Songfacts®:

• This song tells two distinct stories wrapped up in a common theme: We're all born to shimmer.
  
  In the first verse, we meet a newborn baby, innocent, born to shine. But he is taught to hate even though he's born to love.
  
  The next verse is about a woman who radiates kindness; it's clear she's intimate with the singer:
  
  She kisses me and wraps herself around me
  She gives me love, she gives me time
  
  Shawn Mullins' first marriage ended in divorce when he spent too much time on the road and she found someone else back home. By the time was writing the Soul's Core album, that marriage was over and he was in a new relationship that was also in trouble. At the end of this song, he does some soul searching and finds that change could save him:
  
  You know I drink a whole bottle of my pride
  And I toast to change to keep these demons off my back
  
  He wants to shimmer, but he has to change if he's going to shine.
• There was a real baby that gave Mullins the impetus for this song, but it wasn't a baby he knew. He told the story on the acoustic version of the Soul's Core album, released in 2018: "I wrote it in the summer of 1995. My buddy Jeff, he and his wife owned a coffee shop in Atlanta. He had seen a lady get her purse stolen and he ran after the guy up the road but then he fell down on the sidewalk and the guy came back and shot him. He survived it but he was really messed up for a while. I went to visit him in the hospital, and that's where this song comes from. I got lost in the hospital (Grady Memorial) because I don't have any sense of direction and a building like that is a big maze. I ended up in the baby hall where you could see all the babies, and there was an older nurse, a black lady, who was holding this little newborn white baby, and I just thought it was such a beautiful picture. It made me think of how we're born with open hearts and open eyes."
  
  Mullins said that additionally, the song is about "being in a relationship that's having struggles, but you love the person and you want to work. You see the best in them, which I guess is what you want."
• "Shimmer" was the follow-up to Shawn Mullins' big hit, "Lullaby." Both songs use Mullins' distinctive vocal stylings, with half-spoken verses, spoken interludes, and full singing in the chorus. The song got some airplay but didn't crack the Hot 100 despite a push from his label, Columbia, which signed him on the strength of "Lullaby." He didn't last long on the label, which wanted him to stay the course and was disappointed when he didn't, delivering a follow-up album (Beneath The Velvet Sun) with little pop appeal. Columbia dropped him, and Mullins didn't release another album until 2006, which he put out 9th Ward Pickin Parlor on the Vanguard label.
• The music video, directed by Peter Christopherson, got some spins on VH1. It shows various characters depicted in the song, including the child who turns hateful after experiencing racism. We also see Mullins depicted as a child and eventually the two coming together as friends.
• "Shimmer" was used in the 1999 Dawson's Creek episode "A Perfect Wedding" and appears on the show's first soundtrack album, which also features "Kiss Me" from Sixpence None the Richer and "I Don't Want To Wait" by Paula Cole, the show's theme song. The soundtrack went Gold in America, selling over 500,000 albums.