Adam Levine's Stunning Transformation
Maroon 5 frontman Adam Levine has always had a complicated relationship with fame. In an interview with Piers Morgan on CNN shortly after he began judging "The Voice," he ruminated on his own level of fame as a personality, comparing it to what he really wanted to be known for: his music. "... people do want to be famous for whatever reason," he said. "For me, it was, I wanted to just be a successful singer. I think it had less to do with fame than anything else."
Still, there's no denying that Levine has become incredibly famous. He's branched out from music into television, even trying his hand at acting. As his entertainment career has reached its third decade, he's even become a tabloid fixture, as famous for his personal life as he is for his music. He even told Morgan that he thought other celebs who complain about public scrutiny had it coming. "A lot of people that start hating it and when it starts to consume them and own them ... they brought it on themselves," he said. With that in mind, read on for a look back at Adam Levine's stunning transformation, from geeky high school kid to sex symbol and beyond.
Adam Levine's parents nurtured his musical interests
Adam Levine was raised in California, the child of divorced parents. His mother was a big fan of music, providing her son an early education in some of the greats. In particular, she was a big fan of The Beatles. "... we'd listen to 'Abbey Road,' and she'd quiz me about which Beatle was singing a certain song," Levine recalled in a 2004 interview with Rolling Stone. "I'd always screw up and say that John was Paul or Paul was John. If it was George or Ringo, though, I'd nail it."
Levine soon realized he wanted to be a performer, and he used to practice. "I used to have a karaoke machine when I was nine," he said. "I sat in front of a mirror with a microphone singing 'I Wanna Sex You Up,' making up my sexy moves."
His parents supported his ambitions, too, sending him off to a summer camp called French Woods Festival of the Performing Arts. That's where, according to an interview with Elle in 2011, he had his first kiss. "She went in for the kiss," Levine revealed. "I was freaked out and amazed."
His first band was signed in high school
Along with several of the people who would later become part of Maroon 5, Adam Levine formed a band in high school that he called Kara's Flowers. They dressed in suits and performed upbeat pop music. In his interview with Elle, Levine confessed that one of their first gigs got him a lot of attention from girls. "That isn't why we started playing music," he insisted, though he allowed, "That might be why we continued playing. Music was a way of rebelling against the whole rah-rah high school thing."
Kara's Flowers was signed by a division of Warner Records while they were still in high school. They released two albums, including "The Fourth World," which was graded a B+ by Entertainment Weekly in 1997.
Levine doesn't seem to look back on that time fondly. He told Billboard, "I didn't like anything that Kara's Flowers did ... We were kids, and we were just experimenting with music, and writing things, and not really thinking them through, and I really didn't like it." Speaking with MTV in 2002, Levine blamed money. He mused, "When they throw money in your face, it's gratifying for [your] ego, but it's empty." Something, it seemed, needed to change.
Adam Levine discovered his sound in New York City
While the members of Kara's Flowers attended college together in New York City, they found themselves in a very different world than where they'd grown up. Suddenly, there were new kinds of people around, and they were hearing brand-new sounds. As Adam Levine later explained to MTV, their lodging had a lot to do with their evolution. "We were staying in this housing place that was primarily Black. That's when I started waking up to the whole hip-hop, R&B thing," he said. "We had friends named Chaos and s***. It was not Brentwood High."
As a result of immersing themselves in new kinds of music, Levine realized that his trademark falsetto worked well for soul music. "I thought, 'I can sing like that,'" he said.
Suddenly, Levine and his friends had new goals. "We were into doing something that was against the grain, taking something out of context," Levine said. They were willing to collaborate, too. Jesse Charmichael, who played keyboard, told MTV, "We want to be the band that backs up a rapper, like the Roots did with Jay-Z." While that specific milestone wasn't necessarily in their future, Maroon 5 had finally found their sound, and they were well on their way to the big time.
Songs About Jane made them superstars
Maroon 5's first album, "Songs About Jane," launched them to superstardom ... but it took a while. The album was released in 2002 and slowly climbed the charts, but by 2004, they were everywhere. Bolstered by hits like "Harder to Breathe" and "This Love," Maroon 5 took over the airwaves; that summer, they opened for John Mayer.
Adam Levine told Rolling Stone that their rise to fame was hard to wrap his mind around. "We're all blown away by what's going on," he said. It was especially awe-inspiring, he said, that celebrities had taken notice. They had a particularly intense experience when they played a pre-Grammys party for Clive Davis. "Sitting at the tables in front were P. Diddy, Jay-Z, Missy Elliott and Magic Johnson," Levine revealed. "I was so star-struck — those were the coolest people ever at a Maroon 5 show."
Around this time, Levine cemented his rockstar image, and he told Rolling Stone that this was important to their success. "Looking good is half the battle," he said. "The Beatles, the Stones, Dylan, Prince, Michael Jackson — they've all got something going on with their appearance. If Prince wasn't the sex god, he wouldn't be Prince."
By 2011, he was a bona fide sex symbol
By 2011, Adam Levine had become the sex symbol he told Rolling Stone it was important to be. That year, in his early 30s, Levine caused a stir by posing in the buff for Cosmopolitan UK, his groin covered by then-girlfriend Anne Vyalitsyna's hand. According to Today, it was a campaign meant to bring awareness to testicular cancer, but much of the coverage focused on the fact that the "Hands All Over" singer was naked. "I spend most of my life naked. In fact, I often have to be told by the people around me that it's inappropriate to be as naked as I am," he told Cosmo. "But I live in California, where it's always warm, so why not?"
That same year, Levine posed shirtless in the music video for "Moves Like Jagger," a song meant to cast him as the heir apparent to Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger and his infamous gyrating. Taking off his shirt meant that Levine revealed he was amassing quite the collection of tattoos, including a bird chestpiece, a tiger, and Sanskrit writing. "Tattoos wind up being this strange road map or narrative over the years. They always remind me of this long, weird, awesome journey life has been," he told later People in 2022. It seems he'd prefer to keep some of that private. When People asked him to explain his necklace ink, Levine said, "I don't think that you have to necessarily ascribe meaning behind every tattoo."
He was one of the original coaches on The Voice
After several years of dominating the music charts with Maroon 5, Adam Levine signed on to a new phase of his career in 2011 when he became one of the original judges on the first season of "The Voice." Alongside CeeLo Green, Christina Aguilera, and future best friend Blake Shelton, Levine helped introduce the competition show's chair-turning format. He didn't, however, enjoy being lumped in with the rest of reality television. "I don't really like reality television. That's not my thing. I don't want to be part of that," he told Rolling Stone. "But I don't believe that this is part of that. I believe that this is something that's more special."
The first season was a mega-success, but Levine told The New York Times during the second season that he wasn't sure he liked the direction in which the show was pulling his career. "I think this was a unique wrinkle, a special little ripple that took place where I love being a part of this," he said. "But if this ever were to end at some point, I wouldn't be on television anymore ... It doesn't seem to be what I want to do forever."
He dabbled in acting on American Horror Story
Though Adam Levine told The New York Times that "The Voice" would be his only foray into television, that wasn't the case. In 2012, he signed on to the second season of "American Horror Story," subtitled "Asylum," for an acting role that saw him getting down and dirty with Jenna Dewan as they explored an abandoned building. "I'm not uncomfortable doing things like that," he told People (via Retro 102.5). "Jenna's a professional and she's amazing, and we have a lot of fun. We were laughing and joking the whole time."
Of course, this is "American Horror Story" we're talking about, and Levine's character soon found himself facing off against that season's main villain, Bloodyface. Ryan Murphy spoke with Entertainment Weekly about Levine's shocking scenes, praising his acting ability. "I wanted a big star in that," he said. "We actually wrote it for him. He did such a great job. He has this great movie star charisma." Murphy acknowledged that it was a surprise to see a famous face meet such an untimely end. "What Janet Leigh was to 'Psycho,'" Murphy said, "Adam is to this season of 'American Horror Story.'"
This was Levine's first role, and while it wouldn't signal a total career shift, he would spend the rest of the decade dabbling. He went on to appear in films like "Begin Again," "Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping," and "The Clapper."
In 2014, he married model Behati Prinsloo
For a while, Adam Levine wasn't sure he would ever get married. His parents' divorce had affected him as a child, sending him to therapy, and his parents' experience was one he wasn't interested in repeating for himself. In a 2013 interview with Nylon Guys (via HuffPost), Levine pondered, "If you don't get married, you can't get divorced. Why couldn't we learn from the devastatingly low percentage of successful marriages that our last generation went through?"
A few months after that interview, however, everything changed. That summer, Levine got engaged to Behati Prinsloo, a model ... even though they'd recently broken up. "The couple recently reunited and Adam proposed this weekend in Los Angeles," a representative told People. They married the following year in a ceremony in Mexico, and Levine told People that despite his earlier misgivings, now was the right time to get hitched. He concluded, "I definitely feel like I'm sitting in the chair I'm supposed to be sitting in right now. It all feels very natural."
Adam Levine became a father in 2016
In 2011, Adam Levine told Piers Morgan that he was thinking about becoming a father someday. "I want to start having kids, yeah. Not for seven or eight years," he predicted for his future, though he said that still seemed like a ways off.
After his marriage to Behati Prinsloo, however, Levine didn't have too long to wait. Prinsloo gave birth to a daughter named Dusty Rose in 2016, and two more kids quickly followed. Another daughter named Gio Grace was born in 2018, and then in 2023, they had a son whose name they chose not to make public. On Instagram, he often posts photos of his family with their backs turned to the camera.
In a radio appearance for "On Air with Ryan Seacrest," Levine used a sports metaphor to talk about his fatherhood journey. "It's zone defense, as they say," he joked. "It goes from man to man to zone. It's like this and that. Here we go. Boom, boom, boom, boom. It's awesome. I love the chaos. I embrace the chaos."
By 2018, Adam Levine acknowledged that Maroon 5 had changed
By 2018, Maroon 5's place in the pop music landscape had shifted. They still had major hits, to be sure, such as that year's "Girls Like You," a track with Cardi B. Their sound, though, was a far cry from what so many people had fallen in love with back in the "Songs About Jane" days. In an interview with The Independent, Adam Levine acknowledged that the band was definitely changing, creatively speaking. However, he clapped back at people who thought the band was just chasing popularity rather than making music with integrity. Levine confessed, "I don't even know what the f*** Maroon 5 are anymore, we occupy a weird space. But I'm so tired of, 'You shouldn't do this, you shouldn't do that.' I wish a band would come out and be genuinely in pursuit in the biggest amount of fame."
He also told The Independent that he may leave the band someday. An exit, however, wasn't on the immediate horizon. "I think I have good friends, and maybe one day a really good friend of mine will one day be like, 'You look ridiculous,'" he mused. "But that moment hasn't come yet."
Fans made plenty of jokes after his shirtless Super Bowl appearance
In 2019, Maroon 5 reached a new milestone when they headlined the Super Bowl Halftime Show. That was a fraught year in the NFL, considering the fallout from Colin Kaepernick's protest against police brutality, and Levine faced criticism for having taken the gig. "No one put more thought and love into this than I did," he told Entertainment Tonight. "I spoke to many people; most importantly though, I silenced all the noise and listened to myself." Maroon 5 decided to go ahead, though Levine acknowledged that the decision was unpopular. "I am not in the right profession if I can't handle a bit of controversy," he said. "We would like to move on from it and speak through the music."
Unfortunately, the band's halftime show went viral online, and not for the music. When he took off his shirt, fans realized Levine had many more tattoos than they'd previously noticed. Social media lit up with jokes about his tats, comparing him to a Chipotle bag and a Spirit Halloween costume. One person noted on X, formerly Twitter, "Adam Levine's tattoos look like he just goes to a tattoo parlor and says 'One tattoo please.'"
In 2022, Adam Levine was at the center of a cheating scandal
In 2022, Adam Levine's personal life hit the headlines. That September, model Sumner Stroh took to TikTok to claim that she had a year-long affair with Levine. "I was young, I was naive, and I mean, quite frankly, I feel exploited," she said. Stroh wound up releasing text messages from Levine that she said proved her allegations, including one that read, "It is truly unreal how f***ing hot you are. Like, it blows my mind." Stroh also claimed that Levine promised to name his next child after her.
When the allegations broke, Levine responded on his Instagram story (via Us Weekly). He wrote that he had indeed used poor judgment in communicating with Stroh, but he insisted that they hadn't actually consummated the affair. "In certain instances, it became inappropriate," he confessed. "I have addressed that and taken proactive steps to remedy this with my family. My wife and my family is all I care about in this world. To be this naive, and stupid enough to risk the only thing that truly matters to me was the greatest mistake I could ever make. I will never make it again." Levine, of course, has a frequently stated aversion to divorce.
According to an insider who spoke with Us Weekly, Levine and Behati Prinsloo worked things out. "He basically recommitted himself 100% to Behati and his family," the source said. Prinsloo and Levine now live a lavish life.
He announced a return to The Voice in 2024
Adam Levine spent the better part of a decade coaching "The Voice," having been in the rotating chair for 16 seasons. That is, until he stepped away in 2019. In an appearance on "The Ellen Degeneres Show," Levine reflected, "I do miss it, but I also don't miss how much I had to work," he said. "I was just constantly working for so many years. Very lucky, very fortunate, very blessed and all that, but, you know, [I like being] able to kind of stop in this moment to spend time with my new young family."
In 2024, Levine announced on Instagram that he plans to return to coach "The Voice" again for an upcoming season, set to air in 2025. "I'm well-rested. I'm ready to go," he said. "I'm a little nervous," he added, laughing, "I'm not nervous. But I'm so excited."
Almost immediately, Levine's return to "The Voice" was marred by controversy. The Daily Mail spoke with sources at the show who were unhappy about the "Misery" singer being brought back. The source revealed, "... towards the end of his last run, he was cocky, arrogant and seemed entitled." The source questioned whether Levine's behavior would be different this time. "Maybe Adam will change," they said. "But if he remains the abrasive Adam from the past, then they will get rid of him again."