“It feels really good to be in the driver’s seat,” singer-songwriter Shawn Mendes tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe on the eve of releasing Shawn, his first album in four years and most personal record to date. A teenage social-media sensation who became one of pop’s biggest stars in the late 2010s, Mendes pulled back after the release of 2020’s Wonder, cancelling a 2022 tour and setting out on a journey to find himself, a decision he calls “terrifying” but one that was ultimately liberating. “It was the greatest gift I’ve ever given myself,” he says. “I gave myself a life. The best part about that is, it taught me that the next time I’m standing at the crossroads between choosing something in my truth or doing what would make everyone else happy, I have this reference point.” “Everything’s hard to explain out loud,” Mendes sings on the hushed opener “Who I Am”, a sketched overview of where Mendes has been and what’s to come over the next half-hour. It strips down Mendes’ music to its essence—vocals and strummed guitar framing lyrics that detail the way his thoughts raced as his life got too big around him. Shawn feels loose and confident even as it’s economical, putting Mendes’ reflections and smoke-plume voice front and centre on the campfire sing-along “Why Why Why” and his tender, album-closing cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”. The swaying “Heart of Gold” is a Laurel Canyon-inspired cut where Mendes laments the way a long-time friend slipped out of his circle before passing away, its weeping slide guitar providing a counterpoint to the bittersweet reminiscing about the days when he and his friend “shot for the stars”. “That’ll Be the Day” is fatefully lovelorn, its arrangement as delicate as lace, as Mendes muses on the idea of eternal love. On “The Mountain”, Mendes takes aim at the many rumours that have swirled around him and his intimates over the last two years in gently devastating fashion, rebuking anyone who might put him in a box while acoustic guitars roil beneath him. “Call it what you want,” Mendes sings on its refrain, and that phrase became an almost-defiant mantra for him as he was working on his fifth album. The song references a spiritual experience he had in Kauai. “Without going into the exact details of it, leaving that mountain that day gave me something I’ve always wanted, which was a sense of security that no success could ever provide me, no relationship could ever provide me,” he says. “It was security with myself. A lot changed after that, because when you’re not chasing something, you let go. And then it almost feels like things are starting to appear.” As he tells Lowe, whatever label people might want to place on him “really doesn’t matter, because I feel this.” Shawn, as a whole, is a statement of purpose from a musician who’s a veteran of the game in his mid-twenties—and it shows what he’s capable of when there’s nothing holding him back.