Dan + Shay Emailed Justin Bieber About Collaborating on ‘10,000 Hours’
In 2019 Dan + Shay released their hit “10,000 Hours” with pop superstar Justin Bieber. The song was cowritten with Jason “Poo Bear” Boyd, Jordan Reynolds, and Jessie Jo Dillon. The duo released the song in October as a single for the upcoming studio album. The song earned the them a top five Billboard Hot 100 hit and Grammy Award in 2021 for Best Country Duo/Group Performance.
But how did the duo and Bieber collaborate together? Well, a simple email was sent.
“I remember Dan kind of having this idea, like, what if we try to get Justin Bieber on this song, you know? And I think Dan might have emailed him and kind of it was like, Hey, man, you know, we love this song and would love to have you on it. And before I knew it, he said, yes”.
Dan + Shay met Bieber awhile back at South x Southwest in Austin, Texas and hit it off while hanging out together. At the time they didn’t have a song that made sense to collaborate on but as soon as they had “10,000 Hours” they sent it over.
“It was one of those things where, you know, we produced these songs and we’ve got the sessions on my laptop and it’s the amount of times that a big artist or another artist is like, Yeah, send me the files, I’ll put a vocal on it. You always do it, you know, no matter who the artist, if it’s huge, it’s like, cool, I’ll stay up all night, print some stems so they can maybe go track it in the studio. Never pans out. It’s like the one time out of 1000 times. So sure enough, printed all the stems, sent it over, didn’t hear anything for weeks. I’m like oh, of course, of course not. Then we got a call and it was like, Hey, Justin’s in the studio. Can you send the stems? I was like, Well, I sent them like a couple of weeks. Sure, I’ll send him again. Yeah. And it’s still at that point you think is not going to happen, right? It’s Justin Bieber. There’s no way. I mean, he probably gets sent different files from different artists thousands of times a day. And we sent them over. And sure enough, like I got a face time from somebody in the studio and he was in there singing it”.
Biebers vocals came back sounding incredible and the duo barely had to do anything with them.
“I remember getting that song back, you know, for the first time. He sent it over to me and I was at my old house and my wife and I sat down on a couch and we had a friend over and I just press play and just remember that feeling of just the calm before the storm. Like we have Justin Bieber on this song and just listening to it, thinking like this is about to make things go a little crazy”.
Dan + Shay couldn’t wait to release the song and share with the world they had a song with Justin Bieber.
