When Shawn Mendes suddenly rocketed to fame in the mid-2010s, landing a major label deal in his teens off the back of the loyal, early fanbase he’d cultivated on the now-defunct social media platform Vine, his story felt familiar.
Like Justin Bieber, Noah Kahan, James Bay, Conan Grey, and countless others, Mendes was another aspiring young artist plucked from relatively obscurity and flung straight into the glare of the spotlight; and like many of his contemporaries who also came to fame through these new, relatively untested means, Mendes has understandably struggled to reckon with the scrutiny and mass-exposure of the internet age.
