Alicia Keys is ready to take on Blake Shelton when she returns to The Voice for Season 14. The singer, who’s heading back to the show alongside Blake, Adam Levine, and new coach Kelly Clarkson, teased that she’s not too happy the country star won Season 13 in her absence and is now ready to take back her crown.
Keys, who won the Season 12 of the show in early 2017 with singer Chris Blue, revealed in a new interview that she’s back to reclaim her crown as the winning coach this year and is ready to put Blake firmly back in his place by taking home another win when the NBC series returns to TV next month.
“I have to come back and put him in his place, man,” Alicia told Entertainment Tonight this week as the coaches filmed their celebrity adviser segments this week ahead of The Voice’s upcoming premiere on February 26.
Keys – who brought on board Shawn Mendes as her celebrity adviser this season – then joked that Blake was left feeling pretty gutted after she won the show in the spring of 2017 before admitting that she’s looking forward to seeing the same look of defeat on his face again this time around.
“I really like Blake a lot and we get along so well, and he was just so crushed that I beat him so thoroughly when I did,” Alicia said in the new interview. “I hope to be able to experience that again.”
The singer – who hasn’t appeared on The Voice since she won Season 12 when Miley Cyrus was also on the panel – then admitted to CBS 8 that Blake has a serious competitive side that usually rears its ugly head towards the end of the season when he knows he’s in with a chance of winning.
“He is slightly crazy right until the end,” Keys joked of Shelton, who won Season 13 in December with Chloe Kohanski. “Like, it’s at the end that he starts to become this secret villain that’s trying to win.”
“No one can save him. He’s unsavable,” the “In Common” singer continued.
And it seems like the competition is most definitely on between the coaches this year, as this isn’t the first time one of the coaches has commented on Shelton’s competitive side that he’s showed off for what will be 14 consecutive seasons as a The Voice coach.
Shortly before Keys joked about Shelton’s desire to win, Kelly Clarkson – who’s a coach for the very first time on the upcoming round of the NBC singing show this year – admitted earlier this month that the “I’ll Name The Dogs” singer poked a whole lot of fun at her on the set as they filmed the blind audition stages together.
Though it was all in good fun as the two have actually been good friends for years (Kelly’s husband Brandon Blackstock is also Blake’s manager), Clarkson told Entertainment Tonight that Shelton made fun of her for being so nervous as the two filmed the blind auditions with Adam and Alicia a few weeks ago.
“I was so nervous and Blake was making so much fun of me because I was [worried] about it,” Kelly said of her first few days as a The Voice coach amid Shelton’s teasing. “I was nervous that I wasn’t gonna turn when I should’ve turned, or I was gonna turn and thought someone was awesome but then it was like, ‘Oh no.’ I was really nervous.”
The Voice Season 14 is set to premiere on NBC on February 26.