Blake Shelton doesn’t miss ‘The Voice’ at all: ‘I stayed too long’

nypost.com:

god’s country.The eight-time Grammy nominee is the longest running judge on the hit NBC competition reality series, but after 23 seasons he is happy to be retired.The country crooner sat down for an interview on Friday episode of “The Jennifer Hudson Show” and revealed that he doesn’t miss the gig one bit after Hudson, 42, asked if he longed to still serve as a coach. “Not yet, I mean,” Shelton snapped. “I did that show for 23 seasons.” The 47-year-old admitted that he would had actually left the show sooner if the COVID-19 pandemic hadn’t forced the world to shut down in 2020.“To be totally honest about it, I wasn’t even planning on being there that long,” he shares. “I was planning on wrapping it up around 20 seasons 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.”Like millions of Americans forced into quarantine as a result of the pandemic, Shelton had more time on his hands than he knew what to do with. “So I stayed,” he confessed. “I didn’t have anything else 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.”Still Shelton has nothing but the fondest memories for the show which introduced him to his wife, fellow coach Gwen Stefani.

Shelton and Stefani tied the knot in 2021 and he has officially been a stepdad to her three sons Kingston, Zuma and Apollo ever since.“It all goes back to ‘The Voice.’ ‘The Voice,’ it connected everything,” Shelton says. “I was having a country music career, but then they asked me to be on ‘The Voice’ and it literally changed my life in so many ways.