One of my favourite moments at We Day was that Shawn Mendes was there to perform! I am a fan of his music, for sure. But it’s more than that – he has a great story about how he was discovered and the success that came after that. But even beyond that, I love what he stands for. When you see it this way – he’s like a triple threat! Read on to learn more about the awesome Shawn Mendes.
Shawn is from Pickering, Ontario and he is the singer behind the amazing hit song “Life Of The Party”. Within 10 days of the single being released on iTunes, 200 000 copies were sold! Island Records, the label that signed him, released the song at 11:15 pm and by midnight, it became #1 on iTunes. Wow. He also has 3.3 million followers on Vine and 2 million followers on Twitter, and climbing every day.
I met Shawn at We Day and he was so awesome. I was so inspired by him that I created a Vine account and my first post was a video I shot of him at We Day while I watched his performance from side-stage.
Shawn started off with his own Vine channel, being one of the first people to sing covers on the social media network. People had been doing this for a long time on YouTube, but no one was doing it on Vine. He sang hits like As Long As You Love Me by Justin Bieber, Shake It Off by Taylor Swift, All About That Bass by Meghan Trainor and more. Soon after he released his covers, he started to get tens of thousands followers on Vine and Twitter and he had gained lots of interest from the music industry, media, and music fans. He got discovered on Vine and got signed to Island Records and made Life Of The Party.
So, Shawn Mendes is VERY big deal. I found some interesting facts about him that I wanted to share:
1. Shawn learned to play guitar from YouTube instead of taking guitar lessons. He would come home from school and from 5:00 to 8:00, he would sit on his computer watching YouTube videos.
2. He is the youngest artist to debut in the Top 25 with a debut song in the Billboard Hot 100. Shawn is the youngest artist to debut in the top 25 since Justin Bieber’s second Hot 100 hit, “One Less Lonely Girl.” At the time, he was 15 years, seven months and three weeks young when Life Of The Party was realeased, he was 15 years old and 9 months old, which is younger than when Justin Bieber’s song One Less Lonely Girl.
3. In April he won Ryan Seacrests’s Best Cover Song contest for his cover of Say Something by Great Big World and Christina Aguilera.
4. Shawn had recorded a cover song of 3 songs by Ed Sheeran and because Ed had loved Shawn’s talent so much, he flew Shawn to LA for dinner.
5. Shawn has a campaign for Do Something called Notes From Shawn. The campaign’s goal is to boost strangers self esteem by posting positive notes anywhere.
Let’s look a bit deeper into Notes From Shawn. It’s all about random acts of kindness. Shawn wanted to make people feel happy and wanted to inspire his huge and very engaged community to join him. He created Notes From Shawn and what it’s really all about is leaving positive messages for people to make them smile. Go sign up at https://www.dosomething.org/campaigns/notes-shawn to get involved. Everybody could use a compliment, and we could use motivation and a smile. You don’t have to leave notes only for family members and friends, strangers could use a boost of self esteem, too. He wants you can leave notes where they will be seen and take people by surprise – on car windshields, school lockers or even the handles of a shopping cart at the grocery store. Awesome, right? I’m already signed up to participate in #NotesFromShawn and I have a few ideas about what I’m going to write and where I’m going to post them.
Shawn Mendes had an amazing performance at We Day! I just signed up for Vine myself and appropriately, my first Vine video is the video I took of Shawn at sidestage.
Leave a Reply