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On his extended family helping him with the ladies:
“One of my theories on why I’m so capable of understanding women is that after my parents split, my mom moved in with her brother’s ex-wife—my aunt—who was also newly single. So I was living in a house with two jilted women, plus my cousin, who’s more like my sister, and my brother, Michael, who we eventually find out is gay. Just the estrogen alone . . . You know when you’re 14 and terrified to talk to a girl? I didn’t suffer much from that. It seemed very natural to me to talk to girls.”

On enjoying the spotlight:
“I love attention. I can’t stand not having it. It just has to be the right kind. To do what you love, to be with the people you love? That’s all I want. That’s the ‘kwan.'”

On the two types of men when it comes to women:
“There’s two kinds of men. There are men who are f**king misogynist pigs, and then there are men who just really love women, who think they’re the most amazing people in the world. And that’s me. Maybe the reason I was promiscuous, and wanted to sleep with a lot of them, is that I love them so much.”

“I saw my first stripper here.” Adam Levine, the frontman for Maroon 5, stands in the kitchen area of Los Angeles’ Conway Recording Studios, reminiscing with the guitarist James Valentine, his longtime bandmate. Crew members of one of TV’s top-rated programs, The Voice, scurry to prepare for this afternoon’s taping. The 33-year-old Levine, one of the four coach-judges on the show, has brought Team Adam’s six finalists to Conway for a history lesson of sorts: A native Angeleno, Levine has been making records here since he was earning D’s and F’s in high school. “We made our first demo at Conway, when I was 17,” he says, referring to Kara’s Flowers, the one-and-done band that eventually morphed into Maroon 5. “I’ve been recording here ever since.” There are perks for such loyalty: The parking spot closest to the studio is marked RESERVED FOR ADAM LEVINE. There are perks, too, for selling 17 million albums, winning three Grammys, and stealing hearts as The Voice’s lady-bait breakout star: A gleaming ink-black 1958 Porsche 1600 Speedster convertible sits in said spot.

Levine does not dress like the owner of a luxe vintage roadster. He’s wearing black shit-kickers, blue Dickies work pants, and a long-sleeved charcoal-gray henley tee. His hair is closely cropped. His toned arms are blanketed in tattoos. If you still believe in rock stars, Levine fits that bill as well as anyone these days. For traditionalists, there’s the ink, the car, the motorcycle collection, the house in the Hollywood Hills, and, until recently, the Victoria’s Secret supermodel girlfriend, Anne Vyalitsyna.

“The first time I went to Adam’s house,” says the country singer and fellow Voice coach Blake Shelton, “I told him, ‘Man, you’re exactly the rock star I wanted you to be.’ There’s a grand piano in his bedroom. From his pool outside, you look up the hill and there’s the Hollywood sign. I mean, there were models hanging around. It was badass.”

But Levine is no nostalgia-glazed revivalist: In addition to the reality-TV gig, there are the collaborations with the Swedish hitmakers Max Martin and Shellback, the on-the-payroll yoga instructor, even the obligatory celebrity fragrance. “Nothing wrong with making money,” Levine says. “I’m always quoting the part in Jerry Maguire when Cuba Gooding talks about the ‘kwan’: ‘love, respect, community, and the dollars, too.’ I love that shit. Nobody has it all, but for me to even come close is amazing.”

Levine carries his stardom lightly; he’s well raised, neurotically polite, discreet about his boldface dating, and self-aware enough to know that exchanging I love you, mans with his new BFF Shelton from comically oversize swivel chairs is not exactly Hammer of the Gods material. “I never got down with conveying a larger-than-life vibe,” he explains. When talk turns to the “yachts and coke” lifestyle of the eighties-excess pinups Duran Duran, Levine smiles sheepishly. “I guess I’m more a houses-and-weed guy,” he says, and he may be exaggerating the weed part.

As a makeup artist blots Levine’s forehead free of moisture (“Thank you.” Blot. “Thank you”), a Voice producer signals for him and Valentine to head to the studio next door, where Team Adam awaits. A camera crew rolls tape. Levine adjusts the mic pack clipped to his jeans. “By the way,” he says as he steps onto the pathway outside, “the stripper wasn’t mine.”

Levine and Valentine sit in the middle of Studio C, sharing stories of Maroon 5’s 10-year “journey,” in reality-TV-speak, with the moon-eyed aspirants of Team Adam. It’s part music-biz master class, part promo op for the band’s upcoming album, Overexposed: Levine and Valentine wax romantic about their salad days (“James and I lived together until I was 27”), offer encouraging notes about the democratization of music, and field questions on everything from coping with paparazzi to overcoming stage fright. “Do I really have moves like Jagger?” Levine quips, referring to Maroon 5’s career-rejuvenating smash. “Fucking A, no, I don’t. But I was going to tell everybody that I did and hoped they believed me.”

Nearly two hours later, the producers indicate that they have all the footage they need. Levine looks crestfallen; he asks his charges if they have any more questions, anything at all, and the segment winds on for another 20 minutes. Levine is a talker, and a good one, too, as viewers of The Voice have come to appreciate. The show’s best episodes are the blind-audition rounds, where the coaches—Levine, Shelton, Christina Aguilera, and Cee-Lo Green—sit in front of a bunch of unknowns and attempt to sweet-talk them into joining their respective teams. It’s a brilliant reproach to Simon Cowell’s pompous bullying—a Trading Places–esque maneuver in which the power imbalance between the haves and the have-nots is reversed. Week after week, Levine kills it during these segments. Pitching his services as a mentor, he appears guileless: His insights are pinpoint-accurate, his praise believable, his desire to help these talented wannabes unquestionably heartfelt. Even his bro hugs ooze sincerity.

“So many times, when you meet somebody whose work you respect, they end up being a dickhead,” Shelton says. “But Adam has to be the most real, honest, easy-to-talk-to person that I’ve met in all of show business. He’s just a good dude with superhero powers.”

Levine has adjourned to one of the studio’s shady garden patios, joined by his yoga instructor, Chad Dennis. He rarely misses a day’s workout, and with the band jetting to Costa Rica tomorrow to headline a festival, Levine, a fearful flier, is eager to schedule a session. He starts to sing the chorus of Buddy Holly’s “That’ll Be the Day,” a ritual meant to appease the gods who watch over rock stars traveling on chartered flights. (Holly was killed when his plane crashed in 1959.) “I hate flying,” Levine says. “Know why? Because no one really understands how planes actually work.”

I ask him if he’s really as anguished as he appears when forced to choose between team members during the show’s Sophie’s Choice–like battle rounds. “Oh, totally, dude,” he responds. “If I’m incapable of one thing, it’s that I can’t ham shit up like that. Trust me.” Cast by the reality-TV impresario Mark Burnett as the show’s quote-unquote rock star—”He’s got the swagger, he’s got the looks,” Burnett coos—Levine has used the opportunity to present himself as anything but.

“I’ve always felt a little misrepresented in the world,” he explains. “I felt like people only knew me as a singer who dated pretty girls. A little bit of a bimbo. Maybe I was kind of a bimbo,” he adds, laughing. “I was the music dude that was naked all the time with the girls, and that’s fine, no problem with that.” (Levine and Vyalitsyna posed together in the altogether for Russian Vogue.) “But I wanted to create a little balance. When the show came around, I thought, ‘People now know that I have a brain.'”

Reality TV is rarely thought of as a platform to establish one’s gravitas, but such is the plight of a soft-rock stud. Maroon 5’s blue-eyed soul, channeling funky-honky standard-bearers like Hall and Oates and the Police, was never going to be hipster fare, but the band’s club-honed chops, their sure-handed embrace of R&B, and Levine’s silky high register created a string of hits and established Maroon 5 as one of the few old-fashioned bands (they write their own songs, play guitars and drums and shit) who could crack Top 40 radio in the face of hip-hop, teen pop, and super-divas.

“A lot of people perceive our music as very safe,” Levine says unapologetically, “but it was a reaction to the conformity I was rebelling against. When I graduated high school, I moved to the east side of Hollywood and everyone was hip and cool. Everybody wanted to be the Strokes, and I wanted to sound like Michael Jackson and write pop songs. Maroon 5 may not be groundbreaking—we’re not fucking Arcade Fire—but we did shit that other bands weren’t really getting down with.

“We’re counting on the cultural-feedback loop to pull a Journey on us,” he continues, half joking. “Journey wasn’t cool. Now I can’t go out one night without somebody screaming the words to that fucking song. That’s what we’re banking on. We’ll play Coachella in 15 years.”

Pop acts like Maroon 5, though, much more so than Coachella headliners like Arcade Fire, rely on hit singles to keep their profiles and ticket prices high. With the 2010 album Hands All Over, the band was relegated to airplay on adult-contemporary stations. If Top 40 radio is high school, then A/C, as it’s known, is a PTA meeting. When Burnett called Levine about a U.S. version of The Voice of Holland, Maroon 5 were staring at middle-age spread. “We’d released our third record and it wasn’t doing well,” he says bluntly. “We weren’t irrelevant, but we needed to shake things up.”

Levine’s bandmates, not surprisingly, had mixed feelings about their singer’s solo plunge into the murky waters of reality TV, but Levine says he “was just going to listen to myself.” Steven Tyler had just joined American Idol; “If he can get away with it,” Levine figured, “so can I.” Soon after Levine signed on, the four coaches, strangers prior to The Voice, were getting hammered, at Burnett’s urging, on pricey champagne at L.A.’s Soho House, attempting to forge a connection and wondering what they’d gotten themselves into. “Adam called me and said, ‘Dude, you should never have given us your credit card. You will not believe this bill coming your way,'” Burnett recalls. “But it was worth it, of course. The chemistry between the judges is absolutely crucial to the show’s success.”

“I’ve never been interested in reality television,” Levine says. “I accept the fact that there are Real Housewives out there, but I don’t need to watch a fucking television show about it. These people are living their lives publicly so they can become famous and rich. I despise that. But when you’re trying to become a singer, or even losing weight—anything like that I fully endorse. The Voice is built on positivity. Once we started filming, I knew that America was really going to love it.”

Christina Aguilera was the show’s star attraction at the outset, its resident diva. “I always thought Christina was the best pop singer around,” Levine says. “She wasn’t just a pop star—she could sing her fucking ass off.” Still, Aguilera had a tough time finding her lane at first. “We butted heads a little in the beginning,” Levine says. “I had sympathy for her being the only girl, though, so I laid off. Blake has a charming way of bickering with her, but I can’t pull that off. We’re totally cool now.” Aguilera even sang some bars on “Moves Like Jagger,” garnering the show some sizzle and Aguilera her first No. 1 hit in a decade. “Adam and the judges are like brothers to me,” she says. “But Adam is definitely the more sensitive of the bunch. He has a softer side people don’t see.”

“You know what yoga’s good for?” Adam Levine asks, pausing in mid-thought as he discusses his healthful lifestyle. He draws to his feet, balances in the private jet’s narrow aisle, points at his crotch, and thrusts his pelvis like a porn star. “I’ll tell you what yoga is good for: Fuuuuck-ing,” he chimes, in a singsong falsetto, then laughs.

We’re aboard a chartered jet en route to Costa Rica. Levine’s bandmates—Valentine; the bassist, Michael Madden; the keyboardist, PJ Morton; and the drummer, Matt Flynn—have hunkered down with their iPads to catch up on their TV viewing (no Voice, but plenty of Justified and Mad Men). Morton glancingly mentions an obsession with the iPad game Temple Run. Levine’s never heard of it; his head cocks, his eyes light up. For the next two days, including for the duration of this five-and-a-half-hour flight, Levine’s nose is buried in an iPad as he tries to surpass Morton’s high score of 2 million. “Fruit Ninja really messed up my life,” he says. “I swear to you, I will reach 500,000 before this plane lands.” (He falls just short.) Before, after, and even during games, Levine chirps amiably—about a Banksy documentary, the Lakers’ new point guard, a song from Overexposed that sounds like it could be from The Lion King—at anyone who’ll listen.

“I’m fiercely independent, but I’m also terrified of being alone,” he says. “I travel in a pack. I like to be surrounded, not just with my boys, but with family, too.” Many of his running mates date back to his Brentwood high-school days and beyond, a Bris Pack of Jewish showbizzers. (Levine’s nickname is the Bear Jew, after the baseball-bat-wielding Nazi punisher in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds.) Levine’s manager of over a decade, Jordan Feldstein, is the son of Adam’s dad’s childhood best friend; Feldstein’s younger brother is the actor Jonah Hill (ne Feldstein). “Jonah is family,” Levine says. “He was a screwy kid, like me. We were both rebellious, didn’t like school. And then, miraculously, this happens for the both of us,” he says, gesturing, metaphorically, at the plane’s plush leather upholstery. “I love that kid.”

Through Hill, Levine befriended the actor Jason Segel in high school. Segel, who also writes and plays music, calls opening for Maroon 5 one New Year’s Eve in Las Vegas “the coolest thing of all time.” Most of his bro time with Levine, however—even in Sin City—is disarmingly low-key. “Usually when we get together, we have dinner and then sit around listening to music. And then we just talk,” Segel says. “We remind each other that we were just kids who happened to be good at what we do.”

Levine remains close to his family. When we land in Costa Rica, he complains about his mom, who’s text-nagged him about attending a family function. “I love her, but sometimes . . .” His parents, who met as students in the late sixties at UC Berkeley, divorced when he was 7. He’d spend weekdays at his mom’s and weekends with his father, and he still gets along with both, as well as with his sprawl of stepparents and stepsiblings. “Steps, halves—at least 30 minutes of explaining family-tree shit,” he says. “But I have a big, wonderful family.” Levine often takes his younger brother Sam to Lakers games. His dad owns a chain of local clothing boutiques; Adam appears in a TV spot for the opening of a new store. “It’s a family operation: my aunt, my grandmother, and my father,” he says. “I have a lot of respect for what they’ve accomplished.”

Levine credits his extended family for his success with the opposite sex. “One of my theories on why I’m so capable of understanding women is that after my parents split, my mom moved in with her brother’s ex-wife—my aunt—who was also newly single,” he says. “So I was living in a house with two jilted women, plus my cousin, who’s more like my sister, and my brother, Michael, who we eventually find out is gay. Just the estrogen alone . . . You know when you’re 14 and terrified to talk to a girl? I didn’t suffer much from that. It seemed very natural to me to talk to girls.”

After the band’s three-year tour supporting the 2002 album Songs About Jane, Levine triumphantly returned to L.A. and embarked on an epic canoodling binge. Among his rumored partners: Lindsay Lohan, Kirsten Dunst, Maria Sharapova, and Paris Hilton.

“There’s two kinds of men,” Levine posits. “There are men who are fucking misogynist pigs, and then there are men who just really love women, who think they’re the most amazing people in the world. And that’s me. Maybe the reason I was promiscuous, and wanted to sleep with a lot of them, is that I love them so much.”

Levine is in the Italian restaurant at the InterContinental in San Jose, Costa Rica, nibbling on sushi, which his assistant has arranged to be served from the Japanese eatery next door. Later that night, Levine and his bandmates will perform in front of 20,000 people, many of whom will impatiently chant “Aaa-dum, Aaa-dum” while the Flaming Lips play.

Midway through the meal, Levine pauses to answer his phone. “Hey, baby,” he whispers. “Can I call you back? I’m in the middle of an interview . . . Love you.” An indiscreet peek at his iPhone’s wallpaper reveals a photo of his girlfriend of two years, Vyalitsyna, who is back in Russia. I ask about the difficulties of a long-distance relationship. “Yeah, love is hard when you’re never able to love them,” he says. “We’re in contact constantly. But it’s not easy. It’s not something you choose . . . it chooses you. These are what I call champagne problems, though.” He waves off other questions about their relationship. “Publicizing a relationship is dicey to me,” he says. “I don’t think any relationship responds well to pressure. We’re both under so much pressure to begin with. Why not keep this beautiful island of distraction to ourselves?”

To his credit, Levine maintains that vow of silence the following week, when Vyalitsyna announces, via People magazine, that the pair have split. “Adam and I have decided to separate in an amicable and supportive manner,” her statement reads. “We still love and respect each other as friends.” The other tabloids scramble to catch up—US Weekly quotes “a Levine pal” that the singer “was blindsided” and “heartbroken.” The only public statement Levine offers, to Access Hollywood, is a gentlemanly reply to the actress Jennifer Love Hewitt, who volunteered on Ellen to be his rebound hookup: “It’s very flattering and very sweet, and it was lovely to hear.”

Blindsided though he may have been, Levine doesn’t seem the type to stew over a breakup, and the next months will provide plenty of distraction, anyhow–the culmination of Season 2 of The Voice, his first acting role, on FX’s American Horror Story, and the release of the new Maroon 5 album. Levine will be surrounded by producers, directors, assistants, team members, yoga instructors, friends, family, and probably a beautiful new girlfriend or three, and he wouldn’t have it any other way. “I love attention,” he’d said on the plane. “I can’t stand not having it. It just has to be the right kind.” He nodded over at his bandmates. “To do what you love, to be with the people you love? That’s all I want. That’s the ‘kwan.'”