Dan + Shay Call Their Chart Success 'Surreal,' Recall How Much '10,000 Hours' Resonated With Justin Bieber

Dan + Shay chatted with Billboard’s Tetris Kelly on the red carpet at the 2019 American Music Awards on Sunday (Nov. 24), discussing their chart success and working with Justin Bieber.

Asked how it feels to have the highest-charting non-holiday country song in the Streaming Songs chart’s history for their Justin Bieber collaboration “10,000 Hours,” Dan Smyers tells Billboard that he and Shay Mooney are proud to be a part of the country music community and that watching their songs climb up the charts is “surreal.”

“We're those nerds who always refresh and we're like, ‘Oh my gosh, we jumped two spots today,’” he says. “We do that because we appreciate it, we appreciate all the people that put hard work into this and make it happen for us. We're thankful, man, we try not to get too caught up in it, but it is really cool whenever the songs are going up the chart. It's a special feeling.”

As for whether or not they have any plans to work with Bieber again, Mooney says that he doesn’t know, but he expresses how grateful he was for the opportunity to work with him.

“We're such huge fans of Bieber and when we wrote this song, we really wanted to throw a hail Mary and try to get Bieber on it and [the song] really resonated with [him],” Mooney continues. “[He was] in a very similar place in his life. He just got married…we write about what we know and we hoped that this song would resonate with him and it worked out and here we are. It's crazy, it’s a pinch yourself moment when you're driving down the road and you see Dan + Shay featuring Justin Bieber and we're like, this cannot be real, this is pretty wild.”

You can watch the full video above.

dick clark productions, producer of the American Music Awards, is owned by Valence Media, which also owns Billboard.