The lead single from Grammy Award-winning duo Dan + Shay's upcoming album "Young" is a clear shift away from the wedding songs that make up a large part of the country pair's discography.

___ EDITOR’S NOTE — This story addresses the topic of suicide.

If you or someone you know is in crisis, the U.S. national suicide and crisis lifeline can be reached by calling or texting 988.

An online chat option is also available at 988lifeline.org ___

"Say So," with its generous and optimistic chorus, deals with the topic of suicide prevention.

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

"If you're going through hell, you're not alone," Mooney sings.

"If you need somebody, say so."

For one of the first times in our career, I found myself thinking, ‘I’m not entirely certain we ought to take this on,’” Smyers said.

But in the studio, it became an inevitability — even though they were uncertain.

“We were just sharing stories about our friend.

And it just fell out of us.

A verse and a chorus in, and I think we were all just like, ‘I don’t know, man.

Is this too heavy to tackle?’” Smyers continued.

Collaborating on the demo with co-writers David Hodges and Jimmy Robbins proved to be a cathartic experience.

“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 the finish line.”

What they failed to grasp 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 heaviest song on “Young,” but it also serves as the album's thematic core — ten autobiographical tracks of crossover country that reflect their lives now with a new emotional openness, which Mooney describes as “a very life-giving thing.”

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

Yet there is an additional, gendered dimension to this.

"Men — I just think, perhaps I'm generalizing — don't do as well at sharing their feelings and emotions.

And I say that because that's me," he said.

You possess a formidable resilience, yet you suppress your emotions.

However, when I eventually dismantled that barrier, it proved transformative for me.

I believe that particular song addresses the experience of maturing as a man.

That is yet another complex topic, which might also explain why, before creating the ten songs that make up "Young," Dan + Shay wrote and abandoned an entire album's worth of material.

The tracks that formed the final collection required time, open and honest communication, and a good deal of self-reflection.

This may explain why this album carries a more pronounced religious undertone than its predecessors — evident in the single “Her, The Kids and Jesus” and the two allusions to a King James Bible woven throughout the record.

“Her, the kids and Jesus,” that’s a fairly accurate snapshot of my life at present,” Mooney remarked.

Grief — and affection — take many forms throughout “Young.”

From the ode to a young adult’s first pet (“Dogs in Our Twenties”) to a twist on the traditional love song format and the hope that your partner dies before you (the ‘90s country-channeling “The Old Guys”), the songs are delivered with tenderness.

The latter includes the album’s sole feature, Cody Johnson — a neo-traditionalist in country music who, on paper, may seem at odds with Dan + Shay’s genre-hybridity.

After all, these are the same guys who recorded the multiplatinum crossover hit “10,000 Hours” featuring Justin Bieber in 2019.

“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 breadth.

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

"Whatever people need to take away from this album, I hope they do."