Who Is Shawn Mendes? Five Facts You Need To Know About The 'Life Of The Party' Singer

Twitter was abuzz on Friday morning when Shawn Mendes, 16, appeared on Good Morning America. The Canadian singer took photos with the massive crowd of young fans cheering waiting outside the Times Square, New York City-based studio. The show even tweeted several photos of the 16 year-old engaging with fans.

You may not know Mendes’ name yet, but your children probably do. The “Something Big” singer has nearly three million followers on Twitter and nearly 800,000 YouTube fans, and he’s not even a legal adult yet. Want to learn more? Here are five facts you need to know about the singer:

1. Mendes got started on Vine. At 14, he began posting six-second clips of himself singing song covers on the popular video sharing app vine in 2013. One year later, he caught the attention of Island Records A & R (artists and repertoire) manager Ziggy Chareton. The rest is history.

2. Mendes described his first single, “Life of the Party” as not “super happy, but it’s also not depressing.” The 16 year-old didn’t write the song’s lyrics.

3. Seventeen magazine called Mendes “the next Ed Sheeran” during an interview last June.

4. Mendes’ mentor is actually Ed Sheeran. The two connected last year and Sheeran flew him to LA for dinner. "He wanted to meet me, because he saw a lot of himself in me and he wanted to give me as much advice as he could," Mendes told Seventeen magazine. "It felt completely normal, he made me feel like a friend."

5. Mendes was born in Toronto, Canada and raised in Pickering, a small city with a population of 88,721 located east of Toronto.