"Shawn was more excited and proud to see Chance the Rapper up [for a Grammy] than he cared that he wasn't," Andrew Gertler tells Billboard.
Although Shawn Mendes came into 2016 with a No. 1 album, a top 10 single and multiple tours already under his belt, the Canadian singer-songwriter spent the year spinning teen stardom into something even sturdier. Mendes followed up last year’s debut Handwritten with Illuminate , which scored his best sales week to date upon its September release; “Stitches” was succeeded by “Treat You Better,” another top 10 smash on the Billboard Hot 100 , as well as “Mercy,” both of which he performed on Saturday Night Live earlier this month; and his first headlining tour in support of Handwritten earlier this year has led to the Illuminate world tour, set to hit arenas beginning next spring.
Also in 2016: Mendes turned 18 years old. “It’s easy to forget that he’s still that young,” Andrew Gertler, the former Vine star’s longtime manager, tells Billboard. "I think we both have these moments of pinching ourselves, and he’s sometimes like, Wow, I’m only 18 . … He has those teenage moments, but he’s also very conscious of protecting the fact that he is still a teenager. Where I think he’s making music that might go beyond someone of his age at the time, a lot of his fans are his age and his peers, and he relates to them. He tries to maintain that authenticity.”
Gertler says that the creation of Illuminate , which was recorded in upstate New York and released just 17 months after Handwritten debuted at No. 1 in April 2015, was the defining process for both of their professional years; fresh off the surprise top 40 success of “Stitches,” Mendes wanted to prove himself an enduring songwriter with his sophomore album. " Handwritten was a great accomplishment, but now he’s been able to bring it as a mature storyteller,” Gertler explains. "I think that payoff of going from an artist known to the world for his hit song ‘Stitches’ and a teenage fan base, and then to harness that and end up on
SNL at the end of the year -- to me, that was the most memorable thing of this year, how far he came.”
