Blake Shelton Didn’t Want Another Coach to Take His Chair on ‘The Voice’
By the time Blake Shelton left The Voice, he was more than ready to walk away from the job. He was a coach on the show for 23 seasons and likely would have left sooner if it hadn’t been for COVID-19. Still, he wanted a keepsake when he left. After a great deal of petitioning, Shelton said he got what he wanted.
Blake Shelton wanted to take his chair from ‘The Voice’ home with him
After 23 seasons on The Voice, Shelton said that the hardest thing about walking away was losing 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.”
He didn’t have a problem with another coach replacing him, but he didn’t want them to sit in his chair.
“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.”
He joked that he felt the show owed him the chair after all the time he spent sitting on it. His tenure on the show was longer than any other coach’s.
He eventually got what he was hoping for
All his talk about the chair paid off. Once Shelton exited the show, he received his red chair at his home in Oklahoma.
“I got my chair!” Shelton said on The Jennifer Hudson Show (per Rolling Stone). “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.”
He didn’t mention if they included any of the cash he wanted in the packaging.
Blake Shelton said he doesn’t miss being on ‘The Voice’
While Shelton appreciated his time on The Voice, he’d been ready to leave several seasons before he actually did. He didn’t want to put the show in a bad position during COVID-19, however.
“To be totally honest about it, I wasn’t even planning on being there that long,” Shelton said. “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].”
He didn’t necessarily regret staying longer, but he admitted he doesn’t miss being a coach.
“I didn’t have anything to do anyway, so I stayed a little bit longer,” he said. “But I stayed too long for me to now miss it, I can promise you that.”
