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Singer-songwriter
2005 Grammy nominee for Best Pop Contemporary Gospel
Album; Her song "Redeemer" was Contemporary
Christian Music's No. 1 Adult Contemporary Song of
the Year in 2000; 2001 Dove Awards for the Song of
the Year,
Female Vocalist of the Year, Artist in Pop/Contemporary
Recorded Song and Songwriter of
Pop/Contemporary Recorded Song; 1998 Dove Award for
writing Song of the Year, "On My Knees,"
recorded by Jaci Velasquez
CBN.com – AN EVERYDAY PERSON
By placing athletes, movie stars, and singers on a pedestal, American culture has established a misguided belief that those who do their work on public stages have somehow achieved a stature higher than the rest of the population. Nicole C. Mullen has played in Carnegie Hall and the Royal Albert Hall and has 20 Grammy and Dove Award nominations to her credit. However, she firmly believes that the people who occupy the seats in the audience have just as much reason to be proud of their accomplishments as she is of her own.
Nicole says, "I am everyday people when it comes down to it. We all get to do different things, but when we take everything else off -- we take the titles off, we take the job descriptions off, we take the salaries away -- we're all everyday people that hurt, that bleed, that cry, regardless of the skin color, regardless of the title of our job."
"Sometimes we think we are what we do," she explains. "We are not. I am not a singer. I sing; that is what I do. But I am Nicole the mother, the wife, the friend, the daughter, the mentor, the mentee. That's who I am."
Nicole makes a point of prioritizing her family and her home life over her career, as glamorous as it may appear from the outside. She routinely tours only Thursday through Saturday to maximize her time at home with her three children during the school week.. Her family often hits the road with her, and at times, the children have been known to join her on stage mid-concert. Her husband, fellow singer David Mullen, is a co-producer of her albums, and she adds her vocal tracks at a home studio in the coziest of circumstances. Nicole says, "When I'm doing a scratch vocal, sometimes my 1-year-old son is sitting right on my lap," she says. "It's real. It's like, 'This is my life. This is everyday living.' "
Nicole's passion for reaching out guides her work and her life. Whether she's tending to her own children, providing support to other kids in need of a parent figure, empathizing with a friend in emotional upheaval, or working on behalf of the afflicted on the other side of the world, her stage is never a pedestal, only a platform to communicate her relentless message of hope.
"My life is probably a lot more like yours than you think," she suggests. "The same struggles that you may have I have sometimes, and the same joys that you experience, I can experience them, too. At the same time, I am allowed to do extraordinary things in my career. But that's what I do, not who I am. I am everyday people."
Nicole takes none of her good fortune in her recording career for granted. She views it not as a vehicle for self-glorification but as a chance to connect with regular people from other walks of life. Her new album, Everyday People, tries to do just that. The song "I Am" talks about the attributes of God. Nicole explains, "Whatever it is that you need, if it's comfort, if it's security, if it's healing for a broken heart, if it's someone to hold you through the hard times to wash away those nightmares from the heart, then God's saying 'I am. I am that I am that I am.' '' Nicole remembers when she first read that statement. It hit her in the heart. He is ever present. He was there during the making of her worst nightmare, He was there when her heart was first broken, and He's going to be there when her heart is being healed. He's going to be there when she acknowledges Him. He is the present I am. The songs on Everyday People are eclectic in style, just like everyday people.
MUSICIAN IN THE MAKING
In many ways, music has been a passion for Nicole since the very beginning. From the age of 2, Nicole had a microphone in her hand, singing with several different family groups in the Cincinnati area. She began writing songs at age 12, partially as a means of working out some of her own very typical feelings of inadequacy as a teenager.
A high school guidance counselor, however, told her authoritatively that singers don't usually make enough to earn a living, that Nicole needed to find another line of work as an adult. "OK," she responded, "I guess I want to be a lawyer." The counselor helped her shadow an attorney for a week. It was an important step in establishing Nicole's vocational steps, though not in the manner that her advisor had planned. "At the end of the week," Nicole remembers, "the attorney said, 'So, kid, what do you really want to be?' I guess he figured I wouldn't be any good as a lawyer. I said I wanted to sing and he knew I was really passionate about it, so he said, 'This is not the life that you really want. Go home and sing.' "
She's been doing that ever since. A man at her church gave her work as a $6-an-hour background singer at his recording studio and helped her land her first recording contract with a now-defunct independent label. During her tenure with the label, she was recommended to work with David Mullen on a recording project. Their talents blended well, although their musical convictions clashed immediately. "We fought that very first week because he didn't want to listen to me tell him what to do," she laughs. But he was impressed by her abilities, enough so that he helped her secure a job as a background singer for Amy Grant during the 1991 Baby, Baby Tour. Even when her label went under, Nicole was still able to work touring as a supporting musician for such acts as Michael W. Smith and The Newsboys.
Her songwriting helped Nicole re-build her recording career. Jaci Velasquez, in particular, brought Nicole her first Dove Award as the songwriter of "On My Knees," and that helped rekindle interest in Nicole as a recording artist. She signed with Warner Brothers/Curb/Word Records, becoming a perennial awards nominee and an advocate for numerous causes.
WHERE HER HEART IS
"I sing to a hurting audience," Mullen suggests, "because I live in a hurting world so I feel like it's part of my job to present hope.
"My goal in life is to encourage those that are out there listening. How can I make the next four minutes of this song worth more than just four minutes? How can I leave somebody with hope? That's my goal, and if I accomplish that, then it's worth more than a Grammy, worth more than a Dove, worth more than any of them," she says.
Nicole has put her words into action. She established an informal group called the Baby Girls Club, in which she mentors a group of girls in her area, opening up her home-and sometimes her closets to provide them clothes, honest counsel, or simple friendship.
"When I was younger," she says, "somebody from my church that I really respected, that I thought was gorgeous and very talented, spoke into my life. She would take me to her house at times and she would comb my hair or encourage me in my singing. In her belief in me, she gave me belief in myself, so I love doing that with other young girls."
She's also become active with International Needs Network Ghana to work at freeing Trokosi slaves. Priests in Ghana have convinced some of the nation's people that their families are cursed by a sinful past and that the only way to atone for the crime is to give away their virgin daughters -- sometimes at just 5-7 years of age -- to the priests. The families continue to pay the daily living costs for the child, while the priests put them to work as slaves, often forcing them into subservient sex. Any children the slaves produce are automatically classified as the priests' property, and the Trokosis are forced to wear humiliating braids around their necks, marking them slaves to anyone who comes in contact with them.
"We in America are outraged at the thought of slavery in our country, how it existed back in the day, but now in our generation we have a chance to free other slaves," Nicole says. "International Needs Network Ghana is giving these slaves freedom. They're teaching them new trades. They're teaching them how to sew, how to do their hair, how to economically provide for themselves and their families. They're putting them through school, working them back into society. Some of these women are in their 50s and they've not known anything but slavery for all their lives."
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