Shawn Mendes opened his journal to a page, and now it’s there for all to see.
His new song “Why Why Why” gives fans a candid look at Mendes’ life as the singer opens up about his mental health challenges and a pregnancy scare that he had with an unknown partner.
In an interview with The New York Times published on Thursday, October 31, Mendes, 26, said he was initially hesitant to include such intimate details in the song, which will be included on his upcoming fifth studio album, Shawn, due out on November 15. His producer, however, pushed for it.
“Then I was like, ‘Why am I doing this?’” he recalled. “I wanted to break down any walls that were remaining, between me and people listening.”
“I 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,” he sings in “Why Why Why.”
Though Mendes never reveals who he was singing about, he dated Camila Cabello for two years from 2019 to 2021. The couple reunited before breaking things off for good in 2023. He was also briefly linked to Sabrina Carpenter but denied their relationship ever went beyond friendship.
Looking back on it, Mendes said the pregnancy scare “taught me a lot as a man.”
“I realized there [were] two options for me. It was literally like, ‘I’m going to go down this path of speaking my exact truth or I’m going to dance around it,’” Mendes told Zane Lowe in an Apple Music 1 interview from August. “It felt pointless to dance around it, even if the song was never to see the light of day.”
“Why Why Why” goes beyond the pregnancy scare and delves into his continuing struggles with mental health. In the past, he has been open about those challenges, even canceling his world tour in July 2022 to return home to focus on his mental health.
“I felt super, super lost,” he admitted to The New York Times. “The shows I could get through and find beauty in them. But when I would step offstage, I just didn’t recognize myself. I was a shell — like talking to a wall.”
When Mendes realized he was using smoking and drinking to cope with the pressures of his career, he knew it was time to make a change.
“I was like, ‘I’m not going to rewrite the same story that’s been written a thousand times by musicians and artists,’” he said. “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.”
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