Adam Levine and Blake Shelton didn’t want to hurt each other’s feelings on The Voice.
In a new interview on the April 28 episode of Late Night with Seth Meyers, the Maroon 5 frontman recalled having a conversation with Shelton when they started as coaches on The Voice about how far they’d go when playfully dissing each other from their respective red chairs.
Levine, who coached on The Voice for its first 16 seasons and recently returned for season 27, first joked about not missing Shelton’s presence on the show. “He’s just not a memorable guy,” he said. “I forgot who he was. I don’t know who you’re talking about.”
Related: A Look Back at The Voice Coaches By Season (and Who Won the Most Titles!)
After admitting he remembers the country star quite well, the “Beautiful Mistakes” singer recalled feeling “really comfortable” with Shelton “right away” upon starting on the NBC singing competition series.
“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,” explained Levine. “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?”
The Grammy winner noted he and Shelton “started kind of dissing each other casually” before addressing their budding dynamic as frenemies. “We had a really specific moment where we were in each other’s trailers,” he said. “I was like, ‘Hey, is there ever too far? Is there a too far for you? Is there an over the line for you?’”
Related: Adam Levine Reveals Paul McCartney’s 4-Word Reaction to Maroon 5’s Beatles Covers — and Why He Later Apologized
Lloyd Bishop/NBC via Getty
Adam Levine in April 2025
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,” joked the “Moves Like Jagger” performer.
Maroon 5’s most recent album, Jordi, was released in 2021. The band is set to release a new single, “Priceless” featuring Lisa of BLACKPINK, on May 2.
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Elsewhere in the Late Night interview, Levine spoke about how the new song marks a return to form for the group. “It was really different this time around because we really got back to the basics of how we started,” he said.
“As time went on, songwriters came in, and we did a lot of collaborations with a lot of different people, which was amazing and led to an amazing run of hits and all that. But this was kind of back to just the organic, kind of simple, all created in-house,” detailed Levine.
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