John Legend & Blake Shelton Reveal The Voice’s Most Competitive Coach & More Secrets

Season 19 of The Voice is just a week away, but for coaches Blake Shelton and John Legend, the competition is already in full swing!

E! co-host Carissa Culiner caught up with the pair on Monday, Oct. 12’s Daily Pop, and right away, Blake couldn’t help but point out that he’s coached many of the singers who went on to become champions.

“My team has won The Voice seven times, I think,” he said cheekily. “Is that correct?”

“He’s trying to act like he hasn’t counted them,” John fired back. “And thought about them every second of every day.”

The two will face off with Kelly Clarkson and Gwen Stefani this season. Perhaps Blake will give the latter, a.k.a. his girlfriend of five years, a break this time around?

“We all have our own teams and obviously you go home, you want to, you know, talk about that,” Blake explained. “And so there’s been times where we’ve bounced songs off each other, too: ‘What do you think about this song? Do you think this would be a good one for my artist to perform?’ or whatever.”

How sweet, right?

Wrong! Blake continued, “And of course, I always take that opportunity to kind of derail her team.”

“Sabotage,” John chimed in.

“This is The Voice!” Blake can be seen saying in a clip of the NBC show. “This is a dog-eat-dog business. There is no feelings.”

Lucky for him, “Gwen doesn’t have a competitive bone in her body,” he told Carissa.

“But she’s passionate about music, which makes her a good coach on the show,” Blake said. “As much as I love John Legend. it’s way more exciting for me to have her on the show.”

Then there’s Kelly, who John said “might be the most competitive” of all the coaches.

“She has won as an artist, you know, on another show, and I saw even more of her competitive streak when we were playing a trivia game on The Kelly Clarkson Show,” he explained. “She’s serious about winning games.”

Blake and John went on to reveal that filming on the new season of The Voice is already underway, and even with all of the precautions in place amid the coronavirus pandemic, everything feels relatively normal!

“Once we got a couple artist auditions behind us, I really felt like we were just doing what we’ve always done,” Blake said. “I mean, outside of the ruckus of a live audience there, really nothing changed.”

He continued, “Naturally, we are spread out anyway…so the only real thing that I noticed after a while was we just didn’t go up and shake someone’s hand when they got on the team, or give them a hug.”

John agreed: “Once you get into the performances, it didn’t feel much different.”

“Actually, there were moments where you were happy that there was no live audience because you could really hear everything about the artist’s voice without all the extra noise and hubbub going on around it,” he added. “It was actually kind of nice to be able to focus in on their voices.”

Watch the complete Daily Pop interview with John Legend and Blake Shelton in the above clip!