It’s been a decade since Emily Ann Roberts finished The Voice season 9 as the runner-up, but she’s still close to her former coach, Blake Shelton — and now she’s opening for him on tour.
“Blake has been absolutely incredible from the get-go,” Roberts, 26, exclusively told Us Weekly ahead while discussing “Scratching Out a Living,” her new single. “I’ll never forget when I got off The Voice, he was calling me,saying, ‘So-and-so wants to meet with you, and I got this buddy that wants to work with you.’ He would call me out of the blue and make connections and check on me. He has just been such a great mentor.”
Shelton, 48, invited Roberts to open for him last year, and now she’s back on the road with him again as an opening act on his Friends and Heroes tour.
“A huge way that he is still supporting me is giving me this opportunity to go out on the road with him and share my music with his fans,” she said. “And that is something that you can’t even put a price tag on — the opportunity to stand in front of an audience that size and share your music with them is just invaluable. But also to be able to stand at front of house while he plays every single night and learn from him is better than any college or training you could ever have, because you’re learning from a pro who has done this for more years than I’ve probably been alive, almost, and done it so well.”
Roberts has been playing and singing music since she was a teenager — she was still in high school when she appeared on The Voice — but she’s still soaking up everything she can from Shelton while they share a bill.
“The biggest thing that I have learned from being able to open up with him is being able to watch how he interacts with his audience and just how wonderful he is at pulling everybody in and making them feel a part of the experience instead of feeling like he’s the star up on the stage and everyone else is separate,” she told Us. “Some stars do that. They feel very untouchable, and Blake is the kind of person that makes you feel like y’all are friends from the minute he steps on the stage. And that is really special to get to learn from somebody like that.”
In between concert dates, Roberts has been in the studio working on new music, including her new single, “Scratching Out a Living,” which dropped Friday, March 14. The song’s title was inspired by wall art her mom had in their kitchen when Roberts was growing up: a picture of a rooster with the punny caption, “Scratching out a living.”
“When I was coming off the road, I’d been touring like crazy, and I got back to Nashville and I was writing with a friend of mine, Shane Minor,” she recalled. “I was so tired going into the writing session, and I told him, ‘I have heard all these songs about hard-working men, and I don’t feel like there’s enough music and songwriting geared towards hard-working women and all the responsibilities that fall on your shoulders as a working woman.’”
Roberts began trying to think of “a cool way of saying I’m working my tail off,” and her mom’s rooster picture came to mind.
“I pitched it to Shane, and he loved it,” she said. “And this song came out real quickly because it’s very relatable to where I am in life right now and all the things that I go through just to get from sunup to sundown. I’m really hoping that other women especially will relate to it and hopefully feel seen in the hustle and the struggle of working hard.”
The song follows in the grand tradition of ’90s classics like Deana Carter’s “Did I Shave My Legs for This?” and Shania Twain’s “Honey, I’m Home,” which Roberts says was by design.
“That’s the kind of music that I was raised on that made me fall in love with country music from the beginning,” she explained. “The way women just said it like it was and they didn’t always try to pretty it up or make it sound poetic, but it was just real life. And when I write, I always gravitate back towards that because that’s what made me fall in love with this genre in the first place. Folks have said that my sound is a little bit more throwback, and I try to put my own fresh spin on it.”
Roberts is working on the follow-up to her 2023 debut album, Can’t Hide Country, and she’s excited for fans to hear what’s next (although she can’t share any specifics about a potential release date).
“I’ve been working my little fanny off to get another record done and finished up,” she told Us. “I feel like with my first record, Can’t Hide Country, it was such an introduction. When you’re meeting somebody for the first time, you put your best foot forward, and maybe you don’t get that deep or that personal because you’re just meeting them. But now, with this second record, I’m like, ‘OK, folks know who I am. I’ve introduced myself, let’s get down to business.’ I feel like the rules are off the table and I can go even more deep and personal with my songwriting and my storytelling and what I wanna say.”
“Scratching Out a Living” is out now.
