It wasn’t an easy choice, but Shawn Mendes doesn’t regret giving up on his last tour.
On September 30, the 26-year-old musician appeared on Intentionally with Jay Shetty podcast and opened up about canceling his 2022 Wonder: The World Tour after just seven dates to focus on his mental health — as well as why it was both the “hardest” and “biggest” decision he’s ever made.
Looking back on that period, Mendes recalled feeling a “general gloom or lowness” associated with depression and anxiety. Worse than his own feelings, however, was the fact that viewing his own life “through that lens” prevented him from seeing “all the people who love and support you.”
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Since rising to fame as a young teenager, Mendes noted, “he’s done a lot of touring” and “been in tough places before” — but this was different.
“I had nowhere to go when things got tough, you know? I didn’t have other aspects of life that I felt connected to, that I could lean on to take a break from touring, come back and just find that balance,” the singer explained “Treat You Better”. “And I knew there was only one way to do it. And that was like creating life.”
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Shawn Mendes performs at Rock in Rio in September 2024.
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Mendes continued: “Cancelling that tour was by far the hardest decision of my life and by far the biggest decision of my life – and gave i life, you know? It gave me time to discover so much about myself.”
A particularly difficult aspect of the cancellation, for the Canadian, affected his “team of almost a hundred people who are away from their families for a year and work every day, don’t sleep, sacrifice everything to put on this show.”
“It was like, ‘Oh man, people were excited,’ you know? People were proud of what they created,” Mendes said, “and that was the hard part.”
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Shawn Mendes in Paris in March 2024.
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After kicking off her Wonder: The World Tour in June 2022, the “Señorita” artist postponed several dates before canceling the trip entirely next month. “It has become clearer that I need to take time that I have never personally taken, to ground myself and come back stronger,” he wrote at the time.
Mendes recently returned to the stage for a few shows in support of his upcoming fourth album, Shawnwill be released on October 18.
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