Blake Shelton Performs ‘Minimum Wage’ on ‘Ellen’

Blake Shelton stopped by The Ellen DeGeneres Show in an episode that aired this week, first to play a game which involved him spraying hard seltzer at fans and also to perform his recent single, “Minimum Wage.” Shelton took the stage with an acoustic guitar as a night sky scene played on the screen behind him, his band and backing singers.

Shelton released “Minimum Wage” in January as the first single from his May album, Body Language. Written by Corey Crowder, Jesse Frasure, and Nicolle Galyon, the track is a love song about feeling like you have everything you need with your partner by your side, even if you might be struggling to get by financially. “You can make a six pack on the carpet / Taste like a million dollar bill / You can make a one bedroom apartment / Feel like a house up on the hill,” Shelton sings. “You can make my truck out in the driveway / Roll like a cleaned up Cadillac / Girl, lookin’ at you, lookin’ at me that way / Can make a man feel rich on minimum wage.”

The Voice coach received some criticism upon the song’s initial premiere from people upset that he was a millionaire singing about making minimum wage, but Shelton told CMT that he was “not really” surprised that people had “misunderstood” the song’s lyrics.

“I just feel like these days; there are people out there who don’t want to know the truth,” he said. “They just want to hear what they want to hear, and they want to pick a fight. No matter what your intention is, no matter what the truth is, they want it to be something that they can be upset about so that they can get on social media and try to grab a headline.” The Oklahoma native explained that initially, he thought, “Wow, I guess I just I’ve missed something here.” But the more he looked into the response, he “realized this was really not real.”

“Whatever this backlash is is just four or five people that probably don’t know anything about country music,” he said. “They clearly hadn’t heard the song or read the lyrics. If they had, they couldn’t feel this way about the song. It’s literally a love song about how if times are tight and you ain’t got much money — as long as you have love and you’re happy — at the end of the day, that’s all any of us can really hope for. You got it if you got that. That’s all that matters. And if that’s offensive to you, then we’ll just have to agree to disagree.”