Across , Dan and Shay write with a moving specificity, threading narratives that feel both personal and vulnerable through a tapestry of intricate musicianship. The songs are as much works of storytelling as they boast pop hooks, while some of the lyrics are so direct they almost feel like they’re asking you to respond.
After breaking to rebuild their relationship, the connection between the pair across is stronger than ever. “I think it's very similar to a marriage, what Shay and I do,” says Dan. “It's like 50/50. Everything is split and we're working hard on something together. If you don't go out of your way to communicate, if you're not proactive, it can slip away. I feel it's been really great ever since that and we're having more fun than ever, and you get to do that with your best friend. It's really, really cool.”
“I think that from being kids and dreaming about this, you only dream about the good stuff. You don't see the hours and hours of work and the hours of what can be lonely times,” says Shay. “We have all these things that we've talked about and we can bring that to the writer’s room because I think one of the difficult things about writing, if you let it, is when you've been doing it for a long time. I think at the beginning you have all these things to say because you've been living life and you've been preparing, unknowingly, to let these songs come out of you. But as you do it for ten-years-plus, you kind of get to this place where it's like, man, what do we sing about? What matters? What do we need to say? We had written all these songs and they just felt kind of like fabrications of other people's lives. I feel like for this album we really wanted it to be about us.”
With an album’s worth of material ready to go, Dan and Shay channelled the conversations they had been having in private into their writing sessions, abandoning what had already been penned and focusing on a new, more personal and introspective approach to working together. “At this point in our career, we owe it to so many people, if we don't feel strongly about it, if it doesn't feel inevitable that the song needs to exist in the world, we should keep writing or just take our time,” says Dan. “We want to look back on our career in twenty-years and be like, that song was supposed to be in the world.”
As well as writing songs that were specific to the newly formed dynamic between the pair, also offers a maturity that can’t be forced. Title track “Young” speaks with an authoritative tenderness and nostalgic retrospect, making an impactful intro to a powerful record. “We just kind of hit this wall where we were like, man, we should give a snapshot of our lives. I feel like that's always a challenge if you want to be generic and universal because you're like, this is going to reach more people and it's going to be more of a hit if we just don't say anything specific. But I feel like it's kind of the opposite. I feel like if you can really tap into something that you believe in or that you’re going through, more people than you think are going through that exact same thing. And if you believe what you're saying, other people are going to believe what you're saying. Every artist in every promo blitz will say, ‘This is our most personal record yet.’ And we've said that a million times before, but I really do believe it when I say this is our most personal record yet.”
“Dan and I were in this place that we knew what was going on in each other's lives. As soon as we got in and started writing about what was happening in our lives, it just felt like this weight was lifted,” says Shay. “The concepts that we're talking about in this album are a lot deeper than things that we've gone into in the past and there's a lot of talk about time - what time gives and what it takes away. It was just an important thing for us to dive into all that. It really helped us process being mid-to-late-thirties men going through life together. It's a really special album, not just because of the end result of it, but the process of that was just a very life-giving thing.”