Shelton also shared the 'countriest' quality about his girlfriend.
She may not have gotten into country music until she started dating Blake Shelton, but Gwen Stefani showed early signs of having an affinity for the genre, judging by Shelton’s latest comments!
Hitting the stage at an iHeart Music performance celebrating his new album, Fully Loaded: God's Country last week, Shelton paused to answer a question about the “countriest” quality about his girlfriend.
“There’s a photo of her when she was a kid with a cowboy hat on holding two kittens -- that’s about as country of a thing that I can think of,” Shelton dished. “But you know what? Since we’ve been together, this girl has literally fallen in love with country music. It’s all that she listens to, it’s all that’s on in her car.”
“It’s not to do with me or anything,” he added, about why Stefani wasn’t into the genre previously. “It’s just she grew up in Anaheim and moved to Los Angeles -- she didn’t hear a lot of country music is all I’m saying. Her parents abused her with this other music they played. It was music abuse, I’m telling you! She just wasn’t exposed to a lot of country music, but now it’s all she listens to. I hope she’s okay with me saying that.”
Stefani doesn’t only love country music, she appears on Shelton’s new record on the song “Nobody But You.”
The album features some of Shelton’s hits, alongside five new tracks, and he told concert-goers at Burbank, California's iHeartRadio Theater that the project and song “God’s Country” had helped reaffirm his place in the industry.
“It re-energized me and reminded me I’m still a country singer first,” he shared. “There’s a whole new generation coming up and they’re all great and I love them, so you start feeling like, ‘Oh, I got to make room for those guys.’ So, to have something like ‘God’s Country’...”
“I won’t [stop,]” he added. “If I have to sing for tips somewhere, I’m going to do it.”
Shelton added that he had no idea how popular “God’s Country” would become when he first heard the song while working at his ranch.
“I was grounding up some trees and I felt so manly then that song came on and it was like, ‘Oh my god, what is this song?’” he recalled. “It had this weird blend of rock and country and I didn’t know what it was going to do for everybody, I just knew what it did for me -- which it’s inappropriate to talk about right now!”
Shelton talked to ET further about his new album at the event, sharing how special it was to record "Nobody But You" with Stefani.
"Gwen was crying when we even just talked about singing it together at all," he said. "I actually got the song through Gwen because she had been working with Shane McAnally. He told her that he had a song he needed to get to me and sent it to her first and she sent it on to me. I listened to it and I knew, 'Oh my god, I gotta cut this song. This song's incredible.'"
See more on Shelton and his new album below.
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