is like asking Cormac McCarthy to explain what happens to The Kid at the end of “Blood Meridian.”You got to come to your own conclusion.

Patterson followed with a new song that is getting a lot of airplay in Philly on WXPN-FM, the alternative station at the University of Pennsylvania where David Dye’s show World Café is hosted. “Righteous Path” is about a family man trying to stay on the straight and narrow in spite of all the temptations life presents. It’s a grown up rock’n’roll song. During this tune, of course, was when an overly-endowed young woman riding on the shoulders of an apparently very strong man chose to pull up her shirt and reveal her abundance to the band. If they noticed her, they didn’t act like they did. And she was hard to miss, bless her heart.

The new album which they are touring in support of is the first since the departure last year of Jason Isbell, the talented young songwriter, singer and guitarist who laid claim to a number of songs, including the brilliant “Outfit” and “Never Going to Change,” one song poignant and the other downright defiant. Isbell, who recorded with the band from the albums “Decoration Day” in 2003 through “A Blessing and a Curse” in 2006, was certainly no slouch. But most bands don’t have one songwriter on par with Hood, Cooley and Isbell, and I doubt any band has room for three for the long-term. It sounds unkind to Isbell to say I didn’t miss him because I greatly admire his work, but I didn’t miss him Thursday night. Hood and Cooley who have been playing together since the eighties have more than enough material to crank out long shows like they did, digging all the way back into the albums of the late nineties, “Pizza Deliverance” and, still my personal favorite, “Gangstabilly.”

While Isbell is gone, David Barbe continues to work with DBT, producing, engineering and mixing “Brighter than Creation’s Dark,” as well as playing on a few tracks. Barbe was at one time bass player for Bob Mould’s band Sugar, but for me he will always be the front man for Mercyland, my all-time favorite Athens, Georgia group. Mercyland is easily the most underappreciated rock trio of the last century.

DBT on Thursday played a long, strong opening set of about two hours—you always get more than your money’s worth—and returned after a quick break for their encore, kicking it off with what may be my favorite song, Cooley’s “Marry Me.” This song definitely has what I think is their best opening line: “Well, my daddy didn’t pull out, but he never apologized.” I once saw Maya Angelou on TV say that George Jones’ “He Stopped Loving Her Today” has more story than most writers can get into a 300-page novel, and the same sentiment goes for many DBT songs, especially this one. “Marry Me” manages to tell one man’s entire life from conception to his own pending unplanned fatherhood and conveys his perspective on the world in only five stanzas, including this declaration on his desire to stay in his hometown: “This old town’s all right with me, there’s nowhere I’d rather be.”

The encore concluded with Hood’s contrary “Buttholeville,” a song that shows while some folks love their humble hometowns and would never leave, others are dying to get away, are flat out “tired of living in Buttholeville.” Unlike the narrator in Cooley’s “Marry Me,” the dude in this song is one day going to put the town in his rearview mirror and is “never going back to Buttholeville.”

Thursday night’s show was the first time I’ve seen The Drive-By Truckers in my four years of following the band that they didn’t finish with Jim Carroll’s dark rocker “People Who Died,” but instead ended with a medley that wove a souped-up version of Bruce Springsteen’s haunting “State Trooper” embedded in the middle of “Buttholeville.” I thought DBT’s ending each show with Carroll’s song might be a tradition that would last like Willie Nelson’s thirty-year run of starting every concert with “Whiskey River,” but I guess not. It doesn’t matter. Like Springsteen whose repertoire is so intertwined with his home turf in New Jersey that for some it defines the state, DBT has carved out a marvelous body of work over the past ten years that paints a vast canvas of the hardships and joys of life in the modern, rural South. Covering Springsteen, who in my mind Hood and Cooley are up on par with at the highest level of songwriting, seems just right by me.

Buy Sam's 1st Novel "Calling" on Amazon, visit his website, and continue to support those who make Southern culture the envy of the rest of the world.

Buy Black Crowes' War Paint
Buy it On Amazon | or download it on

"Goodbye Daughters Of The Revolution" - From War Paint

War Paint, The Black Crowes first studio album in 7 years is now available on CD via Amazon, and download via iTunes. This Georgia band has been rocking the world for almost 20 years. Well the reviews are out on the latest effort, and it looks like The Black Crows will continue to rock us for some time

Rolling Stone -

"The Black Crowes have fallen out, broken up and been written off as washed-up. Hell, these guys did their Behind the Music almost ten years ago, and Rich Robinson isn't even forty yet. They've now been around as long as some of their own idols were when the Robinsons first started. But with Warpaint, for the first time in a long time, the Black Crowes seem like a band with a future. "

All Music guide -

"They're old-fashioned, but in the best sense: they're in it for the long haul, which the superb Warpaint proves beyond a shadow of a doubt. "

Billboard -

"Warpaint mines the same Allmans-to-Zappa synthesis of influences that's been the Crowes' stock in trade but finds the group fortified by sharp songwriting and lace-tight, live-sounding performances. "

Black Crows War Paint: New Album, Same Sound

Pop music has changed in the last 18 years, but the Black Crows continue to make the kind of music that endears fans, and keeps them coming back album after album, and show after show.

According to Chris, Warpaint is the complete package of the Georgia-born Crowes’ passions and influences. “It’s got all the roots,” But it’s also got a psychedelic feel." “Oh Josephine” is, Chris says, “one of the best things Rich and I have ever written.”