Watch Blake Shelton, Gwen Stefani’s Valentine’s Day ‘Kimmel’ Stop

Blake Shelton and Gwen Stefani kept the romantic vibes flowing for Valentine’s Day on Wednesday (Feb. 14), but they didn’t take the day off work.

The couple made an appearance on ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live! to perform their new duet single, “Purple Irises,” a song that they’ve played live for a crowd only once before. In keeping with previous joint efforts including “Happy Anywhere” and “Nobody but You,” Shelton and Stefani’s new team-up is a love song, reflective of their own real-life story of finding and falling in love with each other.

There’s one key difference, though: Stefani wrote “Purple Irises,” and she’s the lead artist on the track. The song is expected to be included on her next musical chapter, which kicked off with “True Babe” in summer 2023.

As they took the stage, Stefani and Shelton looked every bit the part of a couple enjoying a Valentine’s Day date: She wore a flowing, floral pink dress, while Shelton rocked a sharp black suit. The stage was covered with bouquets of purple irises, and purple fog covered the floor.

Before their performance aired, Stefani sat down with Kimmel to discuss how “Purple Irises” started out as a quarantine project — and eventually transformed into a Shelton duet with help from her country star husband’s own producer, Scott Hendricks. But before she got into all that, Stefani revealed the glitzy real-life Valentine’s Day present she got from Shelton: A ring with a large green gemstone, and a glittering border in the shape of flower petals.

“I got my Valentine’s present early this year,” she said, holding up her ring for the crowd to see.

“He really mixed it up. Usually I get, like, amazing flowers, which I love, love, love,” she continued, explaining that Shelton pulled off the grand gesture without giving the surprise away or getting any input on jewelry selection from his wife. “He did the whole thing.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Stefani also shared the story of how “Purple Irises” came to be, dating back to the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when she first got inspired to start writing new music.

“I’ve been writing music since 2020. I basically wanted to put music out,” she recounted. “And I got really jealous, ’cause Kelly Clarkson actually texted me during quarantine, and I’m sitting there, you know, cleaning toilets, doing the dinner, homeschool. She’s sending me all these songs she’s writing, and I’m like, ‘Wait a minute. When?! How are you doing this?!

“So that got me thinking, ‘You know, I wanna make music,'” Stefani relates. “I kinda went down this whole road, and then when I wrote ‘Purple Irises,’ fast forward years later, I was like, ‘This is it. This is where I landed. This is me now.'”

She didn’t originally plan the song as a duet with her country superstar husband, but Stefani says that things started falling into place for them to record the track together. “We didn’t have to rewrite anything. It just worked,” she continues.

The fateful twists and turns didn’t stop there: They wound up cutting “Purple Irises” on a street in Nashville called Iris Drive, with Shelton’s longtime (and recently retired) producer at the helm.

“One of my favorite producers, Scott Hendricks, who is a country producer that works with Blake — he was never available to work with me. But then four days after his retirement, he recorded this song,” Stefani says.

“Purple Irises” first dropped earlier in February.