Dan + Shay have made plenty of songs for weddings.
Their new album is about what happens after the wedding.
Marriage.
Kids.
Getting older.
Faith.
Losing people you love.
And figuring out who you are when you’re no longer the twenty-something chasing a dream.
Dan Smyers and Shay Mooney released their sixth studio album, Young, on Friday, August 21, and they’re calling it the most autobiographical record they’ve made during their 13-plus years together.
One song in particular explains why.
“Say So” was inspired by the loss of the duo’s longtime mentor and friend Ben Vaughn, who died by suicide.
Dan and Shay had known Vaughn for years through Nashville’s songwriting community, and his death hit both of them hard.
While writing with David Hodges and Jimmy Robbins, they began working on a song about telling someone what you’re going through instead of keeping everything inside.
Only later did they discover something remarkable.
The song had been started on what would have been Vaughn’s 50th birthday.
That coincidence gave “Say So” even greater meaning for the duo, and its message about reaching out for help became one of the emotional centers of the album.
But Young isn’t entirely about grief.
It’s really about growing up.
The title track looks at how quickly time moves. “Her, The Kids and Jesus” reflects Shay’s life as a husband and father. “Dogs in Our Twenties” deals with another strangely universal part of getting older—the pets that were there during the early years of adulthood eventually getting old too.
Then there’s “The Old Guys.”
That song features Cody Johnson and imagines two people growing old together—and the possibility that eventually one will have to figure out life without the other.
Not exactly “Speechless.”
And that’s the point.
Dan + Shay aren’t in the same place they were when songs like “Tequila,” “From the Ground Up” and “Speechless” made them stars.
Their lives changed.
So the songs changed too.
The duo says they’re less interested now in trying to manufacture a particular kind of hit and more interested in writing about what’s actually happening in their lives.
That’s a risky move in pop-oriented country music.
It’s also usually where the most interesting records come from.
At some point, the guys who wrote the wedding songs had to grow up.
Young is apparently what happened next.
