In 2022, the pop singer and songwriter cancelled a world tour to focus on his mental health. Returning with a stripped-down album, he has a mature new message for his fans.
On a rainy summer night, on a club stage in Woodstock, New York, Shawn Mendes was ready for tears. Happy tears, overwhelmed tears. Just some processing-everything-as-it-happens mistiness. “There’s probably a high chance I cry a lot,” he told the small crowd, pressing the backs of his hands to his eyes and emerging with a grin.
It was the first time in over two years that Mendes, the 26-year-old Canadian pop star, had performed in front of an audience, after he abruptly pulled the plug on his career at its pinnacle. In 2022, amid what he called a mental health “breaking point,” he cancelled a multimillion-dollar, two-year international tour – over 80 scheduled arena dates – acknowledging that, in that moment, he couldn’t handle it. It was a startling admission, especially for a multiplatinum male artist with a hugely devoted young fan base. If their attention was fickle, he would be gone.
In the time since, Mendes – a social media phenom with model looks and a penchant for bare-chestedness, who found immediate chart-topping success as a teenager – stepped almost completely away from music, seeking stability and a life away from the road. Then he slowly winched his way back to songwriting, through the wilds of adulthood. Over rootsy guitar and strings, his struggles are laid bare on his fifth album, Shawn, released November 15. “I don’t understand who I am right now,” he whispers on the anguished opening track.
He’s not the type to mask anything. And it took him a long while to feel strong enough to make the record. “I felt super, super lost,” he said. In Woodstock, he talked of spiralling anxiety, the walls closing in.
But in the few months since that gig, Mendes’ stages have been growing exponentially: he blasted through Nobody Knows, a new, lovelorn ballad, at the MTV Video Music Awards, ending it in ecstatic guitar peals; and then sang to 100,000 people – in Portuguese – at a festival in Rio de Janeiro. When we met for an interview, at his favourite recording studio in bucolic Rhinebeck, New York, where he worked on the new album, he seemed as if he had regained the muscle memory of what it means to be a star. But he wore it lightly.
It was the afternoon after the VMAs, and if he had spent the night partying, it didn’t register. Sitting on a wooden chair on a porch overlooking rolling hills and picturesquely positioned lawn equipment, Mendes wore a hand-painted T-shirt that showed off his tattoos – Good Boy, read one – drank water from a Mason jar and asked if it was OK if he smoked. And then, with no hesitation, he dove into the darkest, and what he called the hardest, period of his life – and what came next.
Mendes has long been open about his episodes of despair. His 2018 hit In My Blood has him frozen on a bathroom floor, pleading for help. In the song, he finds it within himself to move forward. In real life, it was more of a group effort.
By the time of his 2022 tour, in support of his 2020 release Wonder, he was a record-breaking young artist: Wonder was his fourth consecutive No 1 album. He opened for Taylor Swift early on and had a seductive chart-topper, Señorita, duetting with Camila Cabello, his girlfriend at the time.
But he had also been on the road since he was launched, out of his parents’ Pickering, Ontario, home, as a 15-year-old star of Vine, the now-defunct micro-video platform. Peak adolescence coincided with global fame, with little space to reflect on either of those seismic changes.
“The first 10 years of my career were just so fast,” he said. “I never was able to catch up to the moment.”
His first-love romance with fellow pop star Cabello, reflected in their music, captivated the public – and so did their breakup. (He still counts her as “one of my closest best friends”.) He was 23, with 80 or so people on his touring payroll and what felt like the weight of the world’s attention on him. During the Wonder circuit, he was, he said, “severely depressed” in a way that he couldn’t hide.
“The shows I could get through,” he said, “and find beauty in them.” (He played seven before he called it quits.) “But when I would step offstage, I just didn’t recognise myself,” he continued. “I was a shell – like talking to a wall.” He suddenly craved preconcert booze and smokes, which he had always sworn off to protect his voice. And when the post-show drink was out of “needing an escape,” he saw the path he did not want to take: “I was like, I’m not going to rewrite the same story that’s been written a thousand times by musicians and artists, where they can’t cope and they’d start taking more drugs, more alcohol, until it’s too much. I’m not doing that. I’m just going hard left.”
It was a wrenching choice: “It broke my heart when I cancelled tour,” he sings on the new album’s opener, Who I Am. “Had my soul and my head going back and forth.”
“Letting people down sucks,” Mendes said emphatically. In eight years of touring, he had only ever called off one show before, because of laryngitis; he feared disappointing his fans and upending his production team, some of whom had been with him from the start. But it was also “a huge lesson for me in becoming an adult, which is that you don’t get to live this life without hurting people,” he said.
Scott Harris, Mendes’ foremost writing partner and producer, said the decision was critical: “It took a really big leap of faith, a lot of confidence, to do what was best for him in that moment.”
Industry experts said the Wonder Tour could have generated US$100 million ($167m). Mendes acknowledged that he lost money – “a lot,” he said. He also noted that he was privileged to be able to take that step and that he was “beyond grateful that I wasn’t going to be in debt”.
He paid out the contracts of his employees, said Andrew Gertler, his co-manager.
In interviews, his collaborators; managers; and Imran Majid, co-CEO of Island Records, Mendes’ label, said their primary priority was Mendes’ wellbeing, not his career.
“This business has a tendency to make young artists resent it,” said Ziggy Chareton, who also manages Mendes. “I was always very cognisant of trying to do everything we could to allow him to not fall out of love with this art form.”
Mendes is approaching his return with care, shoring himself up with support and family as he plays smaller, thoughtfully chosen venues. Making the album, he listened to ‘60s and ‘70s folkies – Joni Mitchell; Crosby, Stills & Nash; “a lot of John Denver,” he said – and turned the pop gloss down in favour of mandolin (performed by Chris Thile), lap steel and violin. Instead of what he called his usual frontman energy, he wanted the lyricism and harmony of many voices, encircling. “More music, more love,” he said.
The son of an English mother and Portuguese father, Mendes first picked up the guitar at 14, inspired by artists such as Ed Sheeran and John Mayer, who remain touchstones. His mother was a real estate agent; his father, the owner of a restaurant supply business; and he’d been a typical kid, putting on little skits for his family, playing hockey, excelling at soccer. But music “brought out a different drive in him,” said his sister, Aaliyah Mendes, 21, a teacher who accompanied him to the VMAs. “Just constantly rehearsing in the home. Like, ‘I’m not going to eat dinner right now. I have to do this.’”
His six-second covers of songs for Vine took off. “I was, like, 8 years old, holding the camera for hours, shaking, trying to get the perfect video for him,” his sister said. Chareton and Gertler found him online, emailed his mother and got him signed quickly. He was touring shortly after his 16th birthday. (He finished high school remotely, returning for graduation.) For six years, the album-tour cycle circumscribed his world. He was grateful and ambitious, but cracks appeared. “If I tell the world that I’m just a normal human, are they going to stop, like, coming to the shows?” he worried in a 2020 Netflix documentary.
In 2022, the really scary part arrived: He was alone, with no obligations, no order to his time. “I remember just driving a lot and just being like, ‘What the [expletive] am I doing?’”
He was lucky, he knew; he had therapy, friends and family. He clung to an adage: If you’re driving in the dark, all you need to see is 10 feet ahead of you to eventually find your destination. “I never could get stuck if all I had to think about was like, OK, it’s morning. My next 10 feet is to, you know, meditate and get a coffee. My next 10 feet after that is to work out; my next 10 feet is to call my mom.”
As the fog lifted, he travelled – Costa Rica, Kenya, Rwanda, where he visited the genocide memorial in the capital. “The world is beautiful and horrific,” he said, “and that does a lot for your sense of self-anxiety” and perspective.
Harris, 38, who has also worked with Cabello, Justin Bieber and Dua Lipa, is a constant sounding board. Mendes was 15 when they met and immediately crafted the iTunes hit Life of the Party, and they’ve been in an emotional and sonic loop since. “He always jokes – I’m the one who, like, gets to read through all the journal entries,” Harris said. Musically, Mendes is persistent. “I get a voice memo from him – maybe two or three voice memos from him – every day, every other day.”
Still, splitting his time between a home in Los Angeles and a Toronto condo, it took Mendes a year to set foot in a studio – fleetingly. “We’d write a song, and halfway through, he’d be like, ‘I’m sorry. I can’t do it,’” Harris recalled.
His label was patient. “We gave him a lot of space,” Majid said.
Gradually, with a Gen Z crew of artists like songwriter and producer Mike Sabath, 26, who were down to emotionally process, dig deep – “He’s like a truth beam,” Sabath said – Mendes found his way back to recording the album this past January.
Love (or breakup) songs have been a staple of his albums, and Shawn has its flecks of heartbreak and lust. On the porch-stomping “Why Why Why,” there’s also an unusually vulnerable reference to a pregnancy scare: “Thought I was about to be a father / Shook me to the core, I’m still a kid / Sometimes I still cry out for my mother.”
Going through that experience “taught me a lot as a man,” he said. When a collaborator suggested it, Mendes initially balked. “And then I was like, why am I doing this,” if not to write about those kinds of complexities, he recalled. “And also, I wanted to break down any walls that were remaining, between me and people listening.”
Almost unprompted, he talked at length about Cabello, whom he dated for several years.
Any public perception that they are “against each other in a weird way,” he said, “bugs me”. He called her someone he still talks to about music or anything important. “I have nerves just even speaking about it, just what people would say. But honestly, if something was to happen in my family and if something was to happen to me, she’d probably be the first person I call, to this day.
“Our relationship is teaching me what love means, in a big way,” he added.
Mendes has always had a sort of internet’s boyfriend quality – someone you could imagine writing poetry for a partner. “Whoever I end up marrying,” he volunteered at one point, “has to be down to just process every day. Anything on your heart. Let’s go for it. I love it so much.”
At a show in Colorado last month, he addressed his sexuality while introducing a song: “Man, I’m just figuring it out like everyone. I don’t really know sometimes, and I know other times,” he said, as the crowd cheered. “And it feels really scary, because we live in a society that has a lot to say about that.”
Navigating the same life stages as his audiences, with seeming transparency, has also endeared him to fans. “I don’t feel a great kind of difference between myself and them,” he said. (His coffee shop run-ins are legion.)
On our sunny afternoon in Rhinebeck, with birdsong and the studio dog in the background, Mendes fretted a bit about how his emotional revelations would be received. “I’m like, man, have I used up my amount of time in the public eye as the guy who went through something hard? Have I used up my sad guy story?”
But he shook it off. “Healing takes time,” he said. “More than you want. And it’s beautiful, because you can be healing and expressing at the same time. You can be joyful and grieving simultaneously.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Melena Ryzik
Photographs by: Mark Sommerfeld
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
