Shawn Mendes ready to talk about why he walked away from pop stardom at his peak

NEW YORK – 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 multi-million-dollar, two-year international tour – more than 80 scheduled arena dates – acknowledging that, in that moment, he could not handle it.

It was a startling admission, especially for a multi-platinum male artiste with a hugely devoted young fan base. If their attention was fickle, he would be gone.

In the time since, Mendes – a social media phenomenon 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, due Nov 15.

“I don’t understand who I am right now,” he whispers on the anguished opening track.

He is 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. In September, he blasted through his new lovelorn ballad Nobody Knows at the MTV Video Music Awards, ending it in ecstatic guitar peals. He then sang to 100,000 people – in Portuguese – at the Rock In Rio music festival in Rio de Janeiro.

At 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.

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 artiste: Wonder was his fourth consecutive No. 1 album.

He opened for American pop star Taylor Swift early on and had a seductive chart-topper, Senorita, duetting with American singer 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 Cabello, reflected in their music, captivated the public – and so did their break-up in 2021. (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 could not 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 added. “I was a shell – like talking to a wall.”

He suddenly craved pre-concert 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 artistes, 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 called off only 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.

Industry experts said Wonder: The World Tour could have generated US$100 million (S$131.9 million). Mendes acknowledged that he lost a lot of money. 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”.

Then the really scary part arrived. He was alone, with no obligations, no order to his time. He knew he was lucky – he had therapy, friends and family.

He clung to an adage: If you are driving in the dark, all you need to see is 10 feet ahead of you to eventually find your destination.

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.

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.

Gradually, with a Gen Z crew of artistes like songwriter-producer Mike Sabath, 26, who were down to emotionally process, dig deep, Mendes found his way back to recording the album in January.

Love, or break-up, 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 is 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 baulked. “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.”

At a recent show in Colorado, 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.”

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?”

He shook it off, however. “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.” NYTIMES