Dan + Shay Return With Autobiographical Album 'Young'

Grammy Award-winning country duo Dan + Shay are set to release a new album, "Young," featuring 10 autobiographical tracks that the pair say reflect a new level of emotional vulnerability in their music.

The lead single, "Say So," marks a sharp departure from the wedding songs that have long defined much of the duo's catalog. The song was written in tribute to Ben Vaughn, the head of Warner Chappell Music Publishing and a mentor to Dan Smyers and Shay Mooney, who died by suicide a year earlier.

"For one of the first times in our career, I was like, 'I'm not sure if we should tackle this,'" Smyers told The Associated Press. He said the song came together almost by accident while the pair and co-writers David Hodges and Jimmy Robbins were simply sharing stories about Vaughn. "A verse and a chorus in, and I think we were all just like, 'I don't know, man. Is this too heavy to tackle?'"

Smyers said they later realized the day they began writing the song would have been Vaughn's 50th birthday. "It was more than a coincidence," he said. "That was the sign that this song could help somebody."

"Say So" serves as a thematic anchor for "Young," which Mooney describes as "a very life-giving thing." The album opens with its stripped-back title track, which Smyers calls "a message from your future self to your present and past self, about the passage of time and appreciating the moment." He connected the song to men's difficulty expressing emotion, saying, "When I finally broke down that wall, it changed my life."

The record also carries more religious imagery than the duo's past work, including the single "Her, The Kids and Jesus" and two references to the King James Bible. Other tracks explore grief and affection in varied forms, from "Dogs in Our Twenties," about a young adult's first pet, to "The Old Guys," a twist on the traditional love song featuring country artist Cody Johnson — the album's only guest feature.

Dan + Shay said they wrote and scrapped an entire album's worth of material before settling on the final 10 songs. "There's kind of a song for everybody, for whatever you're going through," Mooney said.

Editor's note: This story includes discussion of suicide. The national suicide and crisis lifeline in the U.S. is available by calling or texting 988, or online at 988lifeline.org.