Singers from all over the country head for Nashville to try to “make it,” and most of them end up going home to look for a normal job.

Dan Smyers comes back to Pittsburgh this weekend, having scored a No. 1 country album as half of the duo Dan + Shay, making its Pittsburgh debut at Stage AE tonight.

The 27-year-old Smyers is one of those guys who “went country” after starting out in a different genre. As a teenager, he fronted the Christian pop-punk band Transition. “We traveled around the country, slept on floors, couches, the whole thing.”

After graduating from North Allegheny High School, he put touring on hold for three years, for the most part, to get a degree in finance at Carnegie Mellon University, and in 2010, he moved to Tennessee to hook up with Andy Albert, a songwriting partner he met online through a mutual friend.

“I threw all my stuff in the back of the car and drove down to Nashville,” he says. “I didn’t even actually have a working guitar. After the Transition days, my guitar was broken. I borrowed my brother’s guitar. ”

They found the cheapest living space they could on Craigslist, a little more than $100 each in rent, and then customized it.

“We actually built a tent there in the living room, which was ridiculous, because we couldn’t afford heat. We did what we could to survive,” he says.

“All that time, my parents are going, ‘Why don’t you come back to Pittsburgh? You have a degree from CMU.’ I said, ‘I gotta give this a good fighting shot.’ ”

Country wasn’t too much of a reach for him, he says, as he grew up going to see Kenny Chesney, Brad Paisley and other big country stars.

“I loved my country my whole life but was just playing what my friends were playing. I loved all kinds of music and still do, whether it’s hip-hop, punk rock, rock. I always wrote [country], but I never really put it out. I guess it wasn’t good enough.”

He and Mr. Albert played together as a duo called Bonaventure. He later met Shay Mooney at a keg party at his house. They hit it off musically, and the first song they wrote was put on hold by Rascal Flatts for potential release.

“We wrote about what we knew,” he says. “Every song is about girls.”

With a pop-country style suited for One Direction fans, they spent a lot of time singing for A&R people in offices. At Warner/Chappell Music, they hoped to sign a publishing deal.

“The publishing company was like, ‘Why don’t you walk upstairs and sing for the president of the label?’ We’re like, ‘Let’s do it!’ We wrote a song that day and pulled my laptop out with the lyrics, and we sang the song from that day. It was like out of the TV show ‘Nashville.’ Before we left that day, we had a record deal offer in our email.”

All along they had been building tracks on the laptop with ProTools, working up a collection of about 80 demos. “The label was like, ‘This is the most songs we ever got from a new artist.’ ”

When they asked who they would get to produce their record, the label said, “Oh, your record’s already done.”

“Our label was nice enough to say, ‘If it’s not broken, don’t fix it, ’” Mr. Smyers says, although they did add some extra production and input.

Their first single, the beachy “19 You + Me,” written with Nashville ringer Danny Orton, hit No. 7 on the country chart. The debut album, “Where It All Began,” sold 29,000 copies the first week, debuting at No. 1 on the country charts and No. 6 on the Billboard album chart.

They went on tour early last year with Hunter Hayes, playing to his young demographic, and then hit an older fan base on a summer tour with Blake Shelton.

“Blake is an incredible stage performer,” Mr. Smyers says. “He’s so candid and so funny. He’s just a star. He connects with an audience in a way I’ve never seen before. We were trying to pick that up from him and steal a few pointers. Blake is such a good guy to hang out with, too. He can have a drink, for sure.”

Having scored a No. 1 album, played a couple of big tours and even earned an Academy of Country Music Awards nomination, they don’t still have a tent in the living room, but, he says, “We’re still living very modestly. People don’t make as much money in the music industry as they used to.”

He’s excited to finally play Pittsburgh and share the work he’s been doing the past five years.

“When we hear the fans sing the words back, it’s special that they’re singing words you wrote,” he says. “I remember sitting down and writing those songs and living off a piece of bread a day whenever we were writing that stuff. Hearing the fans sing it back, it’s crazy, it’s surreal. It feels like a dream, honestly.”

Scott Mervis: smervis@post-gazette.com; 412-263-2576. Twitter: @scottmervis_pg.

First Published: April 9, 2015, 4:00 a.m.