Dan + Shay Are 'Best We've Ever Been,' Tease Personal New Album & Tour (Exclusive)

Dan + Shay’s Dan Smyers and Shay Mooney sat down with “Extra” to dish on hitting the road this fall on their newly announced The Young Tour in support of their forthcoming album “Young.” 

Dan said of “Young,” “I really think this is our best album yet... I think this is definitely our most authentic and most personal album that we’ve ever written.”

He said with the advancement of technology and AI, he thought, “I want to make an album that feels tangibly human. From every word that was written on the album to the instruments that were played on it.”

Smyers added, “I could feel the life breathing throughout this album.”

He confessed, “We even went as far as making a different album. We went down a wrong path and it just didn’t feel right. We had cold feet and we just didn’t feel secure about the idea of putting it out there into the world and we were like, ‘You know what? We need to go back to the drawing board.’”

Shay recalled the moment they started over with a new album, saying, “We wrote the very first song on the record. And we were like, ‘This is it. Like, let’s go down this path. This affects me. When I hear this, I’m moved. I feel it in my spirit, not just, like, in my ears.’”

He added, “It had a heart to it. There was a heartbeat to the song.”

Plus, they teased what fans can expect from the tour.

Shay said, “You can always expect a high-energy show. Dan and I are running around being crazy... It’s going to be a lot of fun… We’re playing the hits and… I think it’s going to be an escape for people.”

He added, “We want people to come out and to have an amazing experience and we’re going to do everything we possibly can so that it’s the best tour, the best show that they’ve ever seen. And I promise you, we’re doing everything on our end.”

Dan said of the fans, “We don’t take it for granted for one second when somebody spends their hard-earned money… That means so much to us and I think we take it really seriously. We try to be in as good a shape as possible. Keep our voices in shape. Eat healthy because when we go on there on that stage, we want to leave it all on the stage for those fans.”

They also talked about how they had to work on their relationship back in 2021 or risk breaking up the duo.

Shay said, “Back in ’21, we had this whole moment that was like, man, ‘I don’t know if we can do this together, you know, right now. We need to fix some things or kind of ride off into the sunset’ and we’ve talked in the past a lot about that, but we fixed it.”

Later, Dan added, “We are hands down the best we’ve ever been and I think it started with that conversation in 2021 when we came together and that was a hard conversation… We’ve been really open about that since. But it was a hard conversation. We were crying and having this moment. And I think it changed the trajectory of our entire career. And I think we’ve been more open in real time with each other. If something’s bothering one of us, we say it in real time. And I just think like we rekindled the friendship that we had when we first met... and I just think that changed everything for us.”