Dan and Shay Almost Broke Up — Duo Is Honest About Their Challenges

The Gist:

• Dan and Shay announced earlier this year that they almost broke up, but have managed to remedy their relationship in recent months.
• The duo explained that they had to have a heart to hear to work through their differences, and committed to hanging out more outside of work.
• Now, they say that they've managed to resolve many of their issues.

Working with your friends is always complicated, and that's especially true as you get more successful. Earlier this year, musical duo Dan and Shay (Dan Smyers and Shay Mooney) revealed that they had almost broken up after being estranged from one another. Following that reveal, many were naturally nervous about whether the two of them would be able to survive as a unit in the long term.

In a recent interview with Variety, Dan and Shay explained how they worked through their differences, and ultimately emerged on the other side of them even more committed to their group dynamic.

Dan and Shay are still together, but in a recent interview, they explained how they came close to breaking up for good.

"Dan and I were both a little bit burnt out on music," Shay explained. "We weren’t communicating. We were not really hanging out outside of work. Any time we got together, it was to do an interview or a show."

They said they weren't communicating with one another, and found themselves going in different directions.

In discussing what the divide between them was, Dan explained that it was ultimately how they looked at the world and their own circumstances.

"Yeah, I would say the different sides of the coin are: Shay is a crazy optimist, and I’m a crazy pessimist. Maybe those are two extreme ways to put it," he explained, adding that the two of them had to support one another.

In order to rectify their friendship, Dan and Shay said they had to commit to spending more time with one another without feeling like they were working.

"We had a plan of action to just hang out three times a week, and just get together with no intention rather than just hanging out," Shay said. "And us hanging out just turned into us ending up writing songs together. We had no pressure to make an album or anything."

Dan and Shay said that they got together and talked things through one night, determined to come up with a plan to either break up or stay together. They also said that they wanted to be open about their near-breakup, in part to let their fans know that they had their problems, just like everyone else.

"It’s just about opening up, being vulnerable, communicating with somebody, asking for help, telling someone you’re not OK," Dan explained. "That’s where it starts. And you can’t heal until you do that. So we just wanted to kind of tell our story."