Though The Voice has often gone through coaching shake-ups from one season to the next, the biggest switcheroo yet came when longtime vet Adam Levine stepped down from his chair after Season 16, with Gwen Stefani taking his place. Fans got their first taste of a Levine-free Voice season when the latest batch of blind auditions recently kicked off Season 17, and the reactions were fairly balanced between Levine's diehard fans and those who just wanted to move on.
Now, Adam Levine himself has opened up a bit about leaving The Voice (and his pseudo-BFF Blake Shelton), and how his life has already changed in the aftermath.
I really do miss it. I love the people that I met and worked with, and obviously we all know how I feel about Blake. I do miss it, but I also don’t miss how much I had to work. I was just constantly working for so many years; very lucky, very fortunate, very blessed, and all that. But just to be able to stop in this moment to spend time with my new young family, and just have the greatest time ever. Now, I'm just like a stay-at-home dad. I just stay home and do very little. It's great.
For around eight years, Adam Levine shared his outer-chair status on The Voice with Blake Shelton, and the workload might not have been so pummeling for the pop music star had NBC and show producers decided to stop cranking out two seasons per year, thus keeping the coaching talent locked up for something like 40 weeks out of the year. That kind of schedule might not disrupt everything in someone's life, it was stopping Levine from spending quality time with his new family, and not even a giant payday could help justify the workload.
Adam Levine is married to the model Behati Prinsloo, and the couple have a pair of children: Dusty Rose, 3, and Grace, 1. While it would certainly be understandable if Levine said he wanted to get back on The Voice to get away from the screaming tantrums of a one-year-old kid, the Maroon 5 frontman specifically wanted to spend more time with his offspring during these formative years in the young kids' lives.
Appearing this week on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, Adam Levine admitted he is "obsessed" with his children at this point, and while he doesn't think of that as a bad thing, he said that's the main reason why he's been such a homebody of late. Not very easy to go out and do worldwide tours when one is trying to constantly get a video of a one-year-old trying to walk around.
Perhaps at some point when Dusty Rose and Grace are a couple of years older, Adam Levine will reach a point when the hunger to return to The Voice will become too strong to ignore. The NBC show's ratings might not be close to what they used to be, but the show still regularly pulls the best 18-34 age demographic rating on the nights it airs, which is a huge reason why the network keeps lining up new seasons.
So at any point when Levine is interested in making his way back to the show, which clearly had him frustrated in the most recent seasons, The Voice will likely still be around to accommodate him.
With Gwen Stefani currently taking her relationship with Blake Shelton to places that Adam Levine probably would have gotten super uncomfortable with, The Voice airs Monday and Tuesday nights on NBC at 8:00 p.m. ET.
