In 2014, when Garth Brooks made the decision to return to country music after leaving the industry for 14 years to raise his children, he found a remarkably different world than the one he’d known.
The singer-songwriter announced his retirement in 2000 when he was at the top of his game, having released mega-hits like “Friends in Low Places” and “The River” during the ’90s. After several years out of the spotlight spent taking care of his three daughters in his home state of Oklahoma, Brooks moved to Nashville after his youngest child made the decision to attend Belmont University in the city.
When he arrived, he found that Music City had turned into a “gutted town.”
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As Brooks wrote in his new book, “The Anthology Part V,” after he and his wife, fellow country superstar Trisha Yearwood, made the move back to Nashville, “I saw that we’d lost over 80 percent of our songwriters. They were gone.”
He continued, “It was a gutted town when it came to songwriters. And, I’m sorry, try and feed the world without farmers. The songwriters? They’re the farmers that feed music, and they were gone. So you kind of said, okay, you’re getting back into this thing. But there’s a lot I am not happy about that’s happened in the last fourteen years. … It created a mood. Things got darker.”
Brooks touched on the same topic again in another portion of the book, once again saying that Nashville had been “gutted” when he returned from Oklahoma. He wrote that he’d seen before “how songwriters made a living and how dreams come true,” but in 2014, all he could see “was all we had lost.”
Later in the book, when discussing his comeback album and its title track, “Man Against Machine,” Brooks explained more about what had changed in the 14 years he’d been gone: technology.
“As much as I love songwriting, and as much as I love the publishers that independently push their songs, what’s happened to the songwriter is technology,” the singer-songwriter explained. “For fourteen years I watched from the sidelines as music fell a victim to technology.”
“The iPod comes out, which leads to the smartphone. And music made the mistake of backing down to technology, because the threat that technology made to music was this: ‘If you’re not going to play our game, then all the iPods and smartphones will be filled with illegally downloaded stuff. And there’s nothing we can do about that.'”
He added, “Music blinked, and bam!, they let technology price their product. And all I can say is, can you believe ‘Hotel California’ is worth only 99 cents? … We understood that technology was taking over music, would eventually choke and damn near kill music while the technology prospered.”
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Brooks struggled with navigating the change in the music industry as he also dealt with all the changes in his personal life — the move from Oklahoma to Tennessee and his last child leaving home (he admitted that “the empty nest hit me a lot harder than I ever dreamed it would”) — but he said that the idea of streaming music “might have been the hardest to get my head around.”
Coming from a time when fans had to buy physical copies of albums and singles and entering into a new era when so much was focused on digital products was something that he admitted he “wasn’t seeing a way through.”
To combat the issues he saw with digital music, Brooks launched GhostTunes in September 2014, his own digital music store, with the intent of giving a greater portion of money from the sales of the music to songwriters and artists. In 2017, GhostTunes was absorbed into Amazon Music, but as he wrote in “The Anthology Part V,” he doesn’t consider it a failed business venture.
“Anybody that calls GhostTunes a mistake can’t see the writing on the wall, that technology is f—ing music over. The genie is so far out of the bottle at this point. I never want to offend anyone. With that said, my opinion is technology has no love for art. None whatsoever. It just has a love for something that can sell its hardware and software,” he explained.
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Also in September 2014, Brooks kicked off The Garth Brooks World Tour — his first since his previous world tour wrapped in 1998. He recalled being “scared s—less that no one would show up” when he first announced new concerts, and when a ticket queue was set up for the first show, which took place in Chicago, he told his team that he’d be happy to see 100,000 people waiting online to buy tickets.
By the time the tickets went on sale, there were over 300,000 in line.
Brooks added shows to meet the demand, eventually performing 11 concerts in Chicago alone. As for the decision to kick off the tour in the city, Marci Braun, a program director for US99, a Chicago radio station that helped promote the tour, explained, “Put Garth’s first comeback show in Nashville, and it’s a country story. Put it in Oklahoma, it’s a Garth story. Put it in Chicago? It’s an American story.”
In the end, the comeback tour went on for three years, concluding with seven Nashville shows in December 2017. Randy Bernard, one of Brooks’ managers, said, “Garth came back bigger than when he left. It made a difference for country music as a whole, just like what he did in the ’90s made a difference. … There was no one in the world doing the numbers he was doing.”
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In 2016, Brooks won the Country Music Association’s Entertainer of the Year award — something he’d won four times before in the ’90s, but that he pushed for in 2016 for the sake of his band and crew, who he said “were doing something nobody had done before. They were killing it. I mean killing it. Three-hundred-ninenty-one shows in something like seventy-two cities. It was absolutely nuts.”
Brooks won the award again in 2017 and 2019. In 2020, he announced that he no longer wanted to be considered for the honor.
Brooks believes that, being an entertainer, the work he and his team did during that lengthy comeback tour is what ultimately made his return to music such a big success story.
“The one thing that no one can take away, that nobody rules but you, is live,” he shared. “The live show, that’s when it’s just you and the people that determine whether your stuff is a success or a failure. … It’s about passion. It’s all on the line every time. You’re just going straight to the people.”
Brooks continued: “Live music was there before radio, before records, probably goes back further than any of us might even believe. One person throwing down a melody and rhythm for another: I’m guessing that if there was love — and surely if there was sex! — there had to have been music. Something like the age of streaming will never be powerful enough to take that away. Live music will win every time. When I think about this, really think about it, I stop worrying about the future of the music business.”
