After the 'highs and lows' of success, Dan + Shay are back with 'Bigger Houses'

A decade ago, eight No. 1 Billboard singles on country radio, quintuple-platinum album sales, and the equivalent of over 30 million singles sold were not remotely a part of the Christmas party conversation that initially unified Shay Mooney, a T-Pain affiliated, pop-crossover singer-songwriter, and Dan Smyers, a guitar-slinging indie rocker.

Five albums, 14 tours, marriages, three children (Mooney), five rescue dogs (Smyers), and a COVID-19 quarantine later, the duo's new album "Bigger Houses" arrives as the tandem emerges from struggling with what happens when unexpected technological advances, pop stardom, country's industrial expectations and maintaining a work-life balance collide.

"Connecting with our fans on a fundamental, essential, and authentic level is what drives our art," says Smyers in an interview with The Tennessean.

'Bigger Houses' and the duo's 'recovery'

"We've finished recovering from the highs and lows of the journey we've been on for the past 10 years," Smyers says, regarding what motivated "Bigger Houses."

The duo's chase for acclaim occurred at the sacrifice of joy, care for themselves and maintaining their interpersonal relationships.

At their root, the tandem exists best as a celebration of the joyous, connective qualities of the popular music made between 1995 and 2005, when America's domestic music sales peaked.

A trio of their pre-COVID-released hits, "Tequila," "Speechless" and Justin Bieber duet "10,000 Hours," is best regarded as coming from minds initially inspired by an era of genre-blending musical freedom.

For Mooney, the loss of his and Smyers' ability to consistently achieve Nashville's "seemingly unattainable rock star magic" was one of his career's most profound artistic lows.

"We found ourselves chasing after Lenny Kravitz's Grammy-level success," jokes Smyers. "That'll leave you in a moment similar to the one I found myself one night in Boston after selling out the TD Bank Garden.

"The highest high. The lowest low," he says with a deep lament.

However, their new album finds that magic recovered via the revival of their lockstep connection with their 2 million followers on Instagram and TikTok, plus 14 million monthly listeners on Spotify alone.

"(Album title track) 'Bigger Houses' is my favorite song we've ever done because its lyrics hit me like a ton of bricks," says Mooney.

"Instead of unnecessarily replacing setting goals with setting records and using material things (to supersede) happiness, we're now re-focused and unified on achieving goals for our families, our fans and ourselves."

For perspective, the song speaks of losing sleep while attempting to fill one's bank account to buy a bigger house on a hill.

When songwriting metaphors match hard-lived realities, the value of a chorus that warns about there always being a "higher high" seemingly worth chasing hits differently.

Success greater than streaming's 'big numbers'

To understand Dan + Shay on a fundamental country music industry level requires knowledge that their success knocked down a door just before COVID-19's quarantine that the industry itself — now multiple times over — has used to shatter global commercial expectations for the genre.

"10,000 Hours" featured Bieber and followed five years of the duo predicating part of their success on America's adaption to then domestically new streaming platform Spotify. Bieber's Spotify-popular trap, tropical house, hip-hop, and reggaeton tracks by DJ Snake, Major Lazer, DJ Khaled, and Luis Fonsi, respectively , had sales equivalent to 30 million units.

"Tequila" added 8 million to that total.

Two years after the success of "Tequila," success, Morgan Wallen alone has over 30 million units sold on mega-popular solo Spotify singles alone.

To wit, his 2023-released hit "Last Night" was the portal's "Song of the Summer."

"Our progressive style and Rascal Flatts-style tenor vocals were polarizing 10 years ago," jokes Smyers. "But the music we stuck to our guns and kept making because we love it is a global movement now.

"It's cool to hear that country music has, as we knew, the ability to compare and compete against music made worldwide."

For Dan + Shay, the success artists like Wallen, Zach Bryan, Luke Combs, HARDY, Jelly Roll and Lainey Wilson are currently having as country uses streaming to springboard into the forefront of the pop music conversation is seen as generally beneficial. To them, the genre cementing itself in the Top 40 marketplace is a rising tide that lifts all metaphorical boats.

"Does this moment make its forefathers, like us, reassess what success looks like? Sure," Smyers says. "Now, we're searching our souls for the things we love more than chasing big numbers. Trying to keep up with everyone is challenging, so we've gotten back to driving around and listening to demos that make us feel better than chasing trends might."

Music that lives in 'the hearts and lives' of country fans

"We're gonna put out an album every couple of years that focuses on quality material that spotlights what we authentically do best," Smyers adds.

When queried as to precisely what that is, a point is made to discuss their adeptness at singing and writing about the arc of a relationship from courtship to marriage and then through the travails of maintaining marital bliss.

The song "10,000 Hours" works because it draws an analogy between Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers" book theory on the type of repetition required to achieve sustainable success to "(learning a partner's) sweet heart" and the 500 miles the Proclaimers were willing to walk to "be the man who wakes up next to (their partner)" in their two-decade-old hit.

"We're super proud that we've performed songs that our fans use as their first wedding dance (like "10,000 Hours"). Having material that applies to someone's life 20 years down the line is the goal," says Mooney.

"Our hits ideally will be the equivalent of Alan Jackson's and George Strait's '90s country catalog and live on forever in the hearts and lives of this generation of country fans."

Adds Smyers: "Nothing is more powerful than being able to locate where you are and what you were doing when you first heard a song,"

Regarding those previously mentioned notions, "Bigger Houses" tracks "Heartbreak on the Map," "For the Both of Us" and "We Should Get Married" sound like a trifecta of Keith Whitley, Garth Brooks and Alan Jackson country hits — they're also about heartbreak, asking a father for a daughter's hand in marriage and planning a wedding, respectively.

"We want the kinds of songs where people can reflect on them and get flooded with the positivity in that moment, or that our music caused in that moment," Smyers says.

On Apple Music Radio, Mooney stated that the new album was "the first time an entire record has genuinely felt like this is who we are as people, where we're at in our lives and where we want to go."

Smyers summarized his excitement about the project with a statement at the crux of who Dan + Shay were and who they've best evolved.

"These songs are our best material yet and market themselves best by hitting people in the heart."

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Dan + Shay release new album 'Bigger Houses'