They are the Sheltons.
Earlier this week, Blake and Gwen performed as a married couple onstage for the first time at the CMA Summer Jam in Nashville, Tennessee, where the 45-year-old country star introduced his wife by her married name to the delight of fans.
Gwen joined her husband onstage for a duet of “Happy Anywhere,” during which Blake paused for a moment to officially welcome “Gwen Stefani Shelton” to the stage.
And Blake couldn’t be prouder to be married to his longtime love.
“To me, a marriage, a ceremony is you’re not keeping it private when you get married to somebody, you’re announcing to the world — ‘Hey, this is my wife, just so everybody knows.’ That’s why we wear these rings,” he said in an interview on SiriusXM’s The Highway.
The couple tied the knot over the Fourth of July weekend at their Oklahoma ranch. The ceremony was officiated by their friend Carson Daly, who insisted that they write their own vows for the wedding.
Blake shared that the writing process proved to be quite a challenge for both of them.
“Gwen, right up until the night before, like when it started getting, like, two weeks away, she was like, ‘Oh my god, let’s just not do that. Let’s just, like, have the repeat after me stuff.’ … And Carson was adamant about, ‘No, you can, look, you’re a songwriter, you can do this.’ And so, right up until the night before, she was working on hers and it was incredible,” he shared.
“I still haven’t even seen a video of our wedding yet,” he continued. “So I can’t remember all the things she said, but it was, she had them written down and she had a hard time getting through them. I had a hard time, you know, trying to, you know, get through what she said also.”
Opening up about the song he wrote for Gwen as his vow, Blake revealed that he enlisted the help of Craig Wiseman.
“I started trying to write a song because that’s kind of the opposite of what she would have expected me to do,” he said. “‘Cause I’m to the point where I just don’t write that many songs anymore. It’s just like pulling teeth for me and she’s always on my case about it. … And so I started writing this song and I can only get so far with it. ‘Cause I didn’t want it to just be something for that moment. I wanted it to be something that was bigger and I saw I needed help. And so I called Craig Wiseman. I said ‘Craig, you got to help me with this thing. Like, I’m not joking around here.'”
“I wanted something broad, but also specific to Gwen,” he continued. “And so that’s what I did. She didn’t know I was going to do that. And so I surprised her with the song and we actually just recorded the song here in Nashville yesterday.”
“I don’t know what, or when we’re going to do something with it, but it’s something that I wanted to have a recording of. No matter what, you know what I’m saying?” he added.
And both of them pulled it off with flying colors.
“At the wedding, Gwen starts and she wrote this [speech] saying ‘since I was a little girl… blah blah blah’ and she crushes [it], not a dry eye in the church,” Carson shared of the wedding on the Today show in July. “… It was so perfect that I said to Blake when she was done, ‘Top that, buddy.'”
“Guitar comes in, stool, next thing you know, he wrote her a song, and he sings her a song — while he’s crying — that he wrote specifically for her,” he said. “‘Reach the Star,’ I think it was called. Not a dry eye in the house. That was a highlight.”
As for Blake, he shared the special meaning the song holds for him in their marriage.
“You know, this is where we’re together now. And I feel that way about the song. It is, you know, for me, something that I want people to hear and know, and because I’m proud to be married to Gwen and so proud of that song,” he said on Thursday’s (July 29) interview.
Aww…
