Adam Levine, already a rock star from his band, Maroon 5, is something of a TV star now as well because of his work as a coach on “The Voice,” NBC’s popular singing-competition show. But fame did not prevent him from answering some utterly frivolous questions in an interview during his visit to New York this week.
There was this one, for instance: In a fair fight — no hair pulling, no eye gouging — could you beat Blake Shelton?
“Physically, he has the edge, clearly,” Mr. Levine said of Mr. Shelton, a country singer and a fellow coach on the show. “He is bigger than I am.” But, he added, “I’m not sure he has the warrior spirit,” something he said he sensed during the filming of a Super Bowl commercial for the show that featured acrobatic fake fighting among the four coaches. (Cee Lo Green and Christina Aguilera are the other two.)
“I think maybe I’d be able to edge him out with sheer will,” Mr. Levine concluded. “But it would be extremely difficult.”
Mr. Shelton and Mr. Levine have perfected a competitive banter that is one of the things that make “The Voice” work so well. It’s not the mean-spirited, joyless sniping of “The X Factor” or some seasons of “American Idol.” It’s clear that these two guys — one country, one rock — actually like each other, something that seems to be true of all the coaches.
This coming Monday night’s episode completes the “blind auditions,” in which each coach acquire a team of 12 singers. (The “blind” refers to the show’s format, which has the coaches hearing but not seeing the singers initially, so a coach’s interest in recruiting them is based on voice alone.) Then comes a series of sing-offs in which the teams are reduced in size before the climactic finals.
Mr. Levine talked about how the season, the show’s second, has been going, his approach to coaching and what the exposure of “The Voice” might mean for his career. Here are excerpts from the interview.
Q. What is different about Season 2?
A. There will be nothing quite like the first season, because I do genuinely believe none of us knew what we were in for. It was the best way to launch the show, because we didn’t know what we were doing. We’ll never have that innocence again. … Everybody this year is prepared, and armed and dangerous, and definitely kind of gunning for everybody. In a fun way.
Q. What specifically do you do to coach the people on your team? Pick their songs? Tell them to try a different key or change tempos?
A. I like to help guide them in a good direction, because I myself need direction. I don’t believe that anyone should be necessarily doing something like this on their own, as far as making all the decisions, because you should be kept in check. I’m kept in check constantly by a lot of creative entities: my band, or a producer, or my manager. … The most important thing, I think, as a singer is doing something that you’re connected to and something that you feel like you can really project into the world, that people are going to want to listen to, that you feel that you convey an idea or an emotion or something during that performance. So it’s less about what I want and more about nurturing them in what they want.
Q. How much face time do you spend with your team members?
A. The time that we do spend together is very carefully monitored, because they don’t want people playing favorites; they don’t want things going on behind other people’s backs. Everyone has the same amount of time with each artist, which is important, I think. It keeps everybody on an even playing field. … It winds up kind of consuming my every thought. I don’t like to do many things, but the things that I actually do like to do, I like to put everything I’ve got into them.
Q. In a standard-format triathlon — swimming, biking, running — could you beat Blake Shelton?
A. I love Blake Shelton. The competition is just our friendship, and we’re goofing around with each other and joking. In a triathlon? There’s no chance he’d beat me.
Q. What has being on this show done for your career? Any producer or casting director or filmmaker watching this has to think, “That guy looks awfully natural on camera.”
A. I don’t think I’ll ever do anything else on television. I think this was a unique wrinkle, a special little ripple that took place where I love being a part of this. But if this ever were to end at some point, I wouldn’t be on television anymore. Never say never; I don’t know. But it doesn’t seem to be what I want to do forever. …
As far as everything else is concerned, I’m a musician at the end of the day. I’m a singer and a songwriter, and I love being in my band. Other things have started to come up in movieland, things I can’t discuss, but I don’t know how I feel about pursuing it. I live my life on an opportunity-by-opportunity basis, where I don’t really know where I’m going; I just enjoy the process of getting there. …
It has always been a dream of mine to be in a Quentin Tarantino movie. And I would like to let him know through this article that I’d like to be in the movie for 17 ½ minutes, and he can bloody me up as much as he wants. He can kill me really gruesomely. I’d be totally fine with that.
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New York Times
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