Dan Smyers was home when the call came.
It was raining. The news was difficult to comprehend: Ben Vaughn, the longtime Nashville publishing executive who believed in Dan + Shay before they were famous, had died.
"I was in shock," Smyers said. "I think we all kind of found out at the same time and, man, it just, it was wild."
More than a decade earlier, Vaughn saw Smyers and Shay Mooney not just as two songwriters, but as a powerhouse, chart-topping act.
"He was one of the first people to say, 'You guys are more than songwriters,'" Smyers said. "You should be a duo."
Vaughn brought them upstairs at Warner’s Nashville offices to play for then-label president John Esposito and producer Scott Hendricks. Now, more than 10 years later, Smyers and Mooney
are back in that same Music Row building talking about "Young," their sixth studio album.
Out Aug. 21, the 10-track album still has the things Dan + Shay do best: large-scale choruses, close harmonies and polished romantic songs built to soundtrack weddings. But this new album also pushes further, especially when it comes to songs about faith.
"Young" explores how the choices we make carry consequences, questions about whether love has an expiration date and, ultimately, digs deep into the ways that growing older forces people to decide what they will leave behind.
If experience is the price of youth and love, the two sing they would "pay it every time."
Feeling young, but growing older
Dan + Shay have always liked a song title that points one way before the lyrics take you somewhere else. "Tequila" sounded like a party record. Instead, it became one of country-pop's most durable heartbreak ballads.
"The original writing title for it was 'When I Taste Tequila,'" Smyers said. "I was like, 'It gives too much away.' When we teased it on social media, people thought we were going to put out a dance song."
"Duh-dun, dun-dun-dunna-dun-dun," Mooney added, doing the riff of The Champs' 1958 hit "Tequila."
"Young" goes down the same way.
"When you hear Dan + Shay's new album, 'Young,' it's like, 'Oh man, I bet they made some summertime feel-good jams,'" Smyers said. "But this song's about dying. This song's about mental health. This song's about aging. It's our heaviest, most serious album. And I think just the juxtaposition of what that word would lead your mind to believe versus what it actually is, just fun."
Yes, there are lighthearted moments and wedding-ready anthems. In "Marry You Again," the two rewind to 2013 for another chance to find, kiss and marry the same woman. "Forever Like This" freezes time inside a perfect moment and the feeling that "heaven ain't so far away."
But the question driving this era is blunt: Why does this song need to exist?
The title track sets the tone. Time "steals like a thief." The young man drinks, loves and leaves, convinced he will live forever, until the song reminds him that one day he will see an old man in the mirror. The road that once looked endless vanishes in a blink. Time serves as the record's antagonist, teacher and quiet co-writer.
Smyers calls it "a message from your future self to your present and past self."
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"Dogs in Our Twenties" examines mortality through the eyes of man's best friend. Dogs endure cheap apartments, mattresses on floors, moving boxes, new towns and the unstable years when young adults are still trying to find themselves.
"All you ever wanted was love, all I ever wanted was more time," the two sing. "Even when we didn't have much, you stayed by my side / We grow up together, I don't know why / Dogs in our twenties can't live our whole lives."
Mooney said that it can feel vulnerable and strange to write songs so candidly about their own lives, especially as two men with kids, dogs and families of their own.
"It's us in an album," Mooney said. "The pursuit was never anything specific. It was like, 'Let's just look at our lives and write about them.'"
Christian music meets country pop
At CMA Fest in June, thousands of country fans packed Brandon Lake's Cowboy Church performance along the Cumberland River. Midway through the service, Lake brought out Dan + Shay to perform "Her, the Kids, and Jesus." It was one of many performances throughout the festival that celebrated Christianity.
"She calls me 'Love,' they call me 'Daddy,' He'll call me up when my day's all done," the three sang. "I don't deserve all I've been given / I'm blessed in way more ways than one / Got it real good, got three good reasons / Her, the kids, and Jesus."
It is one of two songs on "Young" that bring the duo's Christian faith more explicitly into their music.
Warner Music Nashville co-chair and co-president Cris Lacy, who has worked at the label for more than 20 years, sees the growing overlap between country and Christian music as an opportunity for artists to express something that has long been part of the genre.
"Faith has always been at the core of the values of this genre," Lacy said. "Our artists are getting to live that faith in a different way."
Data provided by the Country Music Association shows the crossover has remained steady. Among the top 15,000 country songs tracked by Luminate, an average of 1.50% were also tagged as Christian in 2026, compared with 1.48% in 2025, about 225 songs versus 223. The CMA said the data does not indicate a meaningful year-over-year increase.
Lacy said country artists once might have relegated explicit expressions of faith to the final song on an album or an awards acceptance speech. Now, she sees more room for what she calls "imperfect redemption" — artists singing about faith while also acknowledging failure, struggle and getting back up.
But Mooney does not see the faith-centered material as a pivot toward Christian music. Instead, it shows that Christian music can be seen as a type of autobiographical country song, like breakup songs or love songs, rather than only being viewed as a separate genre.
"I don't think we really set out to do anything other than kind of take a snapshot of where we're at," Mooney said. "Those are just kind of stories about my day. Like one more 'Goodnight Moon.' I'm reading 100 books before, and it's really that moment of going downstairs and hanging out with my wife. It really is a snapshot of my life."
"Bible in the Truck" is reminiscent of Carrie Underwood's "Don't Forget to Remember Me," turning a parent's practical advice into instructions for leaving home. But the final verse flips the perspective, turning the kid receiving those lessons into the parent passing them down. Mooney, now a father of four, name-checks his oldest son, Asher James, as he pictures handing him the keys to that same old Chevrolet.
"I can't listen to it without crying," Mooney said.
For artists entering an adjacent musical space, Lacy said audiences can tell the difference between an authentic extension of who an artist is and an attempt to chase a growing genre.
"Is this a legitimate desire, and are they walking the walk?" Lacy said. "Or are they just trying to capitalize on something that's growing right now?"
'The Old Guys'
After COVID interrupted a career that included 200 shows a year, Smyers and Mooney began drifting apart. Without the constant motion, they had to confront what their partnership had become.
Smyers eventually asked Mooney to come to his house. His wife, Abby, took the dogs for the night, leaving the two men to talk.
"We were at a crossroads in our career," Smyers said. "We either need to figure out if we're going to double down, rebuild our relationship like it was early on, hug it out, find that connection again, or ride off into the sunset and not look back on what we've done in vain."
They chose to stay together.
"Being in a duo is like being in a marriage," Smyers said. "If you're not being open and going out of your way to communicate and foster and build that relationship, it can go separate ways."
What followed included some of their biggest moments. A rehearsal performance of Taylor Swift's "Back to December" prompted fans to demand a full cover, while their a cappella national anthem at the World Cup went viral.
By now, Dan + Shay have little left to prove commercially. The three-time Grammy winners have amassed more than 14 billion global streams and 139 worldwide gold, platinum and multi-platinum certifications. But after more than a decade of measuring success in No. 1s, streams and trophies, Smyers says "Young" came with a different benchmark.
"We didn't make this album for it to be a commercial success," Smyers said. "I hope it is our biggest album. We all do. But we can't control that. We can control the creation and how we feel about the creation and the process and enjoying it, but when I die, I want to look back on this album and be like, 'I am so proud of that.'"
Bryan West is a music reporter at The Tennessean, part of the USA TODAY Network. Follow him on Instagram, TikTok and X as @BryanWestTV.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Dan + Shay put faith at 'Young's center. It's still a country album
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