Shawn Mullins never had any grand plan for a 20th-anniversary celebration of Soul’s Core. If anything, he had to be talked into it. “People around me were saying, ‘Hey, you need to do something—it’s been 20 years, man!’” Mullins says. “And I was like, ‘Wow, has it really?’” The problem? Sony owned the original masters, and Mullins wasn’t interested in dealing with a major label bureaucracy. The solution? Just re-record the whole thing. “We can do it the way we play it now, 20 years later,” he says. “Some of it’s stayed the same, but over the years, these songs have evolved.”
That’s how Soul’s Core Revival was born. A double-disc project—one disc full-band, one disc stripped down—revisiting every song, twisting arrangements, changing keys, and in some cases, extending the tracks into full-blown jam sessions. “Some of these songs stretch out to seven or eight minutes now,” Mullins laughs. “It’s like a jam band with really good story songs.” Which makes sense, considering members of the Allman Brothers Band, Sea Level, and Widespread Panic were involved.
Playing the same songs for 20 years doesn’t just change the arrangements—it changes their meaning. “It’s weird,” Mullins admits. “It’s like they make more sense now than they did when I wrote them. Take Shimmer—that song is about my son now. I didn’t even have a kid when I wrote it.” As for Lullaby, the song that took him from the coffeehouse circuit to major-label success, there’s no resentment there. “I never got tired of playing it,” he says. “That song brought me to the dance, and I still love singing it. It’s fun seeing people in the audience who don’t quite know who I am, but the moment we play it, they go, ‘Oh, that guy!’”
Which leads to a recent moment Mullins is still cracking up about. “The other night we were in an elevator after a show, and this band walks in. We’re all carrying guitars, so we start chatting. One of them says, ‘We’re in Dokken.’ And just as the elevator door starts closing, one of them yells, ‘Wait, what’s your band?’ I say, ‘Shawn Mullins.’ And as the doors shut, he goes, ‘The Rockabye guy!’” Mullins lets out a laugh. “So now I know Dokken knows who I am. Life’s weird.”
His life has taken some heavy turns, too. He lost his wife to suicide a year ago, a devastating experience that reshaped the way he sings. “I think I just have the blues more,” he says. “It changed how I approach my voice. I used to worry about singing things a certain way, but now, I just let it go where it wants to.” That means Soul’s Core Revival isn’t a note-for-note recreation—it’s a full-circle moment, played by someone who’s lived through everything that came after that breakout record.
Mullins has already moved past nostalgia mode and is writing new material, even working on a song for an upcoming film. “I can’t wait to write another song,” he says, before chuckling. “That’s what my friend told me ten years ago, and that’s still how I feel.”
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