Less than a week after Adam Levine’s exit from “The Voice” after 16 seasons, fellow original coach Christina Aguilera is shedding light on her 2016 departure, explaining that the NBC reality singing competition wasn’t the right fit for her.
In a new interview with People magazine, Aguilera said her 2018 album “Liberation” represented a “shedding of a certain skin on some level” – and that skin was the show.
“Prior to that, I had given myself fully to television and being a part of a network that really wasn’t quite the fit for me after the amount of time I put in,” she told the outlet.
Aguilera, 38, departed NBC’s singing competition for good in 2016 after her protégée Alisan Porter won Season 10. By then, her sixth season, she was “ready to move on.”
After mentoring hopeful during Seasons 1-3, 5, 8 and 10, she said, “I wanted to get grounded again in my artist body, and that’s what I did with ‘Liberation.’ Moving on to this era, it’s just an exciting time of fresh energy.”
Referencing her Sin City residency, which kicks off Friday at Planet Hollywood Resort & Casino, she said, “Vegas is coming at the perfect time for me.”
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Aguilera added that for her, the draw of “The Voice” was the stability it provided her and her kids, Max, 11, and Summer, 4.
“But after a certain amount of time, of course, the artist in me was like, ‘I have to evolve!’ ” she explained. “I was just very afraid of going out on tour and the instability I felt it would maybe impose on my children.”
In an interview with W published last year, the “Ain’t No Other Man” remarked “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.”
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That was the beginning of the end for Aguilera.
“When I stop believing in something, then it’s like, What am I doing here?” she continued. “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.”
On Friday, NBC revealed that Levine had given up his big red chair after 16 seasons and will be replaced in the fall by Gwen Stefani, who previously served as a coach in Seasons 7, 9 and 12.
In an Instagram post later that day, the Maroon 5 frontman reflected on the “amazing ride” and explained, “for me, it was time to move on.”
