Dan + Shay made peace with time

With a couple of days off in between shows, Shay and band mate Dan Smyers have jumped on the phone to chat through the near fifteen-year career that has led them to new album Young, an intimate and reflective record born out of the toughest period in their professional lives. 

Since releasing their debut album Where It All Began in 2014, the duo have been on a continuous, gradual ascent, clocking in milestones with gold and platinum records, eight American Music Awards and three consecutive wins at the Grammys for Best Country Duo/Group Performance. “In the world that we live in today a lot of times you have to have this big viral moment to get started and for us, we tried to have a steady climb,” says Shay. “We never had this just massive moment. We were out there, opening up shows for anybody who would let us come out and we were trying to write the best songs we could. We started to stack up some number ones on country radio and we were just out, grinding in these clubs and bars.”

When Dan and Shay met, both had relocated to Nashville off the back of previous projects. Neither were looking to start something new. “I had all but given up on being an artist,” says Dan, who had previously played in rock and emo bands. “I had done bands and I was an artist for a long time, just traveling around in the Northeast. I kind of exhausted that part of my life. I had committed to being a songwriter or a producer. I was learning my way around Logic and ProTools at the time.”

Shay had previously been signed to T Pain’s Nappy Boy Entertainment. “It's been a crazy, crazy journey,” he laughs. “We met on December 7th, 2012, and that night is forever burned into my memory because it's kind of the night that changed everything for both of us, not just for our careers, but it was a definite turning point for our lives and what was going to happen after that.”

Dan was throwing a house party with a keg, which Shay had found out about through friends. “We were all very broke at the time and any chance you get that you hear that there's free beer somewhere, you jump at the chance,” he laughs. “Dan and his buddies that he was living with at the time had fashioned a tent in the living room out of bed sheets that they got from a local thrift store to keep the heat in the living room. So I was walking into what looked like Narnia, and it was a pretty awesome setup they had there.” 

As the night became morning and things quieted down, a guitar was passed around. What happened next sounds like a storyline straight out of Nashville. Shay picked up the guitar and started singing, Dan recording the performance on his phone. “He was quiet all night, wasn't saying a whole lot, but he started singing and I did a voice memo called ‘best singer I've ever heard’ or something like that. Literally we were all blown away,” says Dan. “It definitely feels like a movie and I think people didn't believe us at first. Before the term ‘industry plant’ was a real buzzword in our business, people were saying, ‘This is too good to be true.’ But it really happened like that.”

They began writing together the very next day, taking their songs to meetings around Nashville in the hope that one would get picked up. “When we got things rolling and got some attention and created some buzz in Nashville, we didn't really have any intention to be in a band. We were just two songwriters who were trying to get a cut on an artist and be able to afford lunch,” says Dan. "As we were going around meeting people in town on Music Row, we would go sing these songs because half of them were so new we wrote them that morning. We'd take a publishing meeting to get somebody to buy dinner that night. We would be singing these songs in their office with no demo. We’d just sit down with an acoustic guitar and harmonize our way through them.”

After months of taking meetings a theme began to occur. “People started saying, ‘These are good songs. Why are you pitching them? You guys should just put these out. You guys are a band.’ And we kind of looked at each other like, are we a band? laughs Dan. “It just happened organically. I think that's the best way for a band to start, to be honest. We wrote a-hundred-something songs that first year and all those demos, just as songwriters without the intention of putting out an album, became our first album. Our friend Ben Vaughn, who we lost tragically a little over a year ago, was one of the first ones to believe in us. He was running Warner/Chappell at the time, which we're still signed to this day, and they believed in our songs.” 

Vaughn’s passing became the inspiration behind new lead single “Say So”, a subtle hit of euphorically hopeful chorus with sharp hooks that take cues from Dan’s pop-rock past. It also set the tone for Young, a record that pushed the duo to rediscover not only their creative connection, but the motivation behind their making music. “It can help someone going through a breakup or it can help someone say I love you to the person that they love or it can help you get through a really tough time. I just think that's an amazing thing,” says Shay. “The closest to real magic that we'll ever get is music because it can heal. It can do all these amazing things and express emotions that you didn't know how to express.”

In 2021, coming off the back of fourth album Good Things, which featured their huge 2019 Justin Bieber collaboration “10,000 Hours”, and a massive run of touring, the duo hit a critical low. Both burnt out and with their relationship frayed, they found themselves questioning if it was time to take a step back from music. “That was the most pivotal point in our entire career. Covid kind of threw everybody for a loop and we were having major success and it was all happening to us for the first time. There's no playbook for that.” says Dan. “Not that we lost touch with each other, but you kind of grow in different directions. If you're just not going out of your way to foster the relationship and have open communication, it can fizzle out like that.” 

The pair took some time out to reassess their relationship and to try and reconnect. Those hard conversations were continued in the short film The Drive, shared by the duo in 2023. “I think out of a responsibility to everything that we worked hard to build and out of a responsibility to our supporters and our fans, we were like, we need to figure our relationship out more than anything. More than writing any new songs or making any new albums or planning a new tour,” says Dan. “We had this hang at my house. Shay came over and we ended up just pouring our hearts out till four in the morning and we landed in this place like, we still want to do this. Obviously, we're best friends and we just hadn't had that moment to air everything out that had been building over those years. We walked away from that meeting completely changed.”

From the rekindled flame of their friendship came 2023’s Bigger Houses, a collection of country-rooted songs full of heart and lighters-in-the-air choruses that felt alive with luscious production and heartstring lyricism. “We started having more fun than ever. I think the Bigger Houses album was a necessary step in our trajectory, but I think looking back on it now, not trying to knock that album, I think we were still figuring out our rebuilding of the relationship,” says Dan. “I think the song ‘Bigger Houses’, that was kind of like the true north for what became the Young album. I feel like that authenticity was a perfect snapshot of exactly where we were in that moment. We kind of doubled down on that on this album. I do think our closeness and our personal relationship, you can hear it in the music.” 

Across Young, Dan and Shay write with a moving specificity, threading narratives that feel both personal and vulnerable through a tapestry of intricate musicianship. The songs are as much works of storytelling as they boast pop hooks, while some of the lyrics are so direct they almost feel like they’re asking you to respond. 

After breaking to rebuild their relationship, the connection between the pair across Young is stronger than ever. “I think it's very similar to a marriage, what Shay and I do,” says Dan. “It's like 50/50. Everything is split and we're working hard on something together. If you don't go out of your way to communicate, if you're not proactive, it can slip away. I feel it's been really great ever since that and we're having more fun than ever, and you get to do that with your best friend. It's really, really cool.”

“I think that from being kids and dreaming about this, you only dream about the good stuff. You don't see the hours and hours of work and the hours of what can be lonely times,” says Shay. “We have all these things that we've talked about and we can bring that to the writer’s room because I think one of the difficult things about writing, if you let it, is when you've been doing it for a long time. I think at the beginning you have all these things to say because you've been living life and you've been preparing, unknowingly, to let these songs come out of you. But as you do it for ten-years-plus, you kind of get to this place where it's like, man, what do we sing about? What matters? What do we need to say? We had written all these songs and they just felt kind of like fabrications of other people's lives. I feel like for this album we really wanted it to be about us.”

With an album’s worth of material ready to go, Dan and Shay channelled the conversations they had been having in private into their writing sessions, abandoning what had already been penned and focusing on a new, more personal and introspective approach to working together. “At this point in our career, we owe it to so many people, if we don't feel strongly about it, if it doesn't feel inevitable that the song needs to exist in the world, we should keep writing or just take our time,” says Dan. “We want to look back on our career in twenty-years and be like, that song was supposed to be in the world.”

As well as writing songs that were specific to the newly formed dynamic between the pair, Young also offers a maturity that can’t be forced. Title track “Young” speaks with an authoritative tenderness and nostalgic retrospect, making an impactful intro to a powerful record. “We just kind of hit this wall where we were like, man, we should give a snapshot of our lives. I feel like that's always a challenge if you want to be generic and universal because you're like, this is going to reach more people and it's going to be more of a hit if we just don't say anything specific. But I feel like it's kind of the opposite. I feel like if you can really tap into something that you believe in or that you’re going through, more people than you think are going through that exact same thing. And if you believe what you're saying, other people are going to believe what you're saying. Every artist in every promo blitz will say, ‘This is our most personal record yet.’ And we've said that a million times before, but I really do believe it when I say this is our most personal record yet.”

“Dan and I were in this place that we knew what was going on in each other's lives. As soon as we got in and started writing about what was happening in our lives, it just felt like this weight was lifted,” says Shay. “The concepts that we're talking about in this album are a lot deeper than things that we've gone into in the past and there's a lot of talk about time - what time gives and what it takes away. It was just an important thing for us to dive into all that. It really helped us process being mid-to-late-thirties men going through life together. It's a really special album, not just because of the end result of it, but the process of that was just a very life-giving thing.”

Tracks like “The Old Guys”, a rumination on the secret agreement most couples have over who should go first (we can’t all be The Notebook) are astoundingly impactful. Burnished with a gloss of rich, country swell, the song’s direct relatability is softened but still as poignant. “I freaking love the song but it's a heavy concept,” laughs Dan. “It's a love song but it's about, what if your spouse passes away before you?” 

“I think if you were to listen to a few lyrics like, man, this is the saddest song I've ever heard. But at the core of it is a love song,” continues Shay. “I think that that's a definite conversation that I've had with my wife before, like, ‘I would not make it. I would die so quickly if you went before me. I'd be an absolute wreck.’ We're always trying to find new ways to say ‘I love you’ and I think that that is a beautiful way. I think that obviously it sounds like a heavy song at times, but no, that's my favorite song on the record.”

For the duo, progressing their songwriting meant allowing their craft to grow with them. “It was just a really cool process of writing that song and the colors that were coming out of that song were just so interesting and unique. It had that '90s country feel that we both grew up loving. It just felt very unique. That song still, every single time I listen to it, just makes me feel something. We've written and we've heard millions of songs at this point in our career. For something to make us feel something, that was kind of the bar for us on this entire record. If it makes us feel something, then we've won, says Dan. “‘Dogs In Our Twenties’ is about a dog who was with you through the hardest and most pivotal time in your life. It's tough and it's heavy to listen to. Or ‘Say So’, about our friend who committed suicide. I think mid-to-late-thirties, we're hitting a place now -  we're not in our early twenties anymore. It's like mortality and real life sneaks up on you real fast and we just wanted to write about that because that's where we are right now in our lives.”

The drive to create something that put heart over head was also a conscious rebellion against the constant encroachment of AI into the creative space. By harnessing both human emotion and performance, they made a record as tangible and organic as possible. “In the past where in the first verse I might have thrown a crazy programmed beat, I was like, let me see if I can have the drummer play that. Let's try to do it so we could get on stage with our live band and play these songs verbatim, and it was really cool,” says Dan, who co-produced the record with longtime collaborator Scott Hendricks. “I just feel like we wanted to make a record written by real humans, for real humans, performed by real humans. Maybe it was us in an angsty revolt against the AI movement, but I just think we made a conscious effort to do that and it feels cool. You can't really hear it reflected in a lot of the record, but I fell in love with the Nebraska album by Bruce Springsteen, which was the most analog it gets - recorded on a four-track Taskcam in a bedroom in New Jersey. Just the way he told stories, a lot of the arpeggio you hear on the record, it's kind of inspired by that where it's just about the words and the message of the song.”

On Young, Dan and Shay blend their diverse experiences into a body of deeply relatable songs. By prioritising that human touch, both in the production and writing, it feels timeless and rich. “I think that authenticity is the most important thing that we can do when we're making art. People, they love to hear those stories even if it's not their specific stories. They recognise the humanity and they can relate it to their life,” says Shay. “I think that songs are so cool in the way that they can relate to different people in different ways. I think the more personal and authentic that you can be, the more people will connect with it. If it's authentic and we connect with it, then our fans will.”