For Shawn Mullins, 1998 began like any other year: He recorded a new album in February (Soul's Core), released it on his own label (SMG Records) in April, and hit the road to support it in May. Together with his dog Roadie, he traveled from gig to gig in a beat-up old van, often spending five to ten hours behind the wheel each day, despite the fact that he abhors driving. After each show, most of which took place at some hole-in-the-wall where he'd play just for tips, Mullins would spend the night in a cheap motel by the side of a highway. When he couldn't afford a room, he'd pitch a tent and set up a campsite. And so it went, every day another town and the same exhausting routine.

By December, however, things had taken a decidedly fortuitous turn: Mullins had a major label deal (with Columbia Records), a hit single ("Lullaby"), a gold album (which he gave to his mother for Christmas) and, most important of all, he got someone else to drive the van.

His shift in good fortune began last June, mostly thanks to the support of 99X, an alternative rock station in Atlanta. When the station's program director, Leslie Fram, heard the song "Lullaby" she phoned Mullins and said, "I think this song is a smash hit and people need to hear it."

"She told me she was going to 'champion my cause,'" laughs Mullins. "I asked what I could do to help, and she told me to go out and get a longer cassette for my answering machine because major labels would soon be calling." Sure enough, a few days after "Lullaby" was added to 99X's rotation, Mullins received calls from more than twenty-six different record companies.

In a music world dominated by backstreet boys and spice girls, Shawn Mullins stands out because he's neither. His collection of soulfully folky, working-class narratives connect simply because he sings them with honesty. Over the course of the past ten years, he's recorded, self-released and self-promoted eight albums, each one selling an average of five-thousand copies per year. By comparison, he recently sold forty-six thousand copies of Soul's Core in one week alone. ("I can't even begin to comprehend that," he says.)

Mullins says he fell in love with the promise of super-stardom at an early age, but quickly learned not to believe the hype. "I dreamt of all this when I was a kid," says the mild-mannered Georgia native. "But once I started making records on my own, the reality of the music business sank in pretty fast. There's a huge difference between making music and having a hit record. After doing this for so many years on my own I never expected anything like this to happen. Now I've got money, I'm signing autographs and every day people are telling me how much my music moves them. Don't get me wrong, I'm incredibly thankful for all of this, and I'm really enjoying it, but you can totally go off the deep end if you start buying into all this. I have to keep telling myself that none of this is real. It's all fantasy."

Maybe Shawn can take a lesson in celebrity etiquette from his mother. Back in her little country town in North Georgia, Mrs. Mullins has become something of a celebrity in her own right. "The other day she went to the post office and the folks there asked for her autograph," her son says with a laugh. "She's having a ball with all of this, and that just makes it all the more special."

MICHAEL MOSES
(Jan. 5, 1999)