Shaun Cassidy, 67, says he took a 40-year break from performing because he was eager to have a more grounded life.
In an exclusive interview with People magazine, Cassidy told the outlet: “I’ve never enjoyed being a public figure. I don’t like all the attention. I’m basically an introvert. I don’t really like being famous.”
He explained his philosophy to a reporter: “For me, it means that I love the work, I love the creative aspect of my job, but I’ve never felt like the glitzy side, the red carpet side, even the famous side was a positive. In fact, it’s often a negative, it’s often a distraction.”
Cassidy continued: “I think one of the reasons I took a 40-year break from performing – doing concerts – is because I was eager to have a more grounded life. And I found it as a writer and producer, still very creative but not having to be in the spotlight all the time was a much healthier choice for me.”
After a 1980 gig at Houston’s Astrodome, Cassidy abruptly quit music to focus on writing and acting, which he describes as his real passion.
His last concert before this tour was at the Houston Astrodome in front of 55,000 people when he was just 21 years old. “I said, ‘Good night.’ I didn’t know it’d be my last show for 40 years, but it was,” Cassidy said during a recent interview.
Cassidy added: “But the only thing more ridiculous than being famous is being formerly famous, because you’re still famous, but a lot of people don’t necessarily know why anymore. And if it were up to me, I’d prefer neither of those things.”
Asked about returning to tour, he said: “For years, I was like, I don’t want to [tour] because I’ll just be trying to replicate some version of myself at 20, which I always thought would be embarrassing and why try? But I discovered, and the audience told me this, that I didn’t need to do that because I had actually all these other cards I could play. Now I’m a storyteller.”
The extended break from performing came as Cassidy found success in television writing and production. He has worked as an executive producer and writer on numerous shows, most recently the medical drama “New Amsterdam,” which ran for five years.
He started touring again 40 years later, spurred by the solitude of the COVID-19 pandemic. “I missed this connection with people,” he said.
Cassidy explained how he developed his show: “I found that storytelling, which has been my job, became the key for me to go back out on the stage. At first, I wrote a one-man storytelling show without any music, and I did it for some of my friends. And they were like, ‘Yeah, stories are great, but people are going to throw things at you if you don’t sing “Da Doo Ron Ron.”‘”
Cassidy told Billboard: “That’s the wonderful gift of performing again. It inspired me to start writing songs, which I hadn’t been doing for decades, while I’ve been writing hundreds of television scripts.”
Before embarking on his tour, he revealed the challenges of relearning his craft: “I literally had to take guitar lessons. I hadn’t played guitar in so long. I had to relearn songs I had written. I didn’t know how to play them.”
But Cassidy sees a benefit to the decades away: “Because I haven’t been singing them for 40 years, they’re not dead to me. They feel new, and I’m only singing the songs I really liked back then that feel appropriate to me singing now.”
On his voice, Cassidy noted: “I’m a better singer now, because I haven’t been singing for 40 years every night and tearing my voice out. I can sing them, I think, with more authority now than I did when I was 20.”
In the viral moment that led to this discussion,
through the late 1970s, as a teen, Cassidy starred in the ABC television series “The Hardy Boys Mysteries” while also releasing several platinum records. A slew of hit singles, such as “Da Doo Ron Ron,” “Do You Believe in Magic” and “That’s Rock ‘n’ Roll,” was the result.
Cassidy signed with Warner Brothers records in high school when he received a Grammy nomination.
In 1980, Cassidy performed before 55,000 people in the Houston Astrodome. Little did the world, nor Cassidy himself, know that the grandiose performance would be his last for the foreseeable future.
Cassidy sees his tour as serving a larger purpose: “Getting people into a room together, any kind of room, getting them off a computer, get them out of off their couch, just get people together in a world that is so crazy, divided for so many stupid reasons,” he said.
On nostalgia and his show’s approach, he explained: “It’s one of the most thrilling parts of doing this, because it’s like you’re doing archeology on yourself and wondering, ‘What was I thinking, or what was I writing about?’ Some songs feel like I anticipated, somehow, potentially singing them in 40 years. My show is a lot of shared discovery and shared experience.”
Cassidy found the key to connecting with audiences was authenticity: “When I first started (performing again), I was speaking kind of generally about my family, and it didn’t land. The more specific I got, the more open I got, the more honest I got, the more people felt like I was talking about them.”
Cassidy’s 50-city “The Road to Us Tour” will kick off Sept. 13 at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tennessee.