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 Shawn Mendes is GQ's Solo Artist of the Year |
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 26th November 2020, 10:22 PM
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 nabad
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Joined: 13 February 2013 Posts: 28,374 User: 18,316 
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Shawn has been named GQ's Solo Artist of the Year, is one of the cover stars and has given an interview about life during lockdown, writing, etc. Will update with more info as it comes through. That photoshoot though 
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26th November 2020, 10:27 PM
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#2
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nabad
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Joined: 13 February 2013 Posts: 28,374 User: 18,316
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Full interview:
QUOTE Shawn Mendes is having an epiphany. He’s had a lot of them recently, but I just happen to be present for this one. I had wanted to know if the fact he started his music career on social media influenced the way he made art. He pauses (Mendes, it should be noted, rarely pauses). “I never thought about that,” he muses. “But that makes a lot of sense. My brain was kind of wired to communicate to the masses, before the music even started.” Just as The X Factor bred Harry Styles, Nickelodeon was the training ground of Ariana Grande and Disney honed Miley Cyrus’ craft, it was the now-defunct video platform Vine that gave us Shawn Mendes. It was there that he found success performing six-second covers of famous songs and after his version of Justin Bieber’s “As Long As You Love Me” blew up, he took his chance to become a star. He signed to Island Records at 15 years old, with a million fans begging for a single before he even released one. Mendes, now 22, has worked hard to remind everyone that he is a songwriter as well as a singer: said songs have propelled him to astronomical heights, with his last three albums all going to No1 in the US and with 12 platinum or multi-platinum singles, including “There’s Nothing Holdin’ Me Back”, “Señorita” and “If I Can’t Have You”. He supported Taylor Swift before selling out New York’s Madison Square Garden and The O2 arena in London during four headline tours and stirred a thousand loins as a Calvin Klein underwear model. He’s ubiquitous enough at this point that, even during lockdown, he gets asked for selfies when he’s at the pharmacy. So far, however, so standard: as long as there have been emotions, there have been beautiful troubadours who spoke to them. But Shawn Mendes’ origins on Vine and YouTube make him a much more interesting artist: once committed to “always saying the right thing”, Mendes is a social media native who has often subordinated himself to his own success, mainly because he knows people are always watching. But in 2020, something has changed in Mendes: he’s realised that the expectation to be hot and omniscient is a completely unsustainable way to live and that what was once the curse of celebrity is now experienced by anyone with a social media account. With a documentary just released on Netflix and his fourth album out this month, Mendes is asking something of himself and his audience: what’s more important, perfection or vulnerability? Mendes has grown his hair long in lockdown: once famed for his purposefully tussled barnet, he’s now gone for purposefully bohemian shoulder-length waves. He wanders through his girlfriend’s family home in Miami, where he is surrounded by guitars on the walls and his dogs, which have decided to get frisky while he Zooms me from the garden. “Jesus. He’s so small. It’s a German shepherd and a Pomeranian.” Miami has played a vital role in the story of the new Shawn Mendes and in the creation of his new album, Wonder: a record that manages the impossible feat of being both emotionally honest and more extravagantly sexy than any he’s put out before. After years of being the handsome, unblemished heartthrob who travelled the world and never turned down a selfie, the coronavirus meant Mendes was no longer going from hotel room to hotel room, destination to destination. He spent three months living with his partner, the singer Camila Cabello, and her family and finally got to live the life he’d never got to have before: he cooked dinner, he did laundry. “I [was able to]have a routine, watch a movie nightly with family, do the dishes, stuff that sounds pretty mundane, but actually... when you’re living in a hotel room, you never do laundry.” One day, he says, he was in the laundry room and found the smell of it so powerful he just sat down, his back against the wall, and took it in until the washing machine stopped, the scent making him feel like he was ten years old and back in Canada. The album is laden with meditations on just how quickly his life had been moving up until this point: much of the album was worked on in lockdown, particularly in Miami with Cabello, who “should be a ghostwriter on everything”. His music has often toyed with the conceit of “a rock star in a foreign clime” – most notably on 2018 single “Lost In Japan” – but here it is inescapable. On “Call My Friends” he writes of being far away from the people he grew up with in Toronto, with the very frank chorus, “I should call my friends and go get high / I need a vacation from my life.” Immediately after, on “Dream”, he is calling out to a partner he “can’t wait to get home” to as they work on different continents. Then straight after, on “Song For No One”, Mendes sings, “Wake up a little drunk / Check my phone. I’m all alone”, receiving texts from everyone but the person he cares for. Even on an album written in the most mundane time of his life, waking up with his partner day in and day out, it’s an album that shows him really unspooling what it means to have spent so much time in transit and to fundamentally be playing catch-up on how to be young. “My friends were back in Toronto getting high, partying or whatever,” he says. “And I just felt like... damn. I don’t know what you have to write about if you’re missing out on it all the time.” Writing about getting high is not the way we’ve come to know Mendes. Showing vulnerability, frankly, isn’t how we’ve known Mendes. This was all part of the artist he wanted to be, he admits, but it was exhausting to maintain. “I held myself accountable to that image of not doing anything wrong, or saying anything wrong, so hard over the last few years,” he says. He knows, however, that this USP has been part of his power: “It’s not that that’s got me here. But it is a part of where I am.” He knew he didn’t have to be perfect, he says. Everyone who loved him told him that. They would tell him, “You are not your body. You are not your voice. You are not your songs. You are you and people love you because of you.” But the voice in his head said otherwise. “Some days I would have three hours of sleep, [because] I’d get up two hours early just to be able to work out”, all to quiet the nagging neurosis that would tell him, “If you don’t work out, you’re going to lose fans.” His Calvin Klein campaign didn’t help. He had connected his identity with being a “pinnacle of fitness” and the struggle for perfection was beginning to get to him. But a few things helped: he started meditating and journalling. He signs off every entry with the same message to himself: “Love you, man, got your back.” He also saw how Cabello’s body was treated by the public and the press, which he knows is ten times more intense than the scrutiny he faced. But then he also saw how she responded. “So strong, so clear and confident with her [body] and so articulate and empathetic about other people’s,” he recalled, “and it really changed my view of mine. It really changed my life.” He realised that “taking that extra few hours of sleep, instead of waking up to pump iron, is a better choice sometimes”. The pandemic has also helped. Taken away from the usual work cycle, he was able to think more about the type of artist he wanted to be. He hates not being able to see his fans, but he also knows that “it has allowed me to become more internal and get deeper inside of myself”. He would run early ideas past Cabello, in itself a test of how vulnerable he could be with his art: “You have a choice to either open up and be very vulnerable or to be locked down and not show her anything.” So he chose the former: he’d show her his most nascent of ideas and hear what she had to say. “There are so many instances during making an album when you want to drop an idea because it’s stupid or it’s not sounding great. And it does! It sounds stupid and doesn’t sound great for some weeks. But then it comes out on the other end and ends up being everything you wanted it to be,” he says. “And you need a support system. And I had support from her, which was different from any support I’ve ever felt before.” Part of what has changed this album, he says, was moving away from thinking the way he used to: of being hot-wired to appeal to the masses first. On his earlier albums, half of what ruled his artistic judgment was whether other people would like it. “It’s a shitty way to make art,” he says now. “To make art in order to have people like it and purchase it becomes a very stressful and hard thing.” You can feel this change of perspective all over Wonder: it varies and oscillates, seduces and soliloquises, zigs when the song would otherwise zag. He’s at a stage where, finally, he’s realised vulnerability is more powerful than perfection. “To have to be someone you’re not, to the whole world, is horrible. And I know how difficult it is to be authentic,” he says. “[But] I can speak to you clearly because I’m not dancing around my real self. I’m just being me with you. And that’s beauty. And that’s success.” It can feel unbearable to hear a beautiful, rich, famous man tell you that success is not about being beautiful, rich or famous. If anyone knows that it’s Shawn Mendes, who is both desperate to share what he’s learned – going off into heartfelt and intelligent monologues frequently when we spoke – and also aware that he’s in a position of immense privilege. If there’s one thing he doesn’t want people to take away from his new documentary, Shawn Mendes: In Wonder, it’s that “they’ll finally be happy once they become a superstar”. Instead, he hopes people come away realising that “the beauty and the happiness that I find in the film comes from art and the music and the way it makes people feel”. It is fascinating to speak to a pop star who not only knows the burden of constant scrutiny, but also understands that nearly all of his fans have experienced a version of it themselves. He was having a “beautiful conversation” with Alicia Keys the other day – another artist who signed to a label in her teens and didn’t slow down until her twenties – during which she pointed out that “for a long time, it was only celebrities who knew what this pressure was like, of constantly being watched by the world”. Now? Instagram, Twitter or TikTok – a platform filled with people trying to do exactly what Mendes did on one of its progenitors – means everyone knows “what it’s like to feel watched, to feel like you have to please people”. So now his understanding of how hard it is to be an expert all the time, meaningful all the time, right all the time, is something that has relevance to every human being on earth. He wants men to understand there’s a difference between being healthy and being obsessed with your abs; he wants his fans to know it’s OK to slip up and admit you don’t know something. He wants people to learn what he is still trying to master: the art of vulnerability. “It opens the door up for softness and sweetness and support. I really just want to be someone who drops his guards and hopefully inspires others to do the same.” He knows this is going to be tough, that when this pandemic begins to fade it will take a long time for people to heal and for people to be patient again, with others and also with themselves. So he plans on being more “vocal and vulnerable” to prove to others how important this is. “I’m not really caring if that affects whatever my image should be, or would be or what, because I think there’s something so important here. And that’s to make people feel better and make people feel safe and supported,” he says, firmly. “But the truth is, it’s so hard to be human.” Some interesting info about songs from the album in there too - Dream, Song For No One and Call My Friends 
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28th November 2020, 06:39 PM
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 "Jayrusaleminians" - Umi.
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Joined: 4 April 2007 Posts: 41,456 User: 3,217
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The front cover
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