Dan + Shay Look Back at Life, Love and Growing Older on New Album ‘Young’

Kelly McF

15 hours ago

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Thirteen years into their career together, Dan + Shay are looking at what it really means to grow up – and everything you gain, lose and learn along the way.

The country duo have released their sixth studio album, Young, a ten-track collection that moves through love, marriage, family, faith and the inevitable passing of time.

And despite its title, this isn’t simply an album about being young. It’s about looking back at who you were, appreciating where you are now and thinking about the person you still hope to become.

One of the most poignant examples comes with The Old Guys, a collaboration with Cody Johnson which imagines a couple growing old together, but also confronts the painful reality that eventually one of them will have to carry on without the other.

It’s a very different kind of love song to Marry You Again, which Dan + Shay recently performed on Good Morning America’s Summer Concert Series. Rather than focusing solely on the excitement of falling in love, the track looks at choosing the same person all over again after building a life together.

That idea of life moving forward runs throughout Young. Songs including Her, The Kids, And Jesus, Dogs In Our Twenties, Already Yours and Bible In The Truck give a pretty good indication of just how much ground the album covers.

Then there’s Say So.

Currently sitting inside the Top 15 at US country radio, the deeply personal song has also become part of a wider conversation around suicide prevention. Dan + Shay performed it at the 2026 Academy of Country Music Awards, helping bring its message to an even bigger audience.

Dan Smyers once again takes a significant role behind the scenes too, co-producing Young alongside longtime collaborator Scott Hendricks.

The album arrives more than a decade after Dan and Shay Mooney first began making music together, during which time they’ve gone from emerging country duo to three-time consecutive GRAMMY winners with more than 14 billion global streams.

There have been plenty of huge songs along the way. Tequila and Speechless became multi-Platinum hits, 10,000 Hours with Justin Bieber spent 21 weeks at the top of the Hot Country Songs chart, and Bigger Houses gave them their eleventh country radio number one.

But Young finds them at a very different stage of their lives from the two musicians who started this journey more than 13 years ago.

Perhaps that’s what makes the title work so well. Growing older doesn’t necessarily mean leaving your younger self behind. Sometimes it simply gives you enough distance to understand that version of yourself a little better.

Dan + Shay will take the album on the road this autumn with The Young Tour, beginning in Indiana on 11 September and travelling across North America for 26 dates before finishing in Mountain View, California on 7 November.

Tyler Hubbard and Josh Ross will join them as special guests across the tour.