"Maybe I'm just a kid in love." Shawn Mendes wasn't the only one with an aching heart on Tuesday night at Amalie Arena.
The Kids Choice Awards — I mean the Shawn Mendes concert consisting of young girls ages 10-17 (plus chaperones) — were yearning, too. The young crowd was enthusiastic to say the least about the very good looking 18 year-old on stage, appropriately dressed for Florida in a Hawaiian shirt paired with the trademark boy-band 'just-tight-enough' skinny jeans.
Not a single moment of silence went by without a marriage proposal or confession of love.
Admittedly, it's hard to not fall in love with the singer when he asks to "keep the [stage] lights on the crowd to see all of the beautiful people" and literally 99.9-percent of his songs are about past relationships, yearning, infatuation and admiration (the other 0.1-percent of material being about self-discovery and the inevitable theme of coming of age).
For those that are reading and aren't familiar with Shawn, his fame began on the internet with the six-second long video app "Vine" that was mostly popular among high schoolers and younger. The Toronto native would do covers of songs on his acoustic guitar and his talent — along with his angelic facial features — are surely what shot him straight into fame.
But don't let Shawn's cool and collected demeanor fool you into thinking that he's some type of phony artist because it's clear Mendes has a passion for music that will only become more evident with time. I mean, he's only got two albums out (Handwritten and Illuminate), but the tour that stopped in Tampa found him supporting Illuminate and it's certified-Platinum single, "Mercy."
With an amazing voice and impressive guitar skills Mendes is comparable in ways to a young John Mayer, except Mendes writes his love songs about breaking up over Snapchat (ok, maybe that's a little dramatic).
The newly legal, super-smiley Mendes has loads of potential and showed that he is clearly dedicated to his fans by cranking out an hour and a half long set all while playing the guitar the entire time, singing his own songs. He even included covers of Ed Sheeran's "Castle on the Hill" while playing the piano. It's no surprise there was not a single water-bottle throwing fan present in the crowd like some other Popstar fans.
