Dan + Shay Artistfacts

2012-
Dan Smyers
Shay Mooney
Before they formed the Dan + Shay duo, Pennsylvania native Dan Smyers was a member of a group called Bonaventure and Arkansas born Shay Mooney was a solo artist on rapper T-Pain's Nappy Boy Entertainment label.
Dan Smyers and Shay Mooney first met at a party at the formers'' house in Nashville on December 7, 2012.

"I was living in a terrible house; it was the worst house of all time. I found it on Craigslist for $100 a month when I first moved to town. No locks on the door, no heat, no AC. It was rough," Smyers recalled to The Boot. "Shay came over with a buddy. We started singing together, singing cover songs and making stuff up on the spot … It was about four in the morning, and we were like, 'We should write together.'"

"A couple hours later, we woke up and wrote a song," Smyers continued. "The first song we wrote got put on hold."
Dan Smyers married Abby Law on May 13, 2017. She made a cameo in Dan+Shay lyric's video for their 2014 single "Nothin' Like You." That song was about Mooney's then girlfriend country singer Veronica Ballestrini.
Shay Mooney's fiancée Hannah Billingsley gave birth to their son, Asher James Mooney on January 24, 2017. Dan + Shay's song "When I Pray For You" was written in anticipation of the baby boy's arrival. Mooney and Hannah later got married on October 20, 2017 in Arkansas.
They weren't always Dan + Shay. When Dan Smyers and Shay Mooney first got together, they called themselves Ragtop Red after Tim McGraw's 2002 single "Red Rag Top."
Why the "+" instead of an ampersand or the word "and"? The pair had high hopes and thought it would be useful in their stage shows. "The vision from day one was that, if someday we ever got to headline arenas, we'd have a "+" stage in the middle of the floor and make it do all kinds of crazy stuff," Smyers said on Instagram in 2021.

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