I’ve always felt that Shawn Mullins never rightly received the due he deserved. His most well-known hit, “Lullaby,” was an international success in 1998…but it wasn’t to last. The oversaturation of the song quickly regulated Mullins to “one hit wonder” status. Making this even more unfortunate and unfair is that “Lullaby” was easily the weakest song on his major label debut, Soul’s Core, an album filled with wistful and well-told stories written by a young man of great promise. To celebrate the album’s twentieth anniversary, Mullins re-recorded it in its entirety with both a full band and as a solo acoustic record, removing the glossy major-label sheen and presenting the songs In a more appropriate setting. At the time, I felt that the song ”Shimmer” was a much better number and would’ve been a better hit than “Lullaby”—it was indeed released a single and was modestly successful, even though it quickly paled in the shadow of the hit––so it’s no surprise that the full band rerecording of this number is still the album’s strongest. Here, the song sounds positively warm and inviting, the result of having been performed hundreds of times ––if not thousands––over the past two decades.
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