Blake Shelton and the rest of The Voice‘s coaches made a stop on coach Kelly Clarkson‘s talk show, The Kelly Clarkson Show, on Monday (May 17), as the show’s Season 20 advances towards its final episodes. While they were there, the four coaches teamed up for a game of “Throw Me a Line,” dividing into two teams and racing each other to be the first to guess popular song titles based on their lyrics.
Clarkson and John Legend made up one team, squaring off against Shelton and Nick Jonas. To up the ante, they also turned the game into a battle of the sexes: A victory for Shelton and Jonas would mean all the men in the audience got a prize, while Clarkson and Legend’s win would mean a prize for all the women in the crowd.
To top it off, if Clarkson’s team won, she’d get to remove Shelton’s picture from Blake Shelton’s Wall of Champions, which hung behind the contestants throughout the game.
The two teams were neck and neck as the game progressed, with Clarkson correctly guessing Garth Brooks‘ “Friends in Low Places” and Jonas swooping in to steal a point when he named legendary pop group The Jackson 5’s hit, “ABC.” Legend added a point to his team’s tally with Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody,” and Shelton got in on the fun, too, correctly naming Kenny Loggins’ “Footloose.”
But Clarkson was the first to buzz in for the tie-breaking vote, whose lyric was “A few times I’ve been around that track / So it’s not just gonna happen like that.” While Shelton initially seemed stumped, a look of recognition dawned on his face as Clarkson and Legend sang the chorus — the song was “Hollaback Girl,” a single from Gwen Stefani off her 2004 debut solo album.
As she celebrated her victory, Clarkson got to remove Shelton’s photo from the wall, though even more crushing was the fact that the country star missed out on naming a song by his own fiancée. Shelton and Stefani got engaged in October 2020 after five years of dating. They met on the set of The Voice, where, at the time, Stefani was a coach.