Shawn Mendes Walked Away From Stardom. He’s Ready to Talk About It.

On a rainy summer night, on a club stage in Woodstock, N.Y., Shawn Mendes was ready for tears. Happy tears, overwhelmed tears. Just some processing-everything-as-it-happens mistiness. “There’s probably a high chance I cry a lot,” he told the small crowd, pressing the backs of his hands to his eyes, and emerging with a grin.

It was the first time in over two years that Mendes, the 26-year-old Canadian pop star, had performed in front of an audience, after he abruptly pulled the plug on his career at its pinnacle. In 2022, amid what he called a mental health “breaking point,” he canceled a multimillion-dollar, two-year international tour — over 80 scheduled arena dates — acknowledging that, in that moment, he couldn’t handle it. It was a startling admission, especially for a multiplatinum male artist with a hugely devoted young fan base. If their attention was fickle, he would be gone.

In the time since, Mendes — a social media phenom with model looks and a penchant for bare-chestedness, who found immediate chart-topping success as a teenager — stepped almost completely away from music, seeking stability and a life away from the road. Then he slowly winched his way back to songwriting, through the wilds of adulthood. Over rootsy guitar and strings, his struggles are laid bare on his fifth album, “Shawn,” due Nov. 15. “I don’t understand who I am right now,” he whispers on the anguished opening track.

He’s not the type to mask anything. And it took him a long while to feel strong enough to make the record. “I felt super, super lost,” he told me. In Woodstock, he talked of spiraling anxiety, the walls closing in.

But in the few months since that gig, Mendes’s stages have been growing exponentially: He blasted through “Nobody Knows,” a new, lovelorn ballad, at the MTV Video Music Awards, ending it in ecstatic guitar peals; and then sang to 100,000 people — in Portuguese — at a festival in Rio de Janeiro. When we met for an interview, at his favorite recording studio in bucolic Rhinebeck, N.Y., where he worked on the new album, he seemed as if he had regained the muscle memory of what it means to be a star. But he wore it lightly.