Dan + Shay felt the musical magic between them from the beginning. The two met as aspiring singer-songwriters, and realized immediately that their gifts and talents paired well together. But they almost lost a piece of their history, due to an unfortunate event while out on the water somewhere in Nashville.
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"The first song we ever wrote together - our story has been insane since then," Dan Smyers says. "But we wrote a song, and this dates us I guess. We did have phones at the time, but for some reason we hand-wrote the lyrics out to this song that we wrote on a yellow legal pad."
Snyers put the lyrics in a head phones case and went out with his co-writer, Shay Mooney, to enjoy a leisurely day out in the water.
"We were out on the Harpeth River," Smyers remembers. "We were canoeing or kayaking with a bunch of friends. This was early days. We're just running around being crazy, and we were out there. And for some reason I had this in a backpack, and Shay and I were in this canoe. We tipped the canoe, everything went into the water, and this lyric sheet somehow survived."
Miraculously, the lyric sheet survived, which seems certain was an early omen for the success they would have.
"The words are pretty faded off it," Smyers says. "We wrote it with a pencil, so it's not great. But in terms of our career having the first song we ever wrote together on paper written out like that, faded from falling in the river when we tipped the canoe is, I think, pretty priceless. I got to dig that up and find it. Maybe frame it, take better care of it."
How Dan + Shay Began
Both Smyers and Mooney were pursuing music on their own when fate intervened, on December 7, 2012.
"I walked in there and met this guy named Dan Smyers ... and there was just a group of these people that I walked in and met for the very first time," Mooney tells Backstage Country.
"And little did I know that was going to change the trajectory of both of our lives," the father of four continues. "Which, is just crazy that I can look back and pinpoint a moment that truly changed my life forever. And that's why I loved telling the story because I remember exactly where I was."
