If you’ve attended any of Union’s open mic nights, there’s a chance you’ve seen Darius Mullin playing guitar or piano and singing an obscure European folk song or an old sea shanty, but there’s another side to Mullin’s already unique musical taste that many students at Union may not be aware of.
Mullin, a junior general biology major, has lived in a number of different places throughout his life, including Nashville, Houston, and most recently, Hannibal, Mo. He’s minoring in classical, medieval, and renaissance studies and works as a cave tour guide in Hannibal. This general well-roundedness finds its way into his creative endeavors as well.
Mullin listens to everything from Scott Joplin to Lecrae, and his own music is just as widely-encompassing. As mentioned before, he performs for open mic nights and plays piano for Union’s jazz band.
Coming from a musical family, it seemed natural that Mullin would develop a musical capability. Both his mother and her father are musicians.
“My grandpa is very, very musically inclined, very talented naturally,” Mullin said. “He’s never taken a lesson, but he can play anything with strings.”
One of Mullin’s earliest musical excursions was involvement with a hand-bell choir in Nashville, but his true musical ability began to show around the age of nine when he started taking piano lessons. In high school, Mullin picked up guitar and began performing when he got to Union.
Perhaps Mullin’s most interesting musical endeavor is his rapping. Since his early teens, he’s been writing and recording his own lyrics. His first experience with Christian rap came from his dad.
“I must have been, I don’t know, thirteen? No, even younger,” Mullin recounts. “My dad gave me this CD, and he had burned an album onto it called ‘Grassroots Vol. 2.’”
This first exposure to early Christian hip-hop and others like it would go on to influence Mullin’s music in a huge way. But early on, he wasn’t completely sold on it.
“I remember thinking, ‘This is really strange,’ and putting it away somewhere. I listened to it once. I didn’t like it.”
It didn’t take long, however, for Mullin to rediscover the album and fall in love with the genre. He specifically references a song called “I Am the One (If Death Could Speak)” by Shai Linne, produced by DJ Official. This kind of poetic wordplay, which Shai Linne calls lyrical theology, would heavily influence Mullin’s own lyrical style.
As time went on and Mullin started writing his own songs, he began looking for an outlet to share his music. One of his first public performances was for his youth group in Houston. After this, Mullin began to record remixes with his youth pastor.
It was this mentor who helped Mullin find the tools and equipment he would need to create his own music. He began to make and record his own beats, only occasionally working with other producers.
“It was a learning experience for me because I was doing it all myself,” Mullin said. “And as time went on, I began to realize I needed to outsource a lot of stuff, like producing and mixing and mastering and album art.”
This collaborating with other artists has opened up one of Mullin’s favorite sides of the creative process: the community aspect of the Christian hip-hop scene. He collaborated with another artist on each song from his 2017 EP, “Work In Progress.”
“One of my favorite things about hip-hop is the collabs. I love that,” said Mullin.
To hear Darius Mullin’s work and some of the collaborations he’s done with other artists, check out his music at https://open.spotify.com/artist/4qsFWi68olxczVZv6xQXQP?si=tDARnLAySEKUKg26DT0Zpw.
Photo courtesy of Neil Cole