After losing a friend and writing 'Say So,' Dan + Shay are back with the
autobiographical 'Young'
[August 20, 2026]
By MARIA SHERMAN
NEW YORK (AP) — The lead single from Grammy Award-winning duo Dan +
Shay's forthcoming album “Young” is a hard pivot from the wedding songs
that make up so much of the country pair’s discography.
“Say So,” with its big-hearted and hopeful chorus, is about suicide
prevention. It was written in tribute to Dan Smyers and Shay Mooney's
late mentor Ben Vaughn, head of Warner Chappell Music Publishing, who
died by suicide a year before.
“If you’re going through hell, you’re not alone,” Mooney sings. “If you
need somebody, say so.”
“For one of the first times in our career, I was like, ‘I’m not like
sure if we should tackle this,’” Smyers told The Associated Press.
But in the studio, it became an inevitability — even though they were
uncertain. “We were just sharing stories about our friend. And it just
fell out of us. 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
continued.
Creating the demo together, alongside co-writers David Hodges and Jimmy
Robbins, became therapeutic.
“We owed it to our friend Ben,” he said. “We owe it to the community,
who he meant so much to. And I feel like we owed it to ourselves to at
least see that one through to the finish line.”
What they didn't realize is that the day they started work on the song
was also what would've 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” may be the heaviest song off “Young,” but it is also a thematic
center for the record — 10 autobiographical tracks of crossover country
that reflect their lives, now, with new emotional vulnerability — what
Mooney labels “a very life-giving thing.”
The heart of 'Young'
The album opens with its title track, the stripped-back acoustic
arpeggio “Young,” what Smyers describes as “a message from your future
self to your present and past self, about the passage of time and
appreciating the moment.”
But there's an additional, gendered resonance. “Men — I just think,
maybe I’m generalizing — don’t do as good of a job of sharing their
feelings and emotions. And I’m saying that because that’s me,” he said.
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Dan Smyers, left, and Shay Mooney of Dan + Shay pose for a portrait
on Thursday, July 30, 2026, in New York. (Photo by Matt Licari/Invision/AP)
 “You’re tough. You bottle it up. But
when I finally broke down that wall, it changed my life. And I think
that song just talks about aging as a man.”
That's yet another difficult subject, which might also explain why,
before creating the 10 songs that make up “Young,” Dan + Shay wrote
and scrapped an entire album's worth of material. The tracks that
made up the final collection took time, open and honest
conversation, and a hearty dose of self-reflection.
It's why there may be more religiosity to this album than in the
previous works — from the single “Her, The Kids and Jesus” to the
album's two mentions of a King James Bible.
“'Her, the kids and Jesus,' that’s kind of a snapshot at what my
life looks like right now,” Mooney said.
Growing into 'The Old Guys'
Grief — and affection — take on many forms across “Young." From the
ode to a young adult's first pet (“Dogs in Our Twenties”) to a twist
on the traditional love song format and praying your partner dies
after you (the ‘90s country-channeling “The Old Guys"), the songs
are delivered with tenderness. The latter includes the album's sole
feature, Cody Johnson — a neo-traditionalist in country music that,
on paper, may seem at odds with Dan + Shay's genre-hybridity. After
all, these are the same guys who recorded the multiplatinum
crossover hit “10,000 Hours” featuring Justin Bieber in 2019.
“We occupy a very different space in country music,” agrees Smyers.
Even vocally — Mooney's got a high register, Johnson sings low, and
when they're all singing together, “It's, like, perfectly meeting in
the middle.”
It also highlights the range of this album. “There’s kind of a song
for everybody, for whatever you’re going through,” says Mooney.
“Whatever people need to get out of this album, I hope that they get
that.”
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