Blake Shelton — And Here We Are, 25 Years Later

The Oklahoma native was arguably the most visible country musician of the 2010s, thanks to a record-breaking string of Billboard Country Airplay No. 1s and a 12-year stint as a coach on The Voice, during which he met his wife, Gwen Stefani. But as Blake Shelton tells Apple Music’s Kelleigh Bannen, filming two seasons of The Voice per year left him feeling out of the loop as far as the Nashville scene. “By the time that those 12 years went by, all of a sudden it was like, man, I’ve gotten old now,” the 48-year-old singer admits. “You finally start looking at a chart, and you’re like, who the hell is Morgan Wallen? Who’s Luke Combs? It was like there was this whole new generation of artists who had taken over country music, and I was like, ‘Oh, my God, I’m one of the old guys now.’”

Nearly 25 years after breaking through with his 2001 debut single, “Austin” (and four years after his last full-length, 2021’s Body Language), Shelton wondered whether there was still room for him on the country charts. “If I do put out a new record, are they going to play it? Are the fans waiting on it?” he recounts thinking. “Those are natural, normal things to think if you’re being honest with yourself, and I try to be.”

On his 13th studio album, For Recreational Use Only, he puts those feelings into songs that sound like the Blake Shelton you know—a sincere storyteller who prides himself on his performance—but still swings for the fences here and there. Lead single “Texas” is a lost-love number that nods to George Strait’s “All My Ex’s Live in Texas” and channels the minor-key melodrama of Ronnie Milsap’s “Stranger in My House.” And “Let Him in Anyway,” co-written by HARDY, allows Shelton to get existential, grappling with grief, God, and the afterlife.

Looking back at his early career, Shelton remembers being elated and terrified at once, worried his success would disappear overnight. “I loved it so much that I couldn’t be comfortable that it wouldn’t be gone someday,” he says. “It was all I ever wanted to be: one of the guys that I was hearing on the radio. I didn’t even know how to do it, and the fact that it was happening, it was like, I want to hang on to this forever. And here we are, 25 years later.”

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