When you’re among the mentors on a show called “The Voice,” you’d best bring your “A” game when it comes time to take the stage and sing. Blake Shelton hasn’t done that much of that this year, and the country star seems to have eased off on the recording habit, too, seeing as he hasn’t released a new album since before the pandemic.
But Sunday night’s show at the Minnesota State Fair Grandstand showed that his rich baritone and gift for selling a song are still strong. Before a crowd of 11,156, Shelton and his six-piece backing band piled one country hit on top of another, covering the gamut of his genre’s traditional subject matter and keeping things respectably traditional.
At age 48, Shelton seems to still enjoy getting out to play, but he did lament the fact that he awakened Sunday morning at home in steamy Oklahoma looking forward to a trip to Minnesota for some cooler weather. Alas, he was greeted by high heat and humidity, and looked to be dripping sweat all set long, pausing to hydrate and wipe his head with a towel after almost every song. But he paused to sing the praises of the Fair and heartily endorsed the deep-fried ranch dressing.
He proved an enthusiastic interpreter of everything he performed during what could be called a greatest hits show. This is an artist who’s had 13 songs hit number one on the country charts, and he performed nine of them on Sunday. Even with some friendly between-songs banter, he and his band still managed to squeeze 18 songs into 80 minutes.
Shelton has demonstrated on “The Voice” that he knows a thing or two about interpreting a pop song, but this concert always had one foot firmly in the honky tonk and the other on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry.
Mostly strumming an acoustic guitar while the sound of a banjo, dobro or pedal steel was ringing out beneath him, Shelton proved most engaging on songs of love and commitment of both the high-energy variety — such as “Honey Bee” and “I’ll Name the Dogs” — and convincingly conveyed ballads like “Home” and “Nobody But You,” the latter featuring a large-scale video of his wife, Gwen Stefani, singing along while looming over the proceedings like the great and powerful Oz.
“My songs aren’t brain surgery,” Shelton said while encouraging a sing-along, and it’s true that there’s a simplicity and a touch too much sameness in his style. That pertains to his lyrical content, too, which tends to check all the cliched country boxes like trucks, rural landscapes, beer, whiskey, dogs, guns and bars, even name-checking Conway Twitty twice during his set.
But he nevertheless came off as a very conscientious performer, pouring an impressive amount of passion and lung power into each song. And that voice is still pretty darn good.
Speaking of “The Voice,” that’s where Shelton first met Emily Ann Roberts back when she was a high school student from Knoxville, Tenn. She was a member of “Team Blake” back in 2015, but she’s undergone a very promising transformation since, as she demonstrated with the evening’s opening set on Sunday.
Not just another “voice,” she showed off her songwriting chops and a traditional country aesthetic. She also carried herself with an engaging stage presence and voice both reminiscent of Dolly Parton, even covering Parton’s 1980 hit, “9 to 5.” And there are few better role models for a young woman singer-songwriter in Nashville.
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Rob Hubbard can be reached at wordhub@yahoo.com.
