New music is here from Gwen Stefani and Blake Shelton! The couple, who wed in 2021, just released “Purple Irises,” a song Stefani wrote, asking Shelton to join her on the track.
“We love this song so much,” Shelton says. “It’s a song Gwen wrote with a couple of friends of hers, and I fell in love with it the first time I heard it. She knew there was something different about it and asked me to come in and sing with her. My longtime producer, Scott Hendricks, produced it, and Gwen’s been wanting to work with him for a long time now, and it’s turned into this really cool and different song that can live anywhere.”
“Purple Irises” could have been inspired, at least in part, by Stefani’s time on Shelton’s Oklahoma ranch, where she enjoys having her own gardens.
“’Purple Irises’ is a song that comes from the idea that when you plant something you are planting hope and watching love grow,” Stefani says. “Weathering all the different seasons of growth. We are in this together, we planted the seeds together and we are growing together.”
This is far from the couple’s first collaboration together. They previously released “Nobody but You,” “Happy Anywhere,” “Go Ahead and Break My Heart” and “You Make It Feel Like Christmas,” along with “Love Is Alive” from A Tribute to The Judds.
Shelton and Stefani began dating in 2015, after meeting on The Voice, marrying six years later in 2021.
“I didn’t see any of this coming with Blake,” Stefani admitted to People. “This was just a big old ‘What?’ It was an amazing gift to experience love like that for the first time.”
“He’s changed my life … when I [started dating] Blake, that’s when I felt home, like, ‘Oh, this is where I’m supposed to be, with this guy,” she added.
Shelton praised Stefani last year, when she received her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
“The first time I ever met Gwen was in 2014,” Shelton recalled as part of a heartfelt speech, remembering the first time he met her on the set of The Voice. “She wasn’t like any other famous person that I had ever met before. She drove herself to work in a black minivan, with car seats in it. She didn’t roll in with security.
“She came in with a baby and two little boys, which at the time worked like security, because nobody was going near her,” he added with a laugh. “It was chaos. It was clear to me that she was a mother, first and foremost over anything else in the world. That was her No. 1 job. And now, standing here almost ten years later after I first met her, I can say without question that being a mother is still the most important thing in her life. And I gotta tell you all, that’s rare in this business.”
Download or stream “Purple Irises” here.