It’s been a while since Shawn Mendes has felt this close. He’s standing in the bleachers at New York’s Forest Hills Stadium while upwards of 12,000 people sing along to “Stitches” at the latest stop on his On the Road Again Tour. The unconventional seating arrangement at the venue allows for fans sitting in the surrounding sections to swarm around the singer with ease. There’s a magnetism to the pull.
Mendes only brought his mic stand and acoustic guitar as he made the move from the stage to the stands after a captivating performance of “Mercy.” Throughout the show, the audience rivals their headliner for best vocal delivery of the night. He welcomes it. “There it is,” Mendes says in encouragement when they echo the “Stitches” chorus back to him. “There you are.”
They’ve been waiting for this. When Mendes cancelled the entirety of his Wonder tour after only seven dates in 2022, citing mental health concerns, he existed in a very different reality. Pop had changed during the pandemic, as had he. “I was not at all ready for how difficult touring would be after this time away,” he said at the time. Mendes’ eased into his return with last year’s For Friends and Family Only Tour. Most of the rooms he played on the 19-date run barely held 4,000 people. He played the folk-leaning songs from his fifth studio album Shawn, spending each night clutching an acoustic guitar with sets that adapted to more intimate settings than he’d been used to.
But here at Forest Hills, he reserves the majority of the set for the most indulgent, eruptive pop singles and fan-favorites from his first four studio albums. When he opens the show with “There’s Nothing Holdin’ Me Back,” “Wonder,” and “Treat You Better,” the crowd makes clear that it’s going to be a loud night. It’s an emotional one, too. At the start, the horizontal screen above the stage locks on a young woman at the barricade. Her entire face glistens with tears as she takes in deep breaths, attempting to regulate her sobs. Mendes hadn’t even stepped onto the stage yet.
The screens running alongside the top and sides of the stage add an immersive element to the show. They capture everything: the layer of stubble growing in, the veins in his neck during his most ambitious vocal runs, the tears welling in his eyes as he introduces the mournful “Heart of Gold,” about the death of a childhood friend. He grins through nearly every song at the sound of the crowd going note for note and lyric for lyric with him. “We’ve been doing this for just over 10 years now,” Mendes says. “I look out at the crowd and see faces that I saw 10 years ago.”
Shawn Mendes performs at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens, New York.
Morgan Winston for Rolling Stone
He performs “Never Be Alone,” from his 2015 debut Handwritten, and it feels retroactively tailored to that connection. “When you miss me, close your eyes,” he sings. “I may be far, but never gone.” He pairs the song with footage from throughout his career. It lingers a while on clips from when he was a bright-eyed 17-year-old teen pop hitmaker.
It’s not a surprise that fans showed up in such an exalting capacity for Mendes. Most of the songs he performs have billions of streams and it’s hard to resist a greatest hits show, especially one with a medley of “Teach Me How to Love” and “Lost in Japan.” But even “Isn’t That Enough” and “Heavy,” songs from Shawn that stalled out, feel just as essential to his catalog here — so does “Why Why Why,” it’s not one of his most notable hits, but it’s remarkable live. They serve as an apt reminder that, despite what the constant churn of the pop machine may suggest, it’s alright to go away for a while.
Last weekend, on this same stage at Forest Hills, singer-songwriter Lola Young collapsed during her set at All Things Go. She’d made it through four songs before her performance abruptly ended, the crowd buzzing with shock. She likely planned to close her set with “Messy,” her breakthrough single that endured a viral run earlier this year. It’ll be some time before she performs it again. “I’m going away for a while,” Young wrote in a statement announcing that she would be indefinitely cancelling future appearances. “I really hope you’ll give me a second chance once I’ve had some time to work on myself and come back stronger.”
There’s a sadness to her uncertainty, this implication that her eventual return will in some way be conditional. It isn’t unfounded. Even the most well-meaning fans can be fickle and entitled at times, especially when someone else’s emotions are viewed merely as a means of accessing, or escaping, their own.
Last year, Chappell Roan cancelled her appearances at All Things Go, telling fans, “Things have gotten overwhelming over the past few weeks and I am really feeling it.” The response online was less than compassionate. Some questioned what could be so difficult about getting on a stage and singing some songs, others suggested that she was unraveling all of the progress she’d made in her career thus far. This sense of musical object impermanence is tied directly to the kind of preemptive doubt that Young expressed, and that Roan was effectively threatened with.
Shawn Mendes performs at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens, New York.
Morgan Winston for Rolling Stone
Early in his set, Mendes interrogates this idea on “Monster,” his duet with Justin Bieber. “Spill my words and tear me down until there’s nothin’ left,” he sings. Later, he takes on Bieber’s verse, sharpening the cadence. “I was fifteen when the world put me on a pedestal/I had big dreams of doin’ shows and making memories.” The record highlights the parallels between their careers.
The more veteran pop singer’s relationship with touring began unraveling long before the collaboration was released in 2020. Bieber made it through more than 150 shows on the Purpose World Tour between before cancelling the remaining dates. “I want my career to be sustainable, but I also want my mind, heart, and soul to be sustainable,” Bieber said at the time. When he returned with the Justice World Tour in 2022, he made it through nearly 50 shows before cancelling the remaining 80. His grand return will come at Coachella next year. Some fans are skeptical that they’ll be walking into a repeat of Frank Ocean’s 2023 Coachella appearance. Still, they’re willing to take the risk to hear Swag live, and hopefully a few My World 2.0 cuts.
Eddie Benjamin, who collaborated closely with Bieber on the Swag albums, opened the show for Mendes. At 23, he’s getting a crash course in touring from a more settled version of Mendes, 27 now. It’s a positive contrast to the perspective his previous opening acts gained. “I remember being on tour with Shawn and seeing what it’s like when you get to that next level — and it scared the fucking shit out of me,” the Australian singer-songwriter Ruel, who opened for Mendes in 2019, recently told Rolling Stone. “It definitely did not inspire me to be like, ‘Fuck, I want to sell arenas.’”
Over the past few years, we’ve witnessed a generation of artists recalibrate their relationship with the idea of pop stardom that they’d been sold. As it turns out, it doesn’t have to be grueling, or exhaustive.
Like his For Friends and Family Only Tour, Mendes kept the On the Road Again Tour limited, with only 20 dates scheduled. Coincidentally, the run shares a name with One Direction’s final tour. Their On the Road Again Tour ran for 77 dates in the span of nine months in 2015. Zayn Malik quit the band a month into the stadium trek. It took him nearly 10 years before he was ready to be on a stage again for his own headlining solo tour. Next year, Malik is setting his sights on a Las Vegas residency, not too far off from his bandmate Harry Styles’ five-city Love on Tour residencies. They’re all figuring out what works best for them.
For his final song of the night, Mendes settles at the piano for “In My Blood,” his figure slightly obscured in darkness. “Help me,” he sings. “It’s like the walls are cavin’ in.” He doesn’t spend long there. It’s too far from the crowd. Grabbing his guitar, he gets closer to them, crying out, “Sometimes, I feel like givin’ up/But I just can’t/It isn’t in my blood.”
The confetti canons that blast moments later are blinding. When the paper settles to the ground, fans in the pit grab clusters to throw into the air and swirl around as it falls, like a winter wonderland in October. This is what the whole night felt like — youthful, buoyant, and carefree. “The old problems still come back no matter how old you get,” Mendes mentioned earlier in the set. “There’s this cycle of happiness and joy, and there’s pain and sadness at the bottom.”
At this moment, Forest Hills is on top, right alongside Mendes.
