Long gone are the days of Blake Shelton and Adam Levine hurling insults at each other on The Voice (at least face-to-face). That hasn’t happened since the Maroon 5 frontman left the show in 2019 (the cowboy followed suit in 2023). It’s something that we look back at fondly, but really, by the end fans had grown tired of their snide remarks. So did things ever go “too far”? Levine recalled the conversation he had with his on-air frenemy, including which one of them was more “sensitive” to the insults.
Adam Levine returned to the Big Red Chair for Season 27, currently airing on the 2025 TV schedule, and while it’s great to have a coach with multiple wins on the panel again, many fans are disappointed that we’re not getting the full Blake-and-Adam reunion. The rocker opened up about his dynamic with Shelton and said when the show started in 2011, he and Shelton even discussed how far to take their on-air rivalry. In an interview on Late Night with Seth Meyers, he said:
We just felt really comfortable with each other right away … and so we started kind of dissing each other casually. And then we had a really specific moment where we were in each other’s trailers. I was like, ‘Hey, is there ever too far? Is there a too far for you? Is there an over the line for you?’
That’s actually pretty decent of Adam Levine to establish boundaries with Blake Shelton as far as when the jokes between them would stop being funny. The country music superstar gave a pretty on-brand response, too, as Levine continued:
And he’s like, ‘Buddy, you hit me as hard as you want. You will never go too hard.’ And I think he pretty much stayed true to that. I got more sensitive than he did.
It’s not all that surprising to hear that Adam Levine took the jabs more personally than Blake Shelton. The “God’s Country” singer did come off as way more laid back than the hot-headed rockstar who was prone to controversy on The Voice.
However, I do have to wonder if things shifted a bit for Blake Shelton when he started dating their fellow coach Gwen Stefani. One of the biggest points of contention seemed to be Adam Levine not getting invited to the couple’s wedding. He joked that he was going to crash the wedding and then object to the union, so I don’t exactly blame Stefani for tossing that invitation in the trash.
There were also rumors back during Adam Levine’s sexting scandal in 2023 that Gwen Stefani asked her husband to distance himself from the Maroon 5 singer; however, Adam Levine made an appearance on The Voice just months later to support Blake Shelton on his final episode.
According to Adam Levine, the four original coaches of The Voice formed a bond when they started this whole chair-turning experience. He said:
When we started The Voice, like, no one knew. It is now what it is, but back then it was a mess. Like, no one knew what was going to happen. They threw these people, these four people in these four turning chairs. And this is something we all know about now, but back then we were like, ‘This is weird.’ And so we all felt like part of this team, you know?
Indeed we do know, because many of us have been tuning in for 14 years and 27 seasons. The current coaches have a great rapport too, and Kelsea Ballerini has really stepped in to be Adam Levine’s frenemy. But I’m not sure we’ll ever get anything like what we had between him and Blake Shelton.
Tune in to see if Adam can score a fourth victory, as The Voice continues at 8 p.m. ET Mondays on NBC and streaming the next day with a Peacock subscription.
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