Shawn Mendes offered a candid take on his sexuality this week, telling fans at a concert that he’s “just figuring it out like everyone else” while staying away from traditional labels.

The three-time Grammy nominee brought up the topic while introducing “The Mountain,” an unreleased song that will appear on his upcoming album “Shawn.”

“You can say I’m too young, you can say I’m too old,” Mendes sings on the track. “You can say I like girls or boys, whatever suits you.”

Widely shared footage from Mendes’ Monday performance at Colorado’s Red Rocks Amphitheater shows him elaborating on the lyrics.

“There’s been this thing about my sexuality since I was really young, and people have been talking about it for so long,” Mendes told the crowd, as seen on TikTok. “I think sexuality is such a beautiful, complex thing, and it’s so hard to just put it in boxes. It always felt to me like an intervention into something very personal, something I was figuring out within myself, something I hadn’t yet discovered and still have yet to discover.”

“The real truth about my life and my sexuality is that I’m just figuring it out like everyone else,” he added. “Sometimes I don’t really know, and sometimes I do, and it feels really scary because we live in a society that has a lot to say about it.”

After noting that his goal was simply to “just allow myself to be human,” he concluded, “That’s all I really want to say about it right now.”

Publicly, Mendes only had relationships with women. He dated Camila Cabello, with whom he collaborated on the 2019 hit single “Señorita,” for about two years before the couple split in 2021. This previously unconfirmed connection is unclear.

But as Mendes hinted in his concert speech, he has been plagued by rumors about his sexuality for some time.

“I thought, ‘You damn guys are so lucky that I’m not really gay and I’m afraid to come out,'” he told Rolling Stone after reading Internet comments that suggested he was secretly was gay or bisexual. “This is something that kills people. That’s how sensitive it is. Do you like the songs? Do you like me? Who cares if I’m gay?”

Later in that interview, he continued to shrug off the online chatter: “Maybe I’m a little more feminine – but that’s how it is. That’s why I am me.”

“Shawn” will be released on November 15th and is considered Mendes’ “most musically intimate and lyrically honest work to date.” The album’s release comes just over two years after the singer-songwriter canceled a world tour after just seven performances, citing the need for a mental health break.