Blake Shelton Admitted He ‘Stayed too Long’ on ‘The Voice’ to Miss It
After 23 seasons, Blake Shelton stepped down from his role on The Voice. Shelton said he enjoyed his time on the show, but has reportedly seen it as a relief to be done. He admitted he never intended to stay on as a coach for the singing competition for as long as he did.
Blake Shelton admitted he spent too much time on ‘The Voice’
Shelton left The Voice after season 23, which was longer than he’d intended on staying. He explained that COVID-19 pushed back his exit.
“To be totally honest about it, I wasn’t even planning on being there that long,” Shelton said on The Jennifer Hudson Show (per Rolling Stone). “I was planning on wrapping it up around 20 or 21 seasons, and then obviously COVID hit, and then I didn’t want to walk out on the show in the middle of COVID, and them trying to scramble and figure out [what to do].”
While he didn’t have much of a problem continuing on with the show, he doesn’t exactly miss it after his exit.
“So, I stayed,” he said. “I didn’t have anything to do anyway, so I stayed a little bit longer. But I stayed too long for me to now miss it, I can promise you that.”
Blake Shelton left ‘The Voice’ to spend more time with his family
Part of the reason why Shelton left the show was his desire to spend more time with his wife, Gwen Stefani, and his stepchildren.
“I think being a stepdad has changed my perspective in that I’m not the first person that I think about anymore,” he told Access. “Even to the small little things when you go, ‘I think I’ll do this,’ the very next thought is always, ‘Well, wait a minute. How’s that going work?’ Or, ‘What will they think?’ Or, ‘How will that affect a schedule?’”
Stefani said the show, on top of all his other work, became too much, particularly considering how much time he was away from home.
“I think that Blake — I don’t know, I think he just wants more time, you know what I mean?” Stefani told Extra. “I don’t know that people realize, if he’s doing two seasons a year, right? In between that, he’s touring. So, he actually has two teams at the same time at a certain point, so they overlap. So, it’s a lot of brain power, it’s a lot of time away from the family, those kinds of things.”
He took home a keepsake from the show
As Shelton filmed his final season, he said his biggest regret was that he’d have to say goodbye to his chair.
“The hardest part about filming my final season of The Voice is I’m very territorial about this particular chair that I’m sitting in,” he told NBC Insider. “I’m trying to negotiate and work out a deal where I can actually take my chair with me. I mean, it’s one thing to say, ‘I’m handing my chair off to the next coach’ or whatever, but I literally don’t want to hand my chair off to whoever the next coach is. I wanna take this one with me.”
Ultimately, though, he got to take it home with him.
“I got my chair!” Shelton said, adding, “I told them it was the one thing I wanted — besides a bunch of money. I wanted to take home from The Voice my red chair! So they did, they sent it to Oklahoma.”
