Shawn Mendes seems happier than ever. He just had the time of his life headlining Rock In Rio 2024. He will release Shawn, his fifth LP, on October 18, and he’s supporting the album with a string of intimate theater concerts.
It’s a far cry from where he was two years ago.
In July 2022, Mendes canceled his Wonder world tour and subsequently all but disappeared from the public eye.
Mendes appeared on an episode of the Jay Shetty Podcast released on September 30 and explained his decision to (temporarily) walk away.
“The reality is anyone who does anything at a high level knows that it’s hard,” Mendes said. “It’s hard. Anything you want to do that’s extraordinary is hard, so there are gonna be these moments where it feels really hard, and it feels like you can’t do it. I think every athlete or performer knows that there are these dips and peaks, and that’s just part of it. The problem is that, for me, the hardest part of being in a state — I don’t even know the right word to describe it, but you could say depression. You could say anxiety. You could say just general darkness or lowness. The hardest thing about that is not feeling that way; it’s that the feeling that way makes you look at your life through that lens, and therefore, all the love that’s around you — all the people who are loving you and supporting you — you can’t even see that love anymore.”
Mendes continued, “I’ve done a lot of tours, and I’ve been in hard places before. I think the reality was that it just became really, really clear to me that I needed to diversify in life in that, since I was a kid, my entire life had been about one thing. It had been about performing and making music and just a constant cycle. It was amazing, but the reality is that I really do believe the ‘all your eggs in one basket’ is a dangerous way.”
Mendes admitted that he had previously advocated for putting all the eggs in one basket, but he eventually realized that he “had nowhere to go when things were getting hard” and “didn’t have other aspects of life that I felt connected to” that could have sustained him. He realized that the only way to build out a fuller life would be to cancel the Wonder tour.
“Canceling that tour was, by far, the hardest decision of my life, and by the far, the greatest decision of my life,” Mendes said. “It gave me a life. It gave me time to discover so much about myself.”
Watch the full Jay Shetty Podcast episode above.