Gwen Stefani Didn’t Know Blake Shelton ‘Existed’ Before ‘The Voice’

Gwen Stefani and Blake Shelton announced their engagement last month after dating for five years, and the superstar couple has The Voice to thank for their relationship. They duo met while coaching on the show together in 2014 before they began dating one year later, and Stefani admitted to Seth Meyers on Late Night last week that she didn’t even know who Shelton was before joining the show.

“I didn’t know Blake Shelton existed before I went on that show,” Stefani said. “Meanwhile, he’s literally one of the biggest… 27 number one radio hits, he’s insane.” The singer added that she often plays a game with herself where she pictures herself in her The Voice coaching chair and thinks about before she knew her now-fiancé. “That first season I didn’t know him at all and then imagine that now he’s my boyfriend and I won a song on a country…” she said, referencing the pair’s recent CMT Music Awards win for Collaborative Video of the Year.

“It’s too hard to imagine,” she continued. “It’s inconceivable that we would even know each other and be friends, let alone do music together. But at the same time, it’s like we have so many things that come together, and we’re the same. Even with music.”

Shelton and Stefani have released several duets together at this point, and Stefani said that “being on those records was so much fun.” “The community, the whole country community was so welcoming to me,” she said. “There’s a lot of cross-pollination going on in music in all different genres, and I feel like in my whole career I’ve been, I don’t know why, so lucky to have been able to bounce in different genres.”

“It’s just so incredible because music brings us all together in so many ways,” she continued. “Sometimes boundaries and genres don’t really mean anything, it’s really about the story and the song and the heart and the message. I’ve just noticed that, being able to go in country music and go to concerts and see Blake’s audience. It’s just so different, but yet, so the same.”

While she’s now a country music award winner, Stefani told Andy Cohen on SiriusXM’s Radio Andy in September 2019 that she wasn’t too knowledgeable about the genre before meeting Shelton. “I can’t imagine before, I didn’t even know he existed, like before the show,” she said. “I didn’t even know he was a human being on this planet, and I didn’t know much about country…. He is literally a country jukebox. He knows every single song forever, he’s incredible like that. But I just love that we’re so from different genres.”