If you think Blake Shelton is thrilled about going back for a third season of The Voice, you're right. And wrong.
"So far, I'm doing the back-to-back seasons," he said backstage at the CMA Festival Friday night, shortly before taking the stage at Nashville's LP Field. His emphasis was on the so far part of that equation. "At some point, something's gotta give. I've been very vocal with the network and Mark Burnett's production company. It's like 'Man, this sucks, because the reason that you want the four of us is because we're viable artists right now—current. And we can't do both, if we do back-to-back seasons.' I've been hammering 'em about it."
Blake Shelton, backstage at Nashville's LP FieldNot that he has any intention of jumping off the train. "We are gonna do this fall," he emphasized. "We've already committed to that. And in fact we start in a week or two, filming it again. And I look forward to that. I love it, and I can't imagine not being a part of The Voice, ever. I mean, I'd love to do it from now on. But it just needs to work in a way that I can still come out here and see these people that are here (attending the CMA Festival) tonight across the country and do that at the same time. So, something's gotta give."
He said "something's gotta give" no fewer than three times during his meeting with the press at LP Field. It first came up in the context of his not doing an exclusive show for his fan club during the CMA Festival, as he has every year prior to this in his recording career. But, the way he explained it, you could hardly hold it against him.
"It's the first CMA Fest…" He interrupted himself to switch to his preferred terminology. "I'm not talking like that. It's the first Fan Fair ever that I haven't done a fan club party—the reason being that this is the first time I've been to Nashville in I don't know when... I'm working on the next studio album and I've been in the studio all this week working on a Christmas record. Man, something's gotta give at some point, so we decided to go down to [a special storefront Warner Bros. Records set up] and sign autographs for an hour and a half or two hours today—and hopefully get the fan club party amped up again next year... When I do a party like that, I want it to be fun, and I just couldn't have done it this week and done everything I needed to. So, I wussed out."
SheltonShelton was asked if his new single, "Over," brought up any thoughts of when he was "wooing" his wife of one year, Miranda Lambert.
"Oh, hell no," he countered. "I had her wrapped around my finger from day one! It was the other lyric... 'Tell me what I gotta do to bend you over' was the original lyric, and I changed it," he joked, which led to a good half-minute of tittering from the room.
The video for "Over" has yet to premiere, but Shelton was predictably irreverent as he described it.
"Man, that's one of those songs where just the energy and the melody had me," Shelton said. "It's one of those lyrics that when you listen to it, you go, 'Hey, wait a minute'—because there's lines in there about burning the world down and sitting in the glow. It's like so romantic and out there that you're like, I guess that's cool. (But) you could have a different melody and it would be like a threat, that song!
"In fact, when we went in to do the video for 'Over' with (director) Roman White, we were looking at the tretment, and… there's a house that burns down and all this stuff. And it's like, man, I think [the songwriter] really just kind of meant that not literally—but you know, screw it, let's burn some stuff down."