Figure can't control anything.

Whoa!

Hey, what's going on?

Everybody For first we feast on Shaun Evans and you're watching hot ones.

It's the show with hard questions and even hotter wings.

And today I'm joined by teenage hit maker Sean Mendez is a platinum selling singer songwriter with a pair of number one albums under his belt And good news for Shawn Mendez fans.

There's more new music on the way.

But first, the wings of death.

Sean, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me, man.

I know that you wants pranked your little cousin with a hot sauce cook.

But now that you're on the recent how are you without food?

Um, I should be okay.

I don't want to come in here confident and mess up on the third wing, but I think I could make it to the end.

My friends won't let me live it down if I don't.

They're so excited on their main thing was like, Dude, I don't care what happens.

You have to make it to the very end.

So promised.

Got you guys.

These look really good, by the way.

It was good.

It is a regular wing way.

Shouldn't eat the whole thing.

Should I Should I?

It's up to, you know, we need it.

There you go, Sean.

I want to start by talking about the Sean Mendez blueprint because in just a few short years you went from learning guitar on YouTube to play in a sold out arena tour with Taylor Swift.

In the beginning, how much of your free time are you spending on YouTube And what were you watching?

Ads?

All I was doing, actually, I was.

I was basically just like, obsessed with YouTube covers like people covering, you know, whatever top pop songs were at the time.

It wasn't until Ed released those acoustic videos of him and the green sweater, and he's like singing the A team and stuff.

I saw that, and ever since then it was 67 hours a day, just learning videos like people playing online and just copying them.

And that's how it started.

How were you treated by other kids during the come up?

Does having a big popular online following translate to being popular in high school or not so much?

Not at all, actually, for the first couple of years, it was pretty bad in school.

Going into ninth grade is the scariest thing in the world.

But I was going in singing, you know, pop songs.

It was like walking to the halls and, like 12th graders.

I asked me to sing for them and stuff, which was cool.

You know, I I knew what my outcome was.

So what I wanted it to be, at least so I was just kind of pushing through it.

Who's laughing now?

Exactly Those same guys just hitting me up like, Yo, what's up, man?

How you been?

Think good, Actually, he's still singing.

Who's the wind maker?

Who did these?

Dom, That was all you little wave.

You really good at making wings that you hate making them at home.

Now you will never make wings at home.

So now that you're a product of picker in Canada, it's a city just northeast of Toronto.

But over the last couple years, you've been very much a citizen of the globe.

They say that Canadians are the most polite people on earth.

Is that until you feed them hot wings?

Yeah.

Is that true?

Um, yes, probably true, but it's annoying, like we're like, way too polite, like I caught myself driving down the highway and some guy cut me off and I went to honk at him.

And then I stopped myself from honking.

That's not really how we aren't candidate like we actually just don't honk.

It gets really annoying.

So it's a good end of that thing.

What's one place in Canada that everyone should visit before they die?

You got to go to Vancouver, Victoria Island, and just like you can, like, rent a boat for like 45 bucks.

If you have a license and just go on the water and it's it's stunning, Dude, you can't really see anywhere like that.

Who's the better hockey player?

You're Bieber?

Definitely.

Bieber.

I played for a couple years.

I've seen videos of him playing on the ice, and I would not get on the ice with him.

He was skate circles around me, for sure.

I was really worried.

I came in already.

My face was already read.

Already felt like 8 10 wings.

What's guitar store etiquette to you like?

In other words, how loud And for how long can I riff the child of mine.

You don't have to buy something.

I really I really don't.

I hate people who do that stuff did.

Do not go play sweet child of mine for like 30 minutes.

Otherwise, everyone is Starr's gonna hate you.

You just see the staff walking around like they want to kill themselves.

This the worst five And then what about to cause sometimes you go into a guitar store.

Even a guy like you might run into a curmudgeonly employee who you have to like, prove your credit to.

Do you ever find yourself in that situation?

Just don't even want to mess with you.

You're like, Hey, can I like the expensive guitar over there that's locked up?

Can I get that down?

And they look at you like you can't pay for that.

What's the Holy Grail?

What's the one?

That's most specialty.

I got a guitar from John Mayer, I think was like about a year ago, and I was just kind of it was getting to know him, texting about guitars, asking kind of like what electric?

I should start playing, and he's like, What hotel you staying at?

I said wherever we're staying.

I was just told people where I stayed.

Um and then I kind of got back to the hotel that night and I went to the front desk.

Hey, is something here for me and that there was a John Mayer like sign signature Strat there for me.

And it was, like the coolest thing ever freaked out the hot one sauce.

You've got wing heating down in.

I'm actually probably a little disgusting with it, because I have to talk.

So I feel like I have to eat it got in, chew it up, swallow down, and then get the question.

I actually thought about this.

And I was like, Man, I hope I don't look like a savage in the wings.

Basic.

I think there's only one way to eat them like a savage.

So asking a singer songwriter to break down their heads That would be like asking Divinci to explain the Mona Lisa.

So don't worry, I'm not gonna ask.

It's not like that special sauce, but I know that there is something that takes just a album cut and turns it into a stadium.

And, um, it's funny.

As a songwriter, you always take your song and then you go play it for the best producer, the best songwriter, and asked for their opinion.

And then it's usually like, you know, whether it's good.

Yeah, that's pretty good.

But you never are getting like, Dude, that's that's the best thing I've ever heard because they're also making, like, really awesome songs like, The best thing I could probably do is just, like, pull a random person off the street and be like, Hey, do you like this or not?

Well, that's what I was wondering, you know, like, how do you know?

Like, what sorts of things are you looking for when you're gauging the likelihood that 50,000 people are gonna sing this song back to you someday?

There's an immediate nous.

Two hits, I think, like the second you hear the first guitar thing, I'm starting to feel a little hot the second you hear the first guitar thing, or like the second you hear the first verse line or something, you kind of see it in the room.

I woke up in the morning with that in my head, and I was like, This is a thing like I know something about this.

There's something about this.

In the second, I have this, like, little like ukulele type guitar.

I played it in the room, and the second I heard it, I was like, Okay, this is it.

Like I could feel it with that one the next day Went to the studio and boom, the hammer Janker.

Don't you tell me these were, like, kind of safe.

They're sending out really spicy man messing with your mind a little bit.

You never have to think this hard when you're eating spicy wings.

Shawn's We have recurring segment on our show called Explain That, Graham.

We do a deep dive on our guest instagram Interesting pictures that need more context.

So bust out the laptop, I'll show you the picture and then you just tell me the bigger story.

Does that sound good?

Oh, it's gonna get really spicy now going down.

It took us so long to figure out a time to do this interview because I have had to not sing the next day I couldn't sing after this or even I could barely talk after this.

You could, Sean.

I could All right, First things first.

It's a Sean Mendez Taylor Swat.

Yeah, Birthday two parter.

One.

Looks like it's her birthday.

The other one looks like it's your birthday.

Yeah, they're both birthdays.

The first time I ever played Madison Square Garden it was a big radio show there, and Taylor was playing this show and she invited me to her birthday party.

Crazy, crazy, crazy night.

I think I was like, maybe 16.

There.

I walked in and got in the elevator with Justin Timberlake Ryan Center, and then I walked upstairs.

In the 1st 2 people I saw were Jay Z and Beyonce.

And as like, Well, this is what it's like to be a Taylor Swift birthday Friday she brought me on stage on my 17th birthday.

I look so weird.

I was so uncomfortable on stage without a guitar.

I just like, weirdly held myself while she had, like, 70,000 people sing me Happy birthday when I was on tour with her right when stitches was kind of happening.

So I was on tour with the biggest artists in the world, and then my song was taking off at the same time, and it was kind of just like the stars align.

Always say like it was like the stars were aligning for me at that time.

They are all the time.

It feels like fellow Canadian I Contras.

Yeah, that was the best night of my life.

That was the night of the amaze.

I met him at the awards show, and then I was not expecting from Drake at all that I know it was.

You know, I love that video with you and your boys on the on the street.

And I'm like, something big, like, if you know that that is like my second song I ever released of all time, The most wack video of me like like llamas on the street.

It was really funny that he brought that up later.

He had, like, a party.

I went and saw him at the party, and it was really cool.

He, like, was just really, really sweet new a bunch about me.

And then we took a photo.

And that to this day is the coolest photo of me on the Internet.

Do things get bad way?

Uh huh.

It's bad to know that they just get worse from here.

Psychologically, I think something's happening.

That has nothing to do with the hot sauce, so every big star has their own protection.

Task force, you know, be it the Rihanna Navy or Team Drizzy, where the Mendez army you'll have these fans that'll take up for you for their figurehead.

But then the funny part of it is you don't really have much control over them.

But if you ever tried to use the Mendez Army to do your bidding, definitely, especially when there's like voting award shows, they're an actual army, they just go all right, They go hard, dude.

And if they can vote like unlimited amount of times that they can vote unlimited mount times like it's a person, can they really get that votes up there in the 1,000,000?

So yeah, so we've been trying to unite.

Our fans have been trying to galvanize them under the Spice Lords banner.

Hasn't gained much traction.

I don't think he's gonna have it.

Kids like me because we can't force it on him is that the thing is the nickname.

It just has to happen.

Yeah, e.

I didn't come up with Mendez army.

That was all that Mendez army came up with this exactly.

I don't think you can come up with it.

Really?

When you think back on all the strange things that fans have done to try to get your attention Is there a story that stands out?

I had a delivery to my house one day from Norway and in the in the box was like these fans in this big book about how they, like, looked at vines and YouTube videos, too.

Figure out the number of the house across the street from mine.

The stop sign where the fire hydrant was to kind of like triangulate Which house was mine.

It was cute because they had no idea what they're doing.

But the fact that they were able to figure out that really kind of stressed me out.

I had, like, a fan show up at my door and like, the middle of the winter, And she had, like, basically like a crop top on and shorts in the middle of the winter.