“I stepped off the stage with nothin’ left,” Shawn sings in one of the verses. “All the lights were f–kin’ with my head / But here I am, singin’ songs again.”
It was a time of his life the pop star is still grappling with.
“I felt super, super lost,” he admitted. “The shows I could get through and find beauty in them. But when I would step offstage, I just didn’t recognize myself. I was a shell—like talking to a wall.”
And it was when he found himself looking to alcohol and smoking ahead of shows, and alcohol again as a means of “escape” after the shows, he decided to make a change.
“I was like, ‘I’m not going to rewrite the same story that’s been written a thousand times by musicians and artists,’” he explained. “Where they can’t cope and they’d start taking more drugs, more alcohol, until it’s too much. I’m not doing that. I’m just going hard left.”
