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“I am so happy to be home right now,” a smiling Shawn Mendes declared, standing centerstage at Massey Hall on Monday, the final night of his nine-show intimate concert tour appropriately titled “For Friends and Family Only.”
“This is the real friends and family show,” he added.
“I am not kidding. Probably half of this venue right now is my actual blood family,” the singer said to cheers and people screaming, “Welcome home!” and “We love you, Shawn!” from the nosebleeds.
Feeling a little awkward and out of place, I jokingly asked a stranger beside me, “Are you friends or family?”
“I am a distant family friend,” he said casually and to my surprise.
Oh, he really isn’t kidding, I thought. I perked up my ears to eavesdrop on conversations around me and could hear legit stories about the singer from people who knew him.
“Shawn doesn’t work out. He only does push-ups in his room,” one young man wearing a VIP badge said, laughing.
“He looks so happy,” an older woman said, weeping as she shot an out-of-focus horizontal video on her phone.
Happy is the best way to describe Mendes’s performance. He oozed happiness with every exaggerated guitar strum, flick of his hair and flirtatious smile.
It was in stark contrast to the first time I saw him perform, in 2019, at the Rogers Centre, for a sold-out crowd of 55,000 people, still his biggest headlining show to date.
As he admits on “Who I Am,” from his new stripped-down country-folk album, “Shawn,” that version of the Pickering native did not know who he was. Since then, a lot has happened to morph the 21-year-old pop star I watched sing “There’s Nothing Holdin’ Me Back,” as confetti fell and teen girls screamed and cried, into the hardened 26-year-old singer-songwriter with something honest to say about grief, soul-searching and love.
There was the world tour he cancelled two years ago at the height of his fame so he could focus on his mental health. There was his purported relationship drama. There were public inquiries into his sexuality, which Mendes recently called an “intrusion” while admitting he is “still figuring it out.” It was hard to watch him get emotional on the Massey Hall stage and not feel sympathy.
Last night was Toronto’s reintroduction to Shawn Mendes. It was a “Shawn”-heavy set with a few oldies sprinkled in. He started the concert with “That’s the Dream,” swaying and dancing while strumming the guitar on a smoky, minimalist stage draped in classy white curtains and bright backlights. This gave the entire show a dramatic 1970s feel, a nod, perhaps, to the folk singers who inspired the new album.
Backing him onstage was a guitarist, a bass player, two drummers, a pianist, a violinist, and a pair of young female backup singers he introduced as “angels,” whom he said had helped his usual travelling band feel less “stinky.”
Two of his main collaborators on the album — Mike Sabath, credited as a producer on 11 of the 12 songs and as a writer on 10, and Eddie Benjamin, who co-produced five songs and is credited as a writer on three — also joined him halfway through the set.
Watching the three perform, it was easy to see their kinship. They goofily allowed one another to take extra-long guitar solos during “Nobody Knows.” They harmonized on “Isn’t That Enough.” And they rocked the crowd like it was the end of a Disney musical during “Why Why Why.”
Every chance the three got, they hugged and kissed on the cheek, basking in the moment while leaving room for levity.
As Mendes spoke about surviving a difficult two-year period and then feeling grateful for being “dead center in the middle of the life he dreamed of,” Sabath interrupted by singing, “O Canada,” and handed the star a comically small red cowboy hat adorned with a maple leaf.
The highlight of the evening was “Heart of Gold,” a track Mendes deemed the “most powerful on the album.” He dedicated the song, written about a friend he lost when he was 18, to the friend’s parents, who were in attendance. Barely getting through the opening lines, he broke down and cried, falling to one knee as the crowd performed the song back to him in a genuinely emotional moment.
Ending the show on a high note after running through all the tracks on the new album, Mendes returned for an encore of “There’s Nothing Holdin’ Me Back” and “In My Blood.” After taking a bow and wiping away tears, he jumped into the crowd and hugged many friends and family, as relatives walked out of Massey Hall to what I assume was a blissful commute back to Pickering.
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