Blake Shelton Sings ‘Over You’ to Honor Troy Gentry at Benefit Concert

Blake Shelton hosted the C’Ya On The Flipside benefit concert honoring Troy Gentry in Nashville on Wednesday night, and along with helming the night alongside Storme Warren, The Voice coach also surprised the crowd with an acoustic performance of his song “Over You.”

Shelton wrote “Over You” to remember his late brother, co-penning the tune with ex-wife Miranda Lambert. Ahead of his performance on Wednesday, the Oklahoma native mentioned Lambert by name for one of the first times publicly since the pair’s divorce in 2015.

“This is a song that I wrote with Miranda that was actually about my brother,” he told the crowd.

Before he began playing, Shelton also reminisced about the moment Gentry heard the song for the first time, with Shelton immediately realizing that the track related to the late musician more than he had initially thought.

“Troy didn’t know that the song was about my brother, and at the time he had lost his brother,” Shelton explained. “It really hit him hard. I remember after I played the song, I looked at him, and I could tell it had hit him really hard. He wasn’t crying or anything, but he was just beside himself a little bit and I remember thinking, ‘Wow, he went through the same thing that I went through, losing my brother.”

Shelton’s brother Richie passed away in a car accident when Richie was 24 and Shelton was 14.

“You’re never gonna get over it.,” Shelton told Cowboys & Indians in September 2018 about losing Richie. “For me, my brother was my big brother. I mean, I wanted to be him. I wanted to look like him, dress like him, listen to what he listened to, and be into the things he was into. So when he was killed in a car accident, it was literally like the world went silent. There was a void in my world all of a sudden, and I’m still not over it. I’m just used to it.”

In 2017, Shelton tweeted that Richie’s death “changed my life forever” and “made me realize that life is precious and there’s no time like RIGHT NOW to go for it.”

Photo Credit: Getty / Jason Kempin