By barnaby
Boy Golden, Bob Moses, July Talk, The Beaches, Metric, Dear Rouge, The Glorious Sons, Arkells, Billy Talent, The Darcys, Monowhales, Anyway Gang, Mother Mother, and Dear Rouge stand out in the year-end Alt category.
Songs like “Tequila” and “10,000 Hours” with Justin Bieber (which reached No. 2 on the Billboard Canadian Hot 100) have topped Billboard’s Country Airplay chart, they’ve won multiple Grammys and CMA Awards, and heard their lyrics sung back at them from stages across the world.
So when they left their writing room in Nashville with their new batch of songs for their follow up to 2024’s Bigger Houses, they knew the feeling. The songs were hits. But there was another, more unfamiliar feeling behind it.
“We had cold feet,” Smyers admits.
Speaking after Dan + Shay played a triumphant Billboard Canada THE STAGE show in Toronto at NXNE, the duo recount a pivotal few years. After admitting they nearly broke up in 2022, the duo released 2024’s Bigger Houses and, after finishing their tour, took an unofficial hiatus. They slowed band activity and their public presence and focused on themselves. They strengthened their relationships with each other and with their families. They went to therapy. Both fathers in their mid-late-30s, they grappled with maturity and their new stages in life.
“We wanted to do our due diligence and not settle,” Mooney agrees. “We thought: Let’s not just find hit songs. Let’s find hit songs that really matter to us.”
The result is the just-released Young (Warner Records Nashville/Warner Music Canada), an album Dan + Shay describe as their most autobiographical album to date, “a snapshot of who we are and what we’ve gone through.” It grapples with love, loss, mental health and aging alongside classic romantic country themes that permeate their discography.
To introduce this new era, Dan + Shay led with their most personal and poignant song as the lead single. “Say So” grapples with the death of Ben Vaughn, the head of Warner Chappell Music, who died by suicide in 2025.
Mooney says his death “shook our community —- not just on the business side, but as a friend and mentor.” He was the first to truly believe in them as songwriters before they were even a band, he says, signing them to their first publishing deal and championing them throughout their career.
The duo were in the writer’s room in Nashville when they started working on it. They weren’t even trying to write a song, Mooney says, just sharing stories about their friend with others who knew him. When the song poured out of them, they didn’t even know if it would be a Dan + Shay song.
“You know, we’re kind of known as the wedding song guys,” Smyers says, referring to their history of soundtracking couples’ first dances. “We felt ‘this is an amazing song, but is it a bit too heavy for what we do?’”
His mind was changed when he went home and played the demo for his wife.
“She was like ‘wow, that’s a beautiful tribute to Ben,’” he recalls. “‘It’s so nice you could do that on his birthday.’ We had no clue it was his birthday that day. I pulled up Facebook and, true enough, it would have been his 50th. That moment to me said, okay, this is more than a coincidence. This song has to come out.”
“Say So” has been a way for the band to tell their fans if they’re going through something, they’re not alone. They’ve received countless letters and DMs talking about how the song has helped them.
“They say ‘Dear Dan + Shay, comma,” he says, saying the punctuation out loud, “and then a long narrative about their own life and how the song has helped them. And man, that's the ultimate fulfilment for us as songwriters and artists.”
The experience influenced their philosophy for the whole Young album: they wouldn’t include a song unless it felt “inevitable.” It needed to feel like it had to exist for them to put it into the world.
Dan + Shay photographed in Toronto at NXNE in June 2026.Dragan Andic
That involved a mindset change for the duo, who cop to being extremely competitive — something Smyers says he’s working on in therapy. They may find validation from their fans and other sources, but they do look at the charts. They do show up to awards shows hoping to win. They take it hard when they don’t. So do many of their peers. They are just willing to admit it.
“I think being competitive is one of the reasons we've been successful,” Mooney says. “But I think maturing and getting older and wising up a bit is really being able to let yourself redefine what success looks like to you, because if you're not careful, you'll let other people define it for you. That can make you a very depressed, sad individual. We’ve been there. When you win, it feels great, but you're not always going to win.”
He cites a podium speech by NBA star Giannis Antetokounmpo, who gave an enlightening monologue when a reporter asked him if he viewed the season as a failure after getting eliminated from the playoffs. Michael Jordan played 15 years and won six championships, he said. Does that mean the other 9 years were a failure?
“We have so many songs that never even cracked the top 40, were never even singles. But if that’s someone’s favourite song, to them, that's your most important song,” he says. “If I say, ‘oh, that's only got a couple million streams. Nobody likes that song,’ that's just not the reality of the power of music.”
But changing your approach isn’t easy, especially for a long-established act like Dan + Shay. Country music is an old-school genre, one with very well-defined institutions — especially for an act living and working in the industry hub of Nashville. Until recently, an established act could rely on heavy radio airplay to drive streams, awards and sales. Like many other genres, though, it’s increasingly being driven by social media and viral success that is harder than ever to orchestrate.
By the time they were starting the new Young era, Dan + Shay were ready for a change — not just in their musical approach, but their business approach as well. They parted from their management at Sandbox Entertainment and began taking meetings with other managers. It was a stressful time, they remember, because a manager is so central to every facet an artist’s career.
They met with many of the biggest names in the industry before walking into the office of a scrappy agency that now acts as a hybrid management firm/record label/publishing company. That company was The Core Entertainment, the firm co-founded by Simon Tikhman and Dave “Chief” Zaruk with backing from Live Nation and its CEO & president Michael Rapino.
Founded in 2019, the company had developed a reputation for helping break new artists like Bailey Zimmerman and Nate Smith as well as rising Canadian artists Cameron Whitcomb and Josh Ross. But Dan + Shay were a little different.
“They’re a household name,” Tikhman says. “They met with probably much bigger, more established companies than us. But when they walked into our office, they felt the culture of what we built.”
They were offered tequila and lemonade from a custom Dan + Shay lemonade stand. They entered to hear all of the employees blasting their new music, enthusiastic to talk about their next steps. They could feel that this was a company that matched their excitement and their work ethic, one that was ready to build a new playbook.
“The thing that put it over the top for us was that they led with the music,” says Mooney. “A lot of people had a lot of ideas like, hey, you've been on The Voice, let's put you back on TV. They had ideas outside of the music. But Dan and I, we've always been about the music first. If you have great songs, everything else will follow after that.”
Though most of The Core’s roster is comprised of acts they helped break, there was one notable act that became somewhat of a blueprint: Nickelback.
One of the biggest bands to ever come out of Canada, where Zaruk also hails from and worked with the band as a tour manager years before starting The Core, Nickelback were at a similar point in their career when they signed there in 2022. They knew they could make hits, and they knew they had a loyal fanbase that would follow them wherever they went, but The Core had ideas they hadn’t even considered.
“When we met them, they were like ‘We’re Nickelback. We are 30-plus years into our career. We have 20 No. 1 songs, we tour the world globally. What would you guys do with us?’” Zaruk recounts. “The first thing we said is we could tap into an entirely different audience they had never tapped into, and that was the country market.
“We knew that all these young artists loved Nickelback. Morgan Wallen loves Nickelback, HARDY loves Nickelback, Bailey Zimmerman loves Nickelback, Red Clay Strays will tell you they’re a band because of Nickelback. There's an entirely different audience, and truthfully, a younger audience in the country world that you guys haven't even been exposed to, and they're really just discovering your music now.”
They booked them to play one of the most important country festivals, Stagecoach, and CMT Crossroads with HARDY. They paired them with young country artists who had been influenced by them. Most importantly, they increased their social media presence and got them posting every day. Now, Zaruk boasts, they went from 10 million monthly Spotify listeners to nearly 30 million.
Dan + Shay photographed in Toronto at NXNE in June 2026Dragan Andic
Tikhman and Zaruk saw similar potential in Dan + Shay. They’re both major sports fans (as their Giannis quote will attest), and they had aspirations of doing a national anthem at a major sporting event like the Super Bowl. It just so happened that the World Cup was being played in North America this year. So, they booked them to sing the “The Star-Spangled Banner” before the U.S.A vs. Paraguay match in Los Angeles in June.
Nowadays, when a national anthem performance goes viral, it’s for negative reasons. Dan + Shay’s rendition was a rare case of going viral because of how good they sounded. It was a simple reminder, after a few dormant years, of who the band was and what they could do with a microphone in front of them.
Beyond Tikhman and Zaruk, The Core is filled with young and hungry digital natives who understand the internet. They saw Dan + Shay had been out of the public spotlight for a few years and posting sporadically. The first step was getting their music onto TikTok and other platforms. But these were not new artists. They shouldn’t suddenly be doing viral dance trends and asking “how do you do, fellow kids?”
“We can make you guys have quote ‘viral moments,’ but it's got to be with your music and with your brand,” says Zaruk. “It can’t feel desperate. It’s got to remind people who you are, what you've done, and that you have new music coming out. We are in a crazy business where if you're gone for too long, people start to forget how relevant you are. We wanted to really bring these guys to the forefront of all conversations when it comes to country music and put Dan + Shay's name at the top.”
Even with social strategy, the music has to come first — and it has to feel real. It has to fit the music they’re making now, while reminding people of who they are: a multiplatinum band with a big catalogue of hits waiting to be discovered or rediscovered.
Dan + Shay know they aren’t reinventing the wheel. You can still come to them for a reflection on maturing or a romantic ballad. But they think deeply about their craft, and they are extreme perfectionists. They’re always looking to find something new in any song they record.
They point to Young song “The Old Guys” as an example. A collab with singer-songwriter Cody Johnson, it’s a classic Dan + Shay love song layered with immaculate vocals.
“Trying to find a new way to say ‘I love you’ is a very difficult thing,” says Smyers. “‘The Old Guys’ is a sad song. It’s asking ‘what if your spouse passes before you do?’ But it's a romantic song, too. You’re not saying that person is gone. You’re saying to that person ‘if I lost you, I would not make it.’ And that’s just a unique way to say ‘I love you’ in a way that hasn’t been done before.”
Dan + Shay say they were looking for twists like that all throughout the album. They start Young with the title track, a reflective ballad written as a letter from their future selves, and “Dogs In Our Twenties” uses pets as another bittersweet way to reflect on the passing of time. They’re all universal themes, but through the lens of their own life experiences.
Those hits they made before Young? They still might release them. But this felt like the right music at the right time.
“We’re always asking ourselves ‘why does this justify coming out?’” says Mooney. “We’re living in a world of AI, and AI can spit out a song that sounds really catchy. What do we have that is unique, that’s different than anybody else? The only answer for us right now is, let’s just talk about our lives. Let’s be vulnerable and authentic, let’s find a way to say things in a way that only we can say them. That’s something that AI can’t replicate: the human spirit.“
In a world with technology at everyone’s fingertips, it feels like anyone can write a hit. But there are only two people in the world who can be Dan + Shay.
