USA Today (March 25th 2013)

Shelton is unafraid to raise his voice

New, 'light album' and new TV season have outspoken star in a blissful state

It's a good time to be Blake Shelton. As he kicks back on a couch in a side room of his management company's Nashville complex, his sleeves rolled up and a big grin on his face, the lean country singer looks downright content. 

"Damn right, I'm content," says Shelton, who's also a mentor on The Voice. "I'm the luckiest guy in the world right now."

He's one of the busiest, too. The Voice starts its fourth season tonight (NBC, 8 ET/PT), and Shelton releases his album, Based on a True Story, on Tuesday. Already the Country Music Association's entertainer of the year, he's up for the honor at next month's Academy of Country Music Awards, a show he'll co-host for the third year.

The album reflects Shelton's satisfied mind. Along with single Sure Be Cool If You Did and the churlish I've Still Got a Finger, a sort of modern-day version of Johnny Paycheck's Take This Job and Shove It, Based on a True Story is full of rowdy songs and love songs, as well as plenty invoking pickup trucks, dirt roads and pretty girls.

"Outside of a couple of ballads, it's a pretty light album," Shelton says. "From Ten Times Crazier to Sure Be Cool If You Did to Doing What She Likes, all these songs are kind of about this guy that's whipped. I really am happy, and it's coming through on the album."

Shelton, 36, is so successful he has become fodder for gossip magazines and hit-hungry websites.

Early this year, the singer riled up defenders of country-music traditionalism when he told cable channel GAC that country music had to evolve to survive. It wasn't so much what he said as the way he said it: "Nobody wants to listen to their grandpa's music. And I don't care how many of these old farts around Nashville (are) going, 'My God, that ain't country!' Well, that's because you don't buy records anymore, jackass. The kids do, and they don't want to buy the music you were buying."

The "old farts" and "jackasses" lit into Shelton for days online, depicting him as a blockheaded, talent-deprived flash in the pan --apparently ignoring, or unaware, of Shelton's reputation as a dedicated student of country music history. He's a guy who loves launching into a Jerry Reed or Eddie Rabbitt tune when playing the Grand Ole Opry. He also insisted on having Bobby Braddock, a renowned writer of George Jones' He Stopped Loving Her Today and Tammy Wynette's D-I-V-O-R-C-E, produce on his first five albums.

And Shelton won't back down from his first comments, though he did make a conciliatory visit to Ray Price when the Country Music Hall of Famer took issue with him.

"I think I get misunderstood a lot," Shelton says, "and, lately, I have enough haters out there that they just take something that I say and turn it into what they want it to have been."

More recently, the cover of a tabloid magazine questioned the stability of Shelton's two-year marriage to Miranda Lambert because of tweets to another female singer.

Shelton tweeted his wife, "I just read in a tabloid that our marriage is falling apart!" Lambert tweeted back: "Oh no! Can't wait to read if we make it or not." As to the real state of his marriage, Shelton says: "I can't wait to see her every day. There's still a little part of me that thinks it's cool that I'm married to a country star."

As Shelton begins his fourth season on The Voice, he's looking to help a singer win the competition for a third consecutive year. But, as fellow mentors Christina Aguilera and Cee Lo Green leave the show, an exit strategy also is on his mind.

"My exit strategy probably will be when I say 'I've got to have this much money to do this again,' and they're going to go, 'We're not going to pay you that much money,'" he says.

It would be hard sitting at home and watching a show he helped build, Sheldon says, but he knows that neither the show nor his place on it can last forever.

"I don't know what I'm going to do. Or when I'm going to do it. It's such a neat thing to be a part of. It would be hard not to get to do it ever again."