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After 18 years in the spotlight–both as a dyed-in-the-wool country star and a wise-cracking TV personality–Blake Shelton has lived nearly half his life as an open book. Now with his Fully Loaded: God’s Country greatest hits album (out December 13), the Oklahoma native looks back over the last few chapters–and starts a brand new one. But this time last year, he was pretty sure the story was wrapping up.
“I thought I was on the last couple of pages,” he says with an instantly disarming laugh. “That sounds dumb to say…but you can feel it when it starts to not be as exciting as it was.”
According to him, the album’s title track changed all that. A Platinum Number One (his 26th Billboard chart topper), Shelton says the song “God’s Country” inspired him to take a new, “let the chips fall where they may” approach to music, and Fully Loaded is another step in that direction.
This greatest hits album is a hybrid of sorts, and definitely unusual. It’s split about fifty-fifty with old hits and new material, but even the oldies are interesting since they all come from a tumultuous time in Shelton’s life. The earliest are off 2016’s If I’m Honest, recorded in the wake of his divorce from Miranda Lambert, and the others first arrived on 2017’s Texoma Shore, which found him washed up on the beach of newfound love with pop superstar Gwen Stefani. Looking back, Shelton says it all feels like 20 years ago.
“It just seems like such a long time ago because there was so much turmoil in my life, and things just really calmed down and got into a good place now,” he says. “It went by so fast that part of me misses that time a little bit –when I was first meeting Gwen and getting together with her, and getting over the divorce. A lot of things were going on and I didn’t have enough time to absorb all of that, so I love hearing those songs. They take me back.”
The context there puts a new spin on some familiar music. But taken as a whole, Fully Loaded is actually more about looking forward. Along with “God’s Country,” it also includes Shelton’s rabble-rousing current single, “Hell Right” (featuring Trace Adkins) and the fiesta-ready “Tequila Sheila”—none of which were intended to be part of a traditional album—plus a new duet with Stefani called “Nobody But You” that he calls “as important of a song as I’ve ever recorded.”
“The lyrics of that song are so on point, not just for me and Gwen, but I think for a lot of people,” Shelton says. “The song is not a fairytale, but at the same time it’s the most epic, earth-rattling love song I’ve heard in a long time, because the lyrics are so honest and just say it how it is.”
Shelton goes on to say there has always been a glut of too-cheesy, fantasyland love songs in country (and he admits he’s recorded a few of his own) but says “Nobody But You” is the opposite. It’s got that same stark sense of eyes-wide-open realism which excited him so much about “God’s Country.”
“This song really cuts to the honesty of how these two feel about each other, and in a real-life situation,” he says. “It’s as honest as you can be in a country song, and something that will make you stop your car.”
Moving ahead, that’s the tone Shelton’s chasing—at least for now. Even this project was a compromise between him and his team, since he’s skeptical about recording in the old-fashioned album model anymore. He promises there will still be plenty of new music in the future, but about a year ago decided to start focusing on one song at a time, letting his inspiration take him where it will. It seems to be working just fine, so maybe there are a few more pages left in that story after all.
“If you had told me in 1994 when I moved to Nashville that I would even have one hit, I would have kissed you on the mouth,” he says, this time not laughing at all. “This has been an unbelievable ride and every time I start to think it’s slowing down, something like ‘God’s Country’ happens and not only reignites my career, it reignites my passion for what I do.”