Dan + Shay‘s follow-up to 2021’s Good Things is shaping up to be even better things.

That’s because last year, Dan Smyers and Shay Mooney decided to go back to their beginnings as they celebrated a career milestone.

“We’ve been together for 10 years, been able to, like, live out our dreams, all this cool stuff,” Dan tells ABC Audio. “Like aren’t we the luckiest guys in the world? And [we] kinda sat back down and just got a guitar like we did when we first met. And we hit this creative stride.”

That included setting the bar high when it came to writing songs.

“We kinda set a goal,” Dan continues. “We’re like, ‘We’re gonna write 50 songs this year’ — which, like, doesn’t seem like that many for just songwriters in Nashville. We’ve got people writing 150 songs, 200 songs.”

“But with how busy we are,” he explains, “it was, like, a manageable goal. And we did, and we just blew past that. And I feel like we wrote our best material of our career so far.” 

Dan + Shay currently have a top 20 hit with “You,” the latest single off Good Things.

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