Audacy's Katie Neal welcomed Dan + Shay as the week’s co-hosts for the Superstar Power Hour on all your favorite Audacy Country stations nationwide, getting into their exciting experience as coaches on The Voice, new music, and plenty more during their chat.
LISTEN NOW: Superstar Power Hour with Dan + Shay
Dan + Shay will be kicking off the extension of their Heartbreak on the Map Tour this month, making stops in 30 additional cities featuring special guests Jake Owen and Dylan Marlowe. The tour is named after the third track on the duo’s most recent album, Bigger Houses, which was released in 2023. See a full list of the duo’s summer tour dates below and grab your tickets HERE.
Though plenty of excitement from the stage is certainly expected, we’re not expecting to see any behind-the-scenes pranks going on between the pair while on the road. “We're not prank guys,” Dan Smyers explains. However he remembers, “Somebody sent me a picture from a thrift store and it was somebody who used to work at our record label. It was like, you know, ‘Tequila's gone more than 2X-platinum at this point, but somebody sold it to the thrift store and her name was on it… It was on sale for like three bucks. I was like, ‘Come on, this is unbelievable!’”
Katie recalled a time when she noticed some bar stools at a friend's house which just happened to have belonged to Dan at one point. “I'm slingin’ stuff on Facebook marketplace all the time,” he admits. “I'll go out of my way to get 10 bucks off somebody. You know what I mean? I'll sell like a rug pad or something. My full name is on there, like, verified account and everything.” He says once in a while he’ll get noticed, “But I'm just like, ‘I don't know, trying to get rid of it. It's hard to bargain at that point though. They show up and they're like, this guy… he's done fairly well and he's bargaining me for $10 for a rug pad.’”
His secret to negotiations: “Don't show your cards. My wife, she's so sweet. She shows her cards way too early. Like, if somebody comes to give us a quote, she'll give it all away and then the quote comes in astronomically high. I'm like, ‘Yeah, we're still on the fence about getting this pool if you want to give us a quote, you know, we just don't know. There's a bunch of people in the mix.’ She'll be like, ‘We love this and we would love to start as quickly as possible,’ and then the quote comes in double what it should. Then we don't get a pool.”
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Looking back on their time on NBC’s The Voice, Dan says he’s not missing all of the travel back and forth from Los Angeles to Nashville. “On the map, it doesn't look that far. But when you're in the plane it's a lot… Might as well go to Europe. It's 100 years away, but we've been raw dogging. Those flights have been raw.”
Shay Mooney tells Katie, “I would say, my favorite part about doing ‘The Voice’ was just meeting the contestants. We get to do music for a living, which is the greatest job. I mean, all of us, we get to be involved in music and we get to do this, which is pretty incredible, but I feel like you can get jaded. You kind of jump on the train and you go down the tracks and it doesn't stop and you're just like, ‘Man, this is, this is so crazy.’ You don't have time to think about the bad things or the good things. We're doing 250 shows in one year, but I feel like you can get very jaded on a very incredible job.”
“This really took that back to the beginning for me, meeting a lot of these people and getting to see the excitement in their eyes just to be there and it made me excited to get to do this again, to be in that position. Not being the one that is sitting there singing to these chairs that are turned backwards is just a crazy thing. I'm excited to be on that side of it and get to share some of our wisdom, some of our failures, some of the things that we got to learn from, and hopefully they won't have to go through some of the things that we had to go through.”
“Getting to help people along like this is such a big moment for them,” Dan adds. “Hearing people's stories, that a lot of them are from small towns. It's like they've never played a show before and here they are with the craziest opportunity… Being on national television with thousands of cameras around you, a whole crew, and then these chairs that are facing backwards. That's tough. If you can overcome that, you can probably make it in the music business.”
Being given the chance to hang out with Reba McIntyre, Dan says, “was a dream for us. She's just the coolest person in the world. We've gotten to know her a little bit over the years. We really got to spend time in L.A. and she's just such a professional. There's a reason why she's had so much success. She still shows up five minutes early to every meeting. Just a pro, sweet to everybody. What you see on TV is who she actually is.”
Offering up some advice for Kelsea Ballerini who will be coaching on the new season, Dan says she should “just approach everything with a little bit of patience, for yourself. I feel like it's a learning curve. She's done a lot of it before. I feel like she, she was maybe a fill in judge for ‘The Voice,’ so she's probably an old pro, she's probably better at it than we are at this point. But, no, I just think go into it and have fun. We didn't know a lot about TV going into it. We just try to be ourselves and I think when you're able to be yourself and feel really comfortable in that moment it comes across on TV.”
The timing of their network TV debut and then hitting the road couldn’t have worked out any better. “Because we've had a few songs out there on the radio, they connect the dots between the music and being on TV,” Dan says. “It's been awesome at shows. People are making signs like ‘Team Dan and Shay’ and wearing the jerseys and stuff. I think it's bringing new people to our shows -- and as many people as we can get to our shows the better.”
Being recognizable can certainly backfire of course. Shay remembers one occasion being in the bathroom when a guy walked up and asked, “Are you famous?” He explains, “first of all, when you get the question, ‘are you famous?’ It's always a weird way to put it. Then you're like, ‘I mean, I guess not if you gotta ask.’” After laughing the question off, he says the guy persisted. “He was like, ‘No, you're famous.’ So then I'm sitting there at the urinal, you know, and I didn't know what to say. It was very uncomfortable. Maybe if you see somebody that you recognize… wait outside the bathroom after you've both washed your hands because it's like, I don't know what you expect to happen here. Like, I'm not gonna shake your hand, we're not gonna do a picture.”
Hear more about what to expect from the upcoming tour by checking out Katie's full conversation with Dan + Shay above, and tune in to the Superstar Power Hour with Katie & Company every weekday from 2PM - 3PM on your favorite Audacy Country stations!
Dan + Shay’s Heartbreak on the Map Tour Dates:
Thu Jul 18 | Cincinnati, OH | Riverbend Music Center^
Fri Jul 19 | Noblesville, IN | Ruoff Music Center^
Sat Jul 20 | St. Louis, MO | Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre – St. Louis, MO^
Thu Jul 25 | Toronto, ON | Budweiser Stage^
Fri Jul 26 | Syracuse, NY | Empower FCU Amphitheater at Lakeview^
Sat Jul 27 | Gilford, NH | BankNH Pavilion^
Thu Aug 01 | Clarkston, MI | Pine Knob Music Theatre^
Fri Aug 02 | Burgettstown, PA | The Pavilion at Star Lake^
Sat Aug 03 | Bristow, VA | Jiffy Lube Live^
Fri Aug 09 | Cuyahoga Falls, OH | Blossom Music Center^
Sat Aug 10 | Wantagh, NY | Northwell Health at Jones Beach Theater^
Sun Aug 11 | Bangor, ME | Maine Savings Amphitheater^
Thu Aug 15 | Charleston, SC | Credit One Stadium^
Fri Aug 16 | Charlotte, NC | PNC Music Pavilion^
Sat Aug 17 | Raleigh, NC | Coastal Credit Union Music Park^
Thu Aug 22 | West Palm Beach, FL | iTHINK Financial Amphitheatre^
Fri Aug 23 | Tampa, FL | MIDFLORIDA Credit Union Amphitheatre^
Sat Aug 24 | Alpharetta, GA | Ameris Bank Amphitheatre^
Thu Aug 29 | Rogers, AR | Walmart AMP^
Fri Aug 30 | Dallas, TX | Dos Equis Pavilion^
Sat Aug 31 | Woodlands, TX | The CWM Pavilion presented by Huntsman^
Thu Sep 05 | Phoenix, AZ | Talking Stick Resort Amphitheatre^
Fri Sep 06 | Chula Vista, CA | North Island Credit Union Amphitheatre^
Thu Sep 12 | Ridgefield, WA | RV Inn Style Resorts Amphitheater^
Fri Sep 13 | Bend, OR | Hayden Homes Amphitheater^
Sat Sep 14 | Mountain View, CA | Shoreline Amphitheatre^
Sun Sep 15 | Stateline, NV | Lake Tahoe Harveys Outdoor Arena^*
Thu Sep 19 | Nampa, ID | Ford Idaho Center Amphitheater^
Fri Sep 20 | West Valley City, UT | Utah First Credit Union Amphitheater^
Sat Sep 21 | Denver, CO | Fiddlers Green Amphitheater^*