“Oh my God, no!” Christina Aguilera, 37, said when W magazine asked if Gwen Stefani, 48, (and her subsequent romance with Blake Shelton, 41) was behind her leaving the show in 2016. “No, it never had anything to do with any one person at all. And I actually think it’s really cute Blake and Gwen found love in that chaotic environment. …I fought for a long time to get two females in the chairs. And, for a long time, I was just told it wasn’t the demographic. But just know that I was a fighter behind the scenes.”
“It was such a hamster wheel,” she told W magazine, opening up about why after six seasons, she decided to leave the big red chair behind “And then I felt like things really started to shift and change. I signed on to a show where the blind audition element was something interesting, something genuine. After a while, though, you start to see that everyone is good-looking. … It wasn’t a comfortable place for me to be, where I’m just part of a money-making machine.”
“When I stop believing in something,” she added, “then it’s like, ‘What am I doing here?’ I think I did choose to, no pun intended, take a chair for so long and do something very commercial for my little ones. But at a certain point I felt like I’m not even doing them a service by cheating myself and what I’m here to do. They should be seeing Mommy live her best life.”
“Once again, I found myself in that place where I’m being told what to do, what’s going to be acceptable or unacceptable, what’s okay or not okay, It’s like, God, you know, I’m a mother of two now,” she said. “The genie is out of the bottle.” Nice reference to her 1999 debut single (and the corresponding “Genie In The Bottle” corporate persona she stripped away with her “Dirrty” reinvention with 2002’s Stripped.)
So, this should put to rest the rumor that Xtina left The Voice because of Gwen, Adam Levine, CeeLo Green or any other host who happened to sit in the big red chair. It was more of a fundamental difference between what she thought the show was and what it became. “For a while, I felt like I was asleep at the wheel,” she confessed to W magazine, adding that she felt the need to get back to making music and being true to herself.