The Hollywood Reporter (June 24th 2011)
The Miracle of The Voice
[edited version]
And Shelton was a rising country star who served Burnett's desire to diversify. Telegdy had worked with Shelton a few years earlier on Clash of the Choirs and was impressed by his talent and easygoing style. He remembers asking the star whether he wanted to stay in the Ritz-Carlton or Four Seasons during Choirs two-week taping. Shelton's response: "I just need three parking spaces." For his tour bus.
Each coach says Voice's positive message was a big attraction. Aguilera claims she had seen only snippets of the other music-competition shows and was struck by their focus on "bashing the performers for 30 seconds of TV," which "might be juicy or interesting to the viewer, but I just wasn't into all of that." When she sat down with Burnett, she says, "he convinced me that that's not what this is about." (Her decision coincided with a series of setbacks: the disappointing Burlesque, a botched Super Bowl performance and an arrest for public intoxication, though no charges were filed.)
Shelton had much the same reaction, pointing to the show's policy not to include hopeless singers in auditions as spectacle. "It's not showcasing people who suck and making a mockery of anybody," he says. "It's just about good singers who all get that it's a competition show."
Levine, too, admits he was "extremely hesitant at first ... but given what's going on in the record industry right now. I saw this show as a way to bring in new talent and give people a second, third or even fourth chance."
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Shelton says he'll know more about the impact of the show when his new album comes out in July. "It's had a huge effect on me in terms of the demographies of the people who recognize me now. I hate to use a word like that, but I don't know any other way to say it," he says. "After the second show aired, I went into an Exxon gas station at about 1 in the morning - a station that I must have been in 100 times - and there was this young black girl working the cash register. I put my Funyuns or whatever down, and she screams. It scared the hell out of me. She said, 'You're that guy from the TV show I'm watching!' I thought, 'My God, I guess that's the power of television.' Normally I'd have to walk into a country bar for anybody to recognize me. But I'm a ham - I love to have people recognize me because that means things must be going pretty well."
Pretty well, indeed.
Sidebar
From left: Telegdy, Greenblatt, Burnett, Green, Levine, Aguilera and Shelton, photographed June 7 on the Warner Bros, lot in Burbank. "I'm smart enough to know that when they put a show on after the Super Bowl, that's an all-in bet," says Shelton. "That tells me they have a lot of confidence in it; it must not be just hype."
Sidebar
The coaches and host talk about why they decided to throw their talents behind The Voice.
Blake Shelton
"In the back of my mind, I'm thinking, 'I hope this means that my album does better and more people come out and see me on tour.' That's still what I do."