It\u2019s funny what will set you off. I have a hundred good reasons to praise this album, and only one not to\u2014but I\u2019m going to rant about the latter for a bit before I get to the former.<\/p>\n
Shawn Mullins is a folk-rock troubadour of long standing, having cut his teeth on the local scene in his hometown of Atlanta, self-releasing a string of albums before signing with Columbia and abruptly hitting it big with his 1998 single \u201cLullaby.\u201d The latter song, recorded for his major-label debut Soul\u2019s Core<\/i>, grew from his experiences in Hollywood when he was still touring solo out of the back of a van. <\/p>\n
Fast-forward 12 years and five albums (the last four on more singer-songwriter-friendly indie label Vanguard). The kickoff song on 2010\u2019s Light You Up<\/i> is called \u201cCalifornia,\u201d and it\u2019s is quite \u201cLullaby\u201d-like in its spoken verses, anecdotal storytelling style, and swelling, propulsive choruses. I would like it quite a bit if not for one major flaw: the place that he describes in the song is *not* California.<\/p>\n
The place he describes in the song is Los Angeles\u2014or at least, an absurdly clich\u00e9d \u201cHotel California\u201d fantasy version of it: \u201cFate would take them to LA County \/ And get them stuck in a traffic jam\u2026 Backstage at the Hollywood Bowl \/ They got the house in Topanga Canyon \/ Partied at the Viper Room\u2026 Well you see them down on the Sunset Strip \/ Trying\u2019 so hard to be so hip \/ Manhattan Beach to Malibu \/ It\u2019s all about the ocean view\u2026\u201d And \u201cthe<\/u> 101\u201d? An LA affectation that no self-respecting Californian living north of Santa Barbara would be caught dead using? C\u2019mon, Shawn. <\/p>\n
For someone who was born in San Francisco, has spent 44 of my 49 years living in Northern and Central California, and has never lived closer than 250 miles to the greater Los Angeles megalopolis (nor wanted to), this song is like a thousand fingernails on a thousand chalkboards. The idea that Los Angeles equals California is as ridiculous and, frankly, insulting as the idea that Miami equals Florida, or Anchorage equals Alaska.\u00a0 It\u2019s lazy stereotyping of the kind that I thought a normally intelligent songwriter like Shawn Mullins would be above.<\/p>\n
Worse yet, Mullins actually writes this song twice in one album and gets it wrong both times. \u201cTinseltown\u201d feels like a gentler, mellower rewrite of \u201cCalifornia,\u201d but the chorus \u201cI don\u2019t want to go downtown tonight \/ The neon burns just a little too bright\u201d draws repeated laughs, since anyone who has spent any time at all in the area knows that downtown LA at night is a ghostly cluster of empty office buildings. There is no neon in downtown LA, and in fact no reason anyone would ever go there after dark at all. <\/p>\n
Let\u2019s face it, despite claiming \u201cI\u2019m over tinseltown,\u201d Mullins seems to have a major fixation with a fantasy version of LA that exists mostly in his head. What\u2019s that about, dude?<\/p>\n
Anyhow<\/b>\u2026 my NorCal native\u2019s visceral reaction to \u201cCalifornia\u201d should not cloud the issue for the non-NorCal listener. Light You Up<\/i> is in every other respect a fine outing from the dependably appealing Mullins, full of artful musings (\u201cMurphy\u2019s Song\u201d), sweet love songs (\u201cI Knew A Girl\u201d), and playful blues-folk (the title track). There\u2019s a comfortable, dusky intimacy to Mullins\u2019 voice that draws you in again and again, even when he\u2019s busy showing off his range on numbers like \u201cNo Blue Sky\u201d where he swerves back and forth between his earthy baritone and the soaring falsetto he often deploys to great effect.\u00a0\u00a0 <\/p>\n
The latter tune also underscores a key part of Mullins\u2019 appeal; his observational songs can be rather sharp-tongued and sardonic, and he does a convincing blues, but his outlook is fundamentally sunny. Consider the chorus to \u201cNo Blue Sky\u201d: \u201cThere\u2019s no blue sky in my town lately \/ Everybody looks at the ground \/ I been distracted and no doubt crazy \/ But the sun never looked so pretty goin\u2019 down.\u201d <\/p>\n
The other musical face of Mullins is the acoustic country-folk traditionalist, who comes to the forefront for two songs. \u201cThe Ghost Of Johnny Cash\u201d is a well-framed tribute to The Man in Black (\u201cUntil I\u2019m raisin\u2019 hell in heaven \/ With the ghost of Johnny Cash\u201d) from the pen of frequent Mullins co-writer Chuck Cannon, while \u201cCatoosa County\u201d is a Civil War historical narrative through the verses before Mullins neatly pivots the song at the chorus into an indictment of all war.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
Mullins\u2019 innate optimism dominates the last third of the album, as he seesaws from the snappy electric blues-funk of \u201cYou Make It Better\u201d (\u201cIt\u2019s all right, life is good \/ You make it better\u201d) to the acoustic economic blues of \u201cCan\u2019t Remember Summer,\u201d and back again for the closer, in which \u201cLove Will Find A Way.\u201d Indeed.<\/p>\n
In sum, for this fine if momentarily misguided effort, I am pleased to award Mr. Shawn Mullins an enthusiastic B+ and a standing offer to show him around the 97% of the state of California that appears to have escaped his attention up until now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":30856,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[6728],"rating":[5617],"class_list":["post-42533","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-shawn-mullins","rating-rating-b-plus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/42533","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42533"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/42533\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30856"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42533"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=42533"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=42533"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}