Associated Press (March 16th 2010)

Blake Shelton deletes Twitter app from his phone, says hello to life

Blake Shelton seems to be coping well after his recent breakup.

The country star ended his committed relationship with Twitter about a month ago by deleting it from his phone.

"After I guess almost a year of being on Twitter, about three weeks ago I woke up one morning, and I was looking at it like I did every morning, and I said, 'Man, I've got to move on with my life. I'm addicted to this stuff.' I can't think in the morning because all I can do is get on there and think, 'All right, I've got to think of something funny to say to start this day,"' he said in a recent interview.

Shelton, 33, significantly raised his profile over the past year through his colourful participation on Twitter. The day he deleted the mobile app, Shelton had over 76,000 followers.

"I think people are so used to country artists, celebrities, just kind of playing the middle and really not being themselves out of fear, that it was refreshing to them to get on Twitter and see well Blake Shelton wrote, 'Oh my god, I got so drunk last night I think my liver exploded . . .,"' he said. "They're going, 'This guy is crazy. I can't wait to see what he's going to write next.' Over time they realized, 'Man, all the guy is doing is joking around."

Shelton has found himself in the post-breakup grey area. He still tweets but it's not as convenient or as often without the mobile application. Since the release of his "Hillbilly Bone" album this month, his followers have actually increased to over 80,000, thanks, in part, to the success of the album's title track.

The "Hillbilly Bone" duet with longtime friend Trace Adkins is currently a top-five country hit, and it's nominated for the Academy of Country Music Awards' vocal event of the year. The collaboration came naturally. Shelton's friendship with Adkins goes back to the early 2000s, when they both had hair longer than their shoulders.

"He's one of the first guys I met that I felt like was not only a great guy, but genuine. Anytime he would talk to me, he would talk to me in a way that I felt like he had my best interest at heart, because I was a new guy when he was probably on his third or fourth album," said Shelton. "He was somebody I could call any time I had a question about the industry and ask him, 'What would you have done here or there?' He was just somebody I could talk to like a friend."

Shelton couldn't be happier with the direction his life is going right now. "Hillbilly Bone" album debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard 200, his relationship with girlfriend and fellow country star Miranda Lambert is solid, and after getting a divorce in 2006, he's finally open to the idea of marriage again.

"Miranda and I have been together, it's getting close to five years now," he said. "We've had our good years and our bad years and our really bad years. But I think right now, she and I have a stronger relationship than we've ever had, even in the early times when it was new and exciting, it still didn't feel like it feels right now. We've been through a lot together, and we've toughed it out. It's exciting to me."

"Probably for the first time I can realistically say, I can see us being together forever," he added. "I can see us getting married one day, maybe, where before you would never have gotten me to say something like that. As far as I'm concerned we're definitely closer than we've ever been to maybe taking that step."