Some Things Never Change [SHAWN MENDES]

January 23, 2021

It was snowing.

This certainly wasn't a miraculous event, but when I looked out the huge windows of my condo, I was surprised to see that the sky had turned gray and that large white flakes were lazily floating down towards the street, eleven stories below. In the distance, the CN Tower was aglow in a bright teal color.

We hadn't had much snow lately. In fact, snowfall totals were lower in general. Global warming was a bitch.

My phone vibrated in my hand, drawing my eyes away from the snow-globe view, and I saw that my agent had texted a list of dates and locations.

Tour dates.

In March 2020, everything went to shit when the coronavirus pandemic struck the world. I'd been planning on releasing an album late that spring, but that went out the window along with my tour plans. For most of 2020, no one knew when concerts would resume. I was left hanging, unsure if when I'd perform again or if live concerts would be anything like they used to be. There were whispers in the music community that only outdoor shows would be allowed in the future or that we'd only be able to book a quarter of the seats in an indoor venue to accommodate social distancing. Many artists proclaimed that they were staying off stage until there was a vaccine.

I got it. I understood the science and the necessity for safety. But that didn't mean that I liked it. The pandemic was catastrophic in terms of lives lost, which saddened me and increased my anxiety tenfold. It also fucked up my entire professional and personal life.

Towards the end of 2020, things started to look up a little. My fourth album, Wonder, dropped and did better than expected. Trump was defeated in the US around the same time, and people there finally started taking the virus seriously. After 270,000 American deaths, their curve flattened. Here in Canada, things had improved much earlier, which says everything about the importance of good leadership. I'd left Los Angeles and returned to Toronto as the 2020 wildfires started raging and hadn't been back. That was changing. I was going there in two days to work on a remix for one of my songs and I could not wait.

In Europe and on several other continents, a vaccine had been approved in November 2020 and had shown to be very successful. The US and Canada were still in the clinical trial stages, but it looked like North America would start mass vaccinations in the spring.

This meant I was finally going on tour.

From LA, I was flying to Australia and New Zealand, two of the safest places in terms of covid-19. They'd handled the pandemic beautifully, so I had no reservations about traveling there. I'd get home February 10th and would have several months off until the European leg of my tour started in late April.

My band and I hadn't had a lot of time to practice, so the Oceania leg of the tour was a warm-up of sorts, and our hope was to have a polished act by the time we got to Europe. This wasn't how I usually did things; I was a bit of a perfectionist by nature. The dates had been scheduled at what felt like the last minute to me, and I'd had to learn to be a bit more flexible.

I perused the dates Andrew Gertler had forwarded. These were for the North American tour, which was currently being scheduled. He'd set it up so that I'd kick off the tour here in Toronto in September, and then hit most of the major cities in Canada and the US. This was all tentative at the moment, since it was dependent on a viable vaccine. Concerts had not resumed in the United States yet, so we had no idea what my tour would look like in terms of crowd numbers. I didn't give a fuck if my revenue was cut drastically; I just wanted to perform.

In Oceania and Europe, I'd only be playing outdoor venues, but the North American leg was in the fall and winter so that wasn't a possibility once the temps dropped in October. It was likely that masks would still be required indoors. I couldn't imagine standing in front of thousands of masked faces, unable to see them smiling or singing along.