Blake Shelton Believes in God ‘More Than I Ever Have in My Life’
Blake Shelton has been going through a resurgence of faith in 2019. In a new interview, the country superstar and coach on TV's The Voice says he believes God is behind his recent career upswing and his happy relationship with Gwen Stefani.
Shelton tells Nashville's Tennessean newspaper that his renewed faith really started to take hold after he began his romance with Stefani 2015. She persuaded him to start attending church on a regular basis, and he realized it was time to "turn a page," he says.
“I believe in God now more than I ever have in my life,” Shelton says. “The biggest part of that is just how [Stefani] came into my life and now our relationship. It’s just too weird. If you take God out of it, it doesn’t make sense. If you put God into it, everything that’s happened with us makes sense.”
Shelton had a moment that he describes as a "revelation" early in 2019, when his producer sent him several new songs to consider. Shelton was on his skid-steer clearing brush at his ranch in Oklahoma when he first heard the demo for "God's Country."
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“It was the most shocking moment I’ve had in my 20 years of doing this,” he relates. “I was in a place that I consider to be God’s country doing the thing that makes me feel the most connected to God, which is working on the land. I heard that song, and I had one of those moments that you hear people talk about … where they say they pulled over on the side of the highway and listened. I literally had that moment.”
He cut the song within days, and "God's Country" went on to become his first No. 1 hit since "I'll Name the Dogs" in 2017, as well as the biggest streaming song of his career. Shelton won Single of the Year honors for "God's Country" at the 2019 CMA Awards in November, and the song is nominated for Best Country Solo Performance in the upcoming 2020 Grammy Awards.
Shelton says the song has not only impacted his spiritual life, it's also helped renew his faith in the kind of southern rock-influenced country that he loves.
“There is still the old-school segment of country music fans out there that are starved for that,” he observes. “But even more than that is this new young generation of country music fans … who know ‘Country Boy Can Survive,’ and they want their generation’s version of that song. That really excited me to know that that part of country music is alive and well out there, it just hasn’t been fed.”
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