The lead single from Grammy Award-winning duo Dan + Shay’s forthcoming album “Young” constitutes a stark departure from the matrimonial ballads that pervade the bulk of the country pair’s discography.

___ EDITOR’S NOTE — This story includes discussion of suicide.

Should you or someone you know require assistance, the national suicide and crisis lifeline in the United States is accessible by calling or texting 988.

An online chat option is likewise available at 988lifeline.org

“Say So,” with its big-hearted and hopeful chorus, is about suicide prevention.

It was written in tribute to Dan Smyers and Shay Mooney’s late mentor Ben Vaughn, head of Warner Chappell Music Publishing, who died by suicide a year before.

“If you are traversing the inferno, you do not traverse it in solitude,” Mooney sings.

“Should you require companionship, make your need known.”

For one of the earliest junctures in our professional odyssey, I found myself beset by uncertainty, pondering, ‘I’m not wholly convinced we ought to embark upon this,’” Smyers observed.

In the studio, however, it assumed an air of inevitability—despite their lingering trepidation.

“We were merely exchanging anecdotes about our friend, and it simply poured forth from us.

A verse and a chorus in, and I believe we were all struck by the same thought: ‘I don’t know, man. Is this too weighty a subject to confront?’”

Smyers continued.

The collaborative crafting of the demo, undertaken in tandem with co-writers David Hodges and Jimmy Robbins, evolved into a profoundly therapeutic process.

"We owed it to our friend Ben," he said.

"We owe it to the community, to whom he meant so much.

And I feel we owed it to ourselves to at least see that one through to its conclusion."

What they failed to apprehend was that the day they commenced work on the song coincided with what would have been Vaughn’s 50th birthday.

“It was more than a coincidence,” he remarked.

“That was the sign that this song could help somebody.”

“Say So” may be the most ponderous track on “Young,” yet it simultaneously constitutes the thematic fulcrum of the album — ten autobiographical forays into crossover country that mirror their present-day existence with newfound emotional candor, an oeuvre Mooney characterizes as “a very life-giving thing.”

The album commences with its eponymous title track, the stripped-back acoustic arpeggio “Young,” which Smyers characterizes as “a message from your future self to your present and past self, about the passage of time and appreciating the moment.”

Yet there persists an additional, gendered dimension to this phenomenon.

"Men — I just think, perhaps I'm overgeneralizing — tend to be less adept at articulating their feelings and emotions.

And I say that because I speak from personal experience," he remarked.

Your fortitude is undeniable; you suppress it all, sealing it within.

Yet when I at last breached that bulwark, it proved transformative.

And I believe that song speaks to the inexorable process of aging as a man.

That is yet another formidable subject, which may also elucidate why, prior to crafting the ten compositions constituting “Young,” Dan + Shay authored and discarded an entire album’s worth of material.

The tracks comprising the final compilation demanded time, candid and forthright dialogue, and a substantial measure of introspection.

This may account for the heightened religiosity pervading this album relative to its predecessors — discernible from the single “Her, The Kids and Jesus” to the album’s two allusions to a King James Bible.

"Her, the kids and Jesus," that's kind of a snapshot at what my life looks like right now," Mooney said.

Grief — and affection — manifest in multifarious guises throughout “Young.”

From the elegiac homage to a young adult’s inaugural canine companion (“Dogs in Our Twenties”) to a subversive reimagining of the conventional love-song paradigm, wherein one beseeches the divine for their partner’s demise subsequent to their own (the ‘90s country-inflected “The Old Guys”), the tracks are rendered with palpable tenderness.

The latter features the album’s sole guest appearance, Cody Johnson — a neo-traditionalist within the country milieu who, ostensibly, might appear incongruous with Dan + Shay’s genre-blurring eclecticism.

After all, these are the very artists who, in 2019, produced the septuple-platinum crossover juggernaut “10,000 Hours” alongside Justin Bieber.

"We occupy a very different space in country music," agrees Smyers.

Even vocally — Mooney’s got a high register, Johnson sings low, and when they’re all singing together, "It’s, like, perfectly meeting in the middle."

It further accentuates the album's extraordinary scope.

"There's kind of a song for everybody, for whatever you're going through," Mooney observes.

"Whatever people need to extract from this album, I hope that they procure it."