Blake Shelton Discusses New Album, Performs ‘Came Here to Forget’ on ‘Today’

Blake Shelton is all the buzz as of late and he dropped by Today on Thursday (5/19) to talk about everything that’s been going on in his world recently.

Shelton is about to release his new highly anticipated album, If I’m Honest, which is already picking up a lot of press over the vulnerable emotions expressed throughout the record. The name of the album comes hand-in-hand with the crazy year Shelton has been going through and he wanted his music to truly authenticate his experience.

“I had a bunch of different ideas and I got to hand it to a friend of mine that works at Warner Brothers named Shane Tarleton. I was going, ‘You know, I want it to be, like, representative of the last year of my life,’ and I was even talking about stupid stuff like how many moons are like in a year and he was like, ‘Man, why don’t you just say you’re being honest about what happened the last year,’ so that’s how we came up with the album title,” said Shelton to Today’s Savannah Guthrie.

One of the songs on the record has caused quite the commotion due to the collaboration with girlfriend, Gwen Stefani, in which they sing a duet for “Go Ahead and Break My Heart.” The two sang the track on NBC’s The Voice and plan to perform it again live on the Billboard Music Awards this Sunday (5/19).

“The reaction to it has just been crazy, you know, because we wrote that song actually…that song started to impress her, to be honest with you,” he explained. “And I sent it to her just half done, like just writing this song kinda about you and she wrote the next verse and sent it back to me. So it was like, ‘Well, we’ve got a song together. That’s kinda cool.’”

He also talked about his opposites-attract relationship with Stefani and joked about his role as a pig in the new Angry Birds film before performing his latest single, “Came Here to Forget.”

Shelton’s new album, If I’m Honest, is out now.