The New York Times (July 10th 2011)

Country Boy For the Whole Country

Blake Shelton has been getting choked up a lot lately. First came his May wedding to fellow country star Miranda Lambert, his girlfriend of several years. And then came the subsequent weeks when he barely got to see her at all.

For the most part he was in Los Angeles working endless hours on the first season of "The Voice," the hit NBC singing competition on which he's one of four celebrity coaches. On off days he was flying out to do concerts. Just before "The Voice" finale late last month Mr. Shelton sat with one of his managers and said with a sigh, "I've got to spend some time with my wife." The reply: "It's probably only going to get worse from here."

"It was like somebody shoved a knife through my chest," Mr. Shelton said the morning after that conversation, calling in from Manhattan, Kan. "It just hit me so weird that I started crying. I had to be alone for a while."

Finally, on the show's last night, Mr. Shelton got to unite his two worlds: Ms. Lambert made an appearance to sing a duet of her wistful ballad "The House That Built Me" with Dia Frampton, Mr. Shelton's protege.

At the end of the performance the usually quick-tongued Mr. Shelton fumbled a bit with his words, getting his feelings in check before telling Ms. Frampton, who placed second in the competition, "You're family to me now, and I love you."

It was a characteristically raw moment for Mr. Shelton, who over the last two months has emerged as the spiritual conscience of "The Voice," an earnest and warm coach with a naughty streak. That the breakout star of the show wouldn't be one of the contestants but instead one of the coaches, and the country one at that, was an unanticipated outcome. But Mr. Shelton, 35, has been primed for such a mainstream star-making opportunity for years now. He's one of the most affable celebrities in Nashville and one of the most unpredictable, cheekier than all his male counterparts put together. Handsome and 6-foot-5, he's one of the highest-profile country stars to appear regularly in prime time since the days Buck Owens hosted "Hee Haw." Apart from perhaps Taylor Swift, he's becoming the most important and visible ambassador from Nashville to the American mainstream.

Next week, on the heels of his fourth consecutive No. 1 country single, "Honey Bee," he'll release "Red River Blue" (Warner Brothers Nashville), his sixth full-length album, which will probably be his biggest commercial success. "Blake was doing just fine without 'The Voice,"' said Mark Burnett, the show's executive producer. "He's on a hit TV show now. Millions of new Americans are falling in love with him."

"The Voice" is novel in that it placed country, so often an isolationist genre, on equal footing with other pop forms. Mr. Shelton may have had the lowest overall profile of any of the judges before the show. "Once I found out who the other three were, I felt stupid that I'd been dragging my feet," he said, referring to Christina Aguilera, Cee Lo Green and Adam Levine. But Mr. Shelton is also the most currently popular artist on the panel, based on recent chart successes.

The weeks of intense collaboration the show required brought out the big brother and father instincts in Mr. Shelton. "That's a side of him I've never seen," Ms. Lambert said. "It's good to know he does have a heart."

Recently Mr. Shelton has been on television with some frequency. In 2007 he was a judge on the fifth season of "Nashville Star" and also appeared on the weeklong "Clash of the Choirs." In April he hosted the Academy of Country Music Awards with friend Reba McEntire (whose husband, Narvel Blackstock, is one of Mr. Shelton's managers).

But there was once a time when Blake Shelton couldn't get on television. He had videos, of course -- "my only way to show people I could really make fun of myself" -- but he was largely overlooked by award shows not only as a nominee but also as a performer or presenter. A glut of male stars two generations deep was blocking his way: Kenny Chesney and Keith Urban and Brad Paisley and Tim McGraw and Toby Keith, and even more entrenched, Alan Jackson and George Strait.

Because of that, for better and worse, Mr. Shelton has been succeeding by relative stealth. His debut album was released in 2002, a time of high jingoism in country music, a template Mr. Shelton didn't fit squarely into. Since then there have been other archetypes: the whimsical outlaw, the nouveau hick, the handsome lover man. Again, Mr. Shelton was a little of each but not loyal to any one.

That was obvious from his series of hits, each different from the others, and each seeming like an unlikely breakthrough. It's too easy for country stars to play to type, but Mr. Shelton doesn't at all, taking on countless roles in his songs: a clever drunk and a loyal son, a skeptical lover and a crafty prisoner, a redneck booster and a carefree rapscallion. Last year he released a greatest-hits collection, "Loaded: The Best of Blake Shelton": it's diverse and fun, and holds up against the catalog of any other country artist of the last decade.

Emerging during what he termed a "horrifyingly conservative" period for country -- aesthetically, not politically -- Mr. Shelton and his loose-cannon attitude often fell through the cracks. He had big hits but not a steady image. "I believe the diversity of his style was probably not appreciated until somebody could stand back and look at everything and say, hey, this is great," said John Esposito, president and chief executive of Warner Music Nashville.

Mr. Shelton is a strong singer. But technical skill isn't his selling point. It's charm, through and through. It's evident on his albums, in his TV appearances and whenever he forgoes the stoic reserve that appears to chronically afflict male country stars. A mouth given to profanity and a Twitter account full of blue humor help too. On Monday he posted on Twitter, jokingly: "I'm so drunk right now I just nut-slapped an Arizona state police officer and shouted, 'Is that bulletproof bitch?!!' "

Mr. McGraw he's not. "There was a point where Warner Brothers was, like, we've got to get Blake off Twitter, 'cause he can't say these type of things," Mr. Shelton recalled. He added, "If Hank Williams Sr. would have had a Twitter account, can you imagine" the things (he opted for a more robust word here) that he "would have said? Or George Jones?"

"If there's anything that I hope that I have contributed to country music, it's probably not going to be song of the year, or to sing some amazing note people will talk about forever," Mr. Shelton said. "I hope that people learn from me, it's O.K. to be yourself. It's O.K. to offend somebody, and as a matter of fact, please be polarizing. If you're not polarizing, you failed in my opinion. If you don't stand for something, how can anyone respect what you do?"

In that he has an apt partner in Ms. Lambert, one of the sharpest voices in country music, and one of the most raw. Last November at the Country Music Association Awards they each had a breakthrough moment. She won female vocalist of the year -- a first, but not a total surprise -- and he won male vocalist of the year, something of an unexpected coup.

The pair's wins indicated a sea change in the genre. Their recent wedding only cemented their status as country music's new first couple. At the affair, held near San Antonio -- the couple live in Tishomingo, Okla. -- they served venison from deer the couple had killed themselves. Mr. Shelton bought new Wranglers for the wedding but has since worn them in. "We didn't hang them up next to the wedding dress or anything like that."

 Still it was a proper celebrity wedding: no cellphones were allowed; photos ended up on the covers of Us Weekly and the People magazine country music special. Mr. Shelton and Ms. Lambert are part of a new Nashville that intersects frequently with the tabloid world: the many dalliances of Ms. Swift, the happy nuptials of Carrie Underwood, the second chances at love for Shania Twain and LeAnn Rimes, and so on.

 The unfiltered Mr. Shelton is a natural for that medium. And with his role on "The Voice" continuing -- all four "Voice" coaches have signed up for Season 2, to begin in the winter -- the spotlight will only get harsher. (The time commitment is already overwhelming: "They've worked him to complete and utter death," Ms. Lambert said.) Whatever marriage issues Mr. Shelton may have, the tabloids aren't likely to get to them before he works them out in song. "Red River Blue" is his least rowdy album, the one that, were he not verging on a new form of crossover, cross-platform stardom, would establish his bona fides as a country crooner hitting his romantic stride. "I thought I was happy before," he said. "A lot of that was just acting out. I can be myself and still be that guy, but I also have this new portion of my life that I can experience, and I can sing about and feel secure about singing about it."

 That means the dark corners too. "God Gave Me You," the second single, is a remake of a Dave Barnes song that was a contemporary Christian hit last year. Mr. Shelton heard it on the radio when he and Ms. Lambert were in an "it-could-have-been-over type fight," he recalled, and decided he had to record it for the album. Apart from that there are lovey-dovey come-ons and melancholy divorce laments. Fans expecting the louche side of Mr. Shelton will have little to drink along with. A couple of randy gimmicks sneak in, but, on the whole "this is like his Fleetwood Mac 'Rumours,' " Mr. Esposito said.

 In moments Mr. Shelton evokes the 1980s country smoothie Earl Thomas Conley, one of his vocal heroes. Even though Mr. Shelton sounds happy on raucous numbers, he's just as comfortable when he's measured, maybe more so. ("Home," his 2008 No. 1 country hit, was a cover of the Michael Buble song.)

 Not all of Mr. Shelton's newfound pop culture fame has translated back to his country music career. Though he'll likely be one soon, he's not yet a headliner; he's opening on the current Brad Paisley tour (which plays the PNC Bank Arts Center in Holmdel, N.J., on July 15). And when "The Voice" returns, he'll once again be a halftime country star, halftime TV star, full-time husband. 

"The one thing we can't allow to happen is we get so busy that we lose each other," Mr. Shelton said of his still young marriage. "Do I want to be the biggest star on earth? Yeah. Am I willing to do what it takes to be that?" Here came some cussing, before he concluded with a no.