Blake Shelton seems poised to earn his 26th No. 1 hit with “I’ll Name the Dogs,” his latest single from his 2017 Texoma Shore album. The song, which says, “Daddy drove the wheels off a flatbed Ford / Flies found a hole in the old screen door / Granny said the dress that my sister wore / To church wasn’t long enough,” was for Shelton perhaps his last chance to get a traditional-sounding song at country radio.
“I kind of feel like right now, and even though it may just be a moment in time, I felt like it would be good to get some things out there – not a full-on throwback to old-school country music, but maybe some ’90s-sounding stuff on radio,” Shelton explains (quote via Nash Country Daily). “[With “I Lived It”] I remember thinking, ‘Wow, this could be the last chance to have a song like that out there,’ kind of a story-reminiscent song about a lifestyle that doesn’t really exist anymore except in our memories.”
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The reigning Sexiest Man Alive didn’t write his previous hit, “I’ll Name the Dogs,” but the song clearly rang true with him. With lines like “I’m talkin’ you and me with the same street name /
Same last name, same everything,” Shelton included girlfriend Gwen Stefani’s older two sons, Kingston and Zuma, in the accompanying video. And the way things are going, it sounds like Shelton will continue to draw inspiration from Stefani and her children in the future.
“I never saw that coming, but it’s so fun,” Shelton shared on the Today show. “At this point in my life, I kind of had put [having kids] as like, ‘Well, I guess that wasn’t meant to be.’ Then all of a sudden it happens one way or another and it’s like, ‘Wow, [I] missed out on a lot.’ And so having them around – I don’t even know how to describe it. It’s so much fun.”
Stefani recently revealed that she and her boys, including youngest son, four-year-old, Apollo, and her goddaughter spent their Spring break at Shelton’s Oklahoma ranch, where they road on ATVs Shelton bought the boys.
Shelton is nominated for one ACM Award for Single Record of the Year at the upcoming 2018 ACM Awards, where he will also perform.
The 2018 ACM Awards will air live from the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas on Sunday, April 15, at 8:00 PM ET on CBS.
Photo Credit: Instagram/BlakeShelton
