Shawn Mendes is opening up without any reservations. On Monday, the 26-year-old singer addressed the audience during his For Friends and Family Tour at the Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado, taking a moment between songs to speak candidly. Recently, Mendes has been performing an upcoming track titled “The Mountain,” which appears to address discussions about his sexuality through its lyrics. “Some days, I have a change of heart / You can say what you need to say,” he sang, as seen in a TikTok video. “You can say I’m too young / You can say I’m too old / You can say I like girls or boys / Whatever fits your mold.”
Mendes further elaborated on the topic during the concert. “Since I was really young, there’s been this thing about my sexuality, and people have been talking about it for so long,” he shared with the crowd, as captured in a fan’s TikTok clip. “I think it’s kind of silly, because I think sexuality is such a beautifully complex thing, and it’s so hard to just put into boxes.” He continued, “It always felt like such an intrusion on something very personal to me, something that I was figuring out in myself, something that I had yet to discover, and still have yet to discover.” Mendes added that he’s “speaking freely now” to be “closer to everyone.” “The real truth about my life and my sexuality is that, man, I’m just figuring it out like everyone. I don’t really know sometimes, and I know other times. And it feels really scary because we live in a society that has a lot to say about that.” He concluded, “I’m trying to be really brave and just allow myself to be a human and feel things. And that’s all I really want to say about that for now.”
Mendes also touched on his dating life, expressing that he wants to relieve the “pressure” of finding “The One.” “When you’re single, there’s this pressure of looking for ‘The One,’ who’s ‘The One?’… Damn that’s a lot of pressure to put on someone when you first start dating,” he told the audience, as seen in a TikTok video. “For me, I’ve just been trying to take that pressure off of whoever, and just allow myself to experience the love that is happening in that moment, wherever and however that’s happening. Man, we all need a little bit of cuddling, a little bit of hugging,” Mendes added before moving on to his next song, “In Between.”
Mendes’ past relationships include on-and-off dating with Camila Cabello since 2019, and previous links to Hailey Bieber and Sabrina Carpenter. In 2020, he addressed rumors about his sexuality during an interview with Dax Shepard on the “Armchair Expert” podcast. “It was so, so frustrating for me because there were some people in my life that I was very, very close to, who were gay and in the closet,” Mendes told Shepard, 49, at the time. He further explained, “And I felt like this real anger for those people. It’s such a tricky thing. You want to say, ‘I’m not gay, but it’d be fine if I was gay – but also there’s nothing wrong with being gay, but I’m not.’ You don’t really know how to respond to the situation.” His upcoming self-titled LP is set to release on November 15.
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