A Personal Turn for Dan + Shay

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."

Smyers told the Associated Press: "For one of the first times in our career, I was like, 'I'm not like sure if we should tackle this.'" 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."

The Heart of 'Young'

"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."

Smyers described the title track "Young" as "a message from your future self to your present and past self, about the passage of time and appreciating the moment." The album also includes the songs "Dogs in Our Twenties" and "The Old Guys," and features Cody Johnson, a neo-traditionalist in country music, as the sole feature.

The duo wrote and scrapped an entire album's worth of material before creating "Young," a process that Smyers said reflected a period of personal growth. The album also shows more religiosity, with the single "Her, The Kids and Jesus" and two mentions of a King James Bible.

Smyers commented that men don't do as good of a job of sharing their feelings and emotions, a theme that resonates throughout the record. "We're just now getting to a place where we're comfortable being vulnerable," he said.

Context and Credits

Dan + Shay recorded the multiplatinum crossover hit "10,000 Hours" featuring Justin Bieber in 2019, but "Young" marks a deliberate step away from the wedding-song territory that defined much of their earlier work. The album's autobiographical nature extends to its collaborators and production, with the duo working closely with longtime co-writers.

A photo credit from the Associated Press notes that Smyers and Mooney posed for a portrait on Thursday, July 30, 2026, in New York, photographed by Matt Licari/Invision/AP.

If You Need Help

This story includes discussion of suicide. If you or someone you know needs help, the national suicide and crisis lifeline in the U.S. is available by calling or texting 988. There is also an online chat at 988lifeline.org.