Blake Shelton‘s current single, “Minimum Wage,” is quickly climbing up the charts, but not everyone was a fan of the song. While the 44-year-old received some criticism for the message in “Minimum Wage,” since his successful career has made him one of the wealthiest artists in country music, Shelton says he still relates to the person who is barely able to make ends meet.
“When I first heard it, I just thought, ‘Oh wow, that is me.’ I literally have lived that song,” Shelton told Radio.com. “I roofed houses for years. Actually, to be honest, making probably less than minimum wage, now that I think about it. But I didn’t care. I just wanted enough money that I could pay my rent, so I could go play guitar all weekend. That’s what I did for the first half of my life, and those are my favorite memories, actually.
“And the other reason that I wanted to record it is because my concerts tend to put people to sleep,'” he added with a laugh. “I thought, ‘Wow, I’ll actually have an uptempo song for my show. That’ll be nice for a change.’ I love the lyric. It’s such a positive message, especially in times like this. We all need love more than ever. That’s pretty much what the song’s about.”
Shelton previously said he was unconcerned with those who criticized his song choice, saying those people missed the message in “Minimum Wage.”
“I just feel like these days, there are people out there who don’t want to know the truth,” Shelton told CMT. “They just want to hear what they want to hear, and they want to pick a fight. No matter what your intention is, no matter what the truth is, they want it to be something that they can be upset about so that they can get on social media and try to grab a headline. With ‘Minimum Wage,’ at first I thought, ‘Wow, I guess I just I’ve missed something here.’ And the more I read into this, I realized this was really not real.
“Whatever this backlash is is just four or five people that probably don’t know anything about country music,” he continued. “They clearly hadn’t heard the song or read the lyrics. If they had, they couldn’t feel this way about the song. It’s literally a love song about how if times are tight and you ain’t got much money — as long as you have love and you’re happy — at the end of the day, that’s all any of us can really hope for. You got it if you got that. That’s all that matters. And if that’s offensive to you, then we’ll just have to agree to disagree.”