Garth Brooks

Nashville to talk with Garth Brooks. Garth told me about volume three of his anthology series, which includes his new Triple Live album, and we also talked about his recent concert for eighty four thousand people at Notre Dame Stadium, and he shared details about the stadium tour he's kicking off next March, as well as the studio album he's releasing next year, which he hasn't gotten around to giving a name to yet, despite the fact that he released a single from it, a rocking bit of honky talk

called All Day Long last June. Right now, the basic working title is the Fun Album. Just a lot of fun on this record. It is untitled on Amazon. Yes, it is untitled drives them Crazy because everything's data they know exactly, but this one just hasn't been named yet so far. It's the Fun Album because it's all about fun.

And there's a cowboys song on there, a song called That's what Cowboys Do, and there's a song on there called the Party Girl, and just talking about how Marty grow for us guys, I've never heard this term before. It's just a honky talk and Halloween and that's what it is. And so it's just fun. It's real cage in varioushigh to go. But ye, at the same time, it's real country, and I think that's what I do. So my thing is, you never chase whatever is cool today.

Congratulations for who's cool, But you've got to be true to who you are, because the last thing you want to do is walk out that They were going, Okay, let's go over this. Who am I today? The greatest gift I've ever been given by the people that come to see us is they have allowed me to be me and be okay, they recognize you as a human being. At the greatest compliment I read I was walking with

the four Ladies are Gonna Remain Nameless? Was walking with him, and one of the girls, the one that has never said anything, she goes. You know, you always just appeared to me as one of us that just got lucky. Sweetest thing anybody has ever said to me, Just one of us that got lucky. Because that's how I feel. I mean, You're still you, You're still a regular person. Yeah, I'm still the the guy that's just full of flaws.

That's okay. We met Garth at the house where he has his offices and also to studios, both of them brand new for himself and his wife, Tricia Yearwood. He came to the door holding a baseball bat and wearing batting gloves, and he got us something to drink right away, made sure we were settled in. So for a superstar who's told tens and tens of millions of albums and also set a record for North America with his last tour, he did seem pretty much like a regular guy. Of course,

he's not. When he greeted us, he had stepped out not from backyard batting practice, but from working on the upcoming CBS television special of that concert at Notre Dame Stadium he'd played just a few days before. And as for that bat Brooks is not just a baseball fan. During his thirteen year retirement from touring, he reported for spring training three times with the Padres, the Mets, and

the Kansas City Royals. If you're keeping score at home, he went one for thirty nine with the Padres and the Mets, which is a point zero to five average, But he did get one hit with the Royals. His music stats are just a little bit better. He's the

best selling artist of the sound Scan era. He's tallied more than seventy million in the US since when sound Scan started, and in fact, sixteen point six million of those sales are of his second album alone, Roping the Wind, holds the title as the best selling album of the sound Scan era. Two years ago, the Recording Industry Association and of America certified Brooks as the first artist with seven Diamond albums that's ten times platinum or ten million apiece.

And when he did return to touring in fourteen, he did it in a big way. His three year world tour with Tricia Yearwood sold more than six point three million tickets. He played three hundred and ninety concerts in seventy nine cities. Brooks went into arenas, playing four or five shows, and most of them sometimes filling them for two shows a day, and finishing with seven nights in Nashville at the Bridgetone Arena. It stands as the biggest

North American tour in history. When Brooks tours next year, he'll be marking the thirtieth anniversary of his self titled debut album, which pretty much laid out all the ways that he'd both draw on country tradition and open up the new frontiers that helped create the context for most of country music today. Brooks grew up on country, but also on seventies hard rock like Kiss and Queen and singer songwriters like James Taylor and Dan Fogelberg. For sure.

You can hear that singer songwriter influence on the Dance from that first album, Oh Memory, the Dance, Sweet Share to Me, the Stars of the Oryma. You can hear it so clearly that Brooks hesitated to even record it, worrying that it wasn't country enough, and then watching it go to number one on the country charts. But if you give them more straight ahead country weeper Alabama Clay a headphones listen, you can hear the rock side of Garth as well. His nag was red as Alabama Clay,

but the CITs God Away. He's got a factory, as he explains in the first volume of Anthology at Deluxe, repackaging of his first five albums in a hardcover book that tells the stories behind each of the songs. The foundation of Alabama Clay Brooks calls it the carpet is a guitar running through a Rockman headphone amp, an invention of Tom Schultz of the band Boston. It pretty much makes your guitar sound like Boston. If you listen to

Alabama Clay with all the harmonies. Says Garth, here comes Journey, here comes Queen. What you're singing about his country as a biscuit. That is Garth talking, not me. I don't use phrases like country as a biscuit, but anyway, what you're singing about his country as a biscuit. But it works. Even if you put the Boston Big crunch in, it is still going to be country, so you can turn up your guitar and still be country. Those lessons resonate

country music to this day. What Brooks accomplished building off that first album is pretty much mind boggling. My just the sales, which are legit mind boggling, but the music itself. He could draw in country storytelling tradition, in which the narrative and detail of a feature film can be packed into three minutes of music, to sing about both vengeful wives and murderous husbands in songs like the Thunder Rolls

and Papa Love Mama. But he also sang about equal rights regardless of race, gender or sexuality, and we shall be free when the last chop cries pulled acrosststum Brand. He made Billy Joel sound like the Eagles when he covered Joel Shameless. Then he added fiddle to an Arrowsmith song, the Fever. A few years later he did classic country like two of a Kind working on a full house in American Hockey Talk Bar Association. But he also got all singer songwriter in ballads like the River and really

that's just scratching surface. No, his dream is like a river ever changed, and that he's a flow, and the dreamer's just a vessel that must follow where it goes, trying to learn from what's behind you. I haven't even mentioned Friends in Low Places yet, for the fact that Garth had a number one country hit with a cover of Bob Dylan's to Make You Feel My Love ten years before Adell got a hold of it, Blown In and the whole world game out off You Make You Feel.

The anthology series put together by Brooks with help from Warren Zanes, the former guitarist of a band called the Del Fuegos, who went on to write a really good biography of Tom Petty a few years ago, functions as an oral history of Garth's life and career told by Garth and those alongside him. The latest volume, again a hardcover book packed with five c ds, is particularly rich

and well constructed. It tells the story of Garth's growth as a live performer, and it begins with the HBO concert broadcast, HBO's first ever with a country performer, when Brooks played to a crowd of nine hundred and eighty thousand people in Central Park in New York City, and then it goes back to his childhood, his college years, his first stabs at playing music professionally, and his explosive popularity in the nineteen nineties when his albums, live shows,

and television special made country the biggest commercial power in American popular music. One of my favorite details comes in the mid eighties when Brooks was touring Oklahoma as a member of the band Santa Fe. As he explained it, Santa Fe loves Southern rock and Brooks love George Straight, perhaps the greatest of the neo traditional singers who put honky tonk values back at the center of country music

in the nineteen eighties. We went into these dance halls, explains Brooks, and it was exactly what those places needed because during the breaks from the live band, the DJs would be playing rock and pop. We brought the rock and roll feel right into the live set. They also set records on beer six. So today when you hear Florida Georgia Line integrating hip hop and pop into their country sound, they're expanning on the lessons Brooks picked up in the dance halls of Oklahoma playing with Santa Fe

and then put into his music. Moving forward, when Kenny Chesney packed stadiums with his country meets Jimmy Buffett vibe, well he's drawing on how Brooks transformed country with his Queen vibe or his James Taylor vibe. And you could say the same thing for Or Swift, who seems to have soaked up some business lessons from Brooks. He owns his masters, and he remains very cautious about digital music.

His music now streams and is downloadable through Amazon, but only because Amazon last year absorbed the online music store that Brooks himself had launched in early on in Anthology, Part three. Garth describes the stage as a pulpit. You're either seen from it or you're watching it, he says, and as you're about to hear he does sound a bit like a preacher when he starts talking about music.

I think the only other artist I've ever spoken with who is as compulsively quotable and as intensely passionate about the dynamic between the audience and the performer is Bruce Springsteen. So, without further ado, Church his in session in the sermon this week, it's pretty good, Garth Brooks. Welcome to inside the studio. Thank you. So we're actually inside your studio,

so let me welcome you inside the studio. We have got a lot of ground to cover, got a new volume of anthology, Anthology three, which has your new live album, Triple Live. We've got your upcoming stadium tour, your upcoming studio album. But let's start with the show you played just recently at Notre Dame, which was filmed for something Else upcoming coming to Special in December. And this turned out to be um a bit of a Neither rain, nor sleep, nor snow nor heavy winds can stop Garth

Brooks from his appointed rounds. It was one of those things where you were worried that the weather was going to take front stage, center stage, and then right before showtime everything just kind of went on. The whole day started off with nice weather, temperature drops, you start to get rain and then hal and then snow, so it was it was like a typical day in Ireland. It was cool man. So the greatest days start with a night. But for Friday night we do this thing called Students

sound Check. It's a new tradition that we'll have with the stadium tour. Any students with Student i D get in free, and faculty and staff have to pay like a ten dollar fee to get in and then all that money goes back to a scholarship before the college we're playing. So we were expecting what maybe five hundred six hundred would have been fantastic people shows up this thing. So all of a sudden, now sound check becomes the concert and it was great and it kind of set

the tone for the whole weekend. And it was miserable that night, misty, rainy. Everybody was soaking wet in the stands on the stage, but nobody seemed to care. And that kind of set the whole attitude for the weekend. What made you pick? Well, Notre Dame kind of picked us.

We're supposed to take this year off and I got named Rob Beckham at w M E called me one day and he goes, I know you're taking the year off, but there's a phone call I think you're gonna want to take and uh, just due to music business mergers, everything that's changing always now some of the most prolific colleges in our history are opening up for the first time ever to have concerts in their stadium and Notre Dame was the first one to make the call, so

there had never been a concert in that space before, never, so it was it was pretty cool. And they when you the sweet thing was they're the nicest people on the planet at Notre Dame. But immediately you realized they've never had a concert because none of them knew anything

about concerts. So it's pretty good. You got to hold their hand, they got to hold our hand because we don't do stadiums, and it was a good marriage, so good that right in the middle of everything, right in the middle of the concert that night, it was like, you know what, it only makes sense we had forty five thousand tickets into the on sale. Thirty minutes into the on sale, we still had sixties some thousand people

in the waiting room. So you were not able to do another show because these are just unique individual shows. They were so sweet, so good during the show that I said, I'll tell you what, let's just make a date and right there and trust me, I know all our people are having a heart attack. So we're gonna start the stadium tour Notre Dame, and we're gonna end the American leg of it back Notre Dame will come full circle. I was just talking to some of your

team here and that announcement came as a surprise. Was that a spur of the moment thing for you? Just anybody that's listening, they gets to do this for a living. Put Notre Dame on your list. The greatest community, the greatest sound and stadium planet. It's heaven, you know, and field of dreams that hey is it's heaven. No, it's Iowa, it's Notre Dame. Is heaven when you get to play music.

So you called that audible on stage. You routed the tour right then and there, and it's really interesting how the book portion of it functions as an oral history of your life because it's telling the story of you as a performer, going back to the very very beginning. But one interesting thing that stuck out to me was I forget who said it said you get a set list. It doesn't mean anything ever. See parts of the Criban. They're not rules, they're more like guidelines. That's what a

set list. So so is that still the case you're gonna call audibles? Yes, that's all we did, and notre dame because it's average changing. If you've ever been to a guard show, the one thing you're going to know more than anything is the guy that's name is on the marquee is not the boss. It's the people in the seats. They're the boss. Where they want to go,

we go. So it makes it fun for us. So instead of the fiddle player knowing, well, this is what I do, I'm gonna grab my fiddle here fiddle, the fiddle player is holding both the guitar and the fiddle in his hand, looking at you because he knows he's ready. The lighting guy, the lighting guys telling all the guys stand by stand by because I get a fit boom, We're going to a different song. And everything now is

so computer program with video and media. Those guys in the back room are going crazy when you change things up, but they handle it so well. It's interesting. Anthology three, you tell the story that each step along the way is you going to school? Amen? Going back to one thing that really stuck with me was you talk about how your bouncer, and as a bouncer you learn which songs packed the dance floors and which ones don't. Where is school for you? Now? School just started at Notre Dame.

I could fill up three legal pads with what I learned in two hours on that stage. Everything from which way the grating and the flooring is going on, everything from that to where the points go out as opposed to the clusters. You're just taking notes the whole time while the crowd is spurring you on to just go crazier, wilder, deeper, under, bigger better. If the crowd should live in the momment,

but the entertainer should live in the moment before. That's where you live, because if you can surprise them, they will surprise you. So you were talking about where the points go, You're talking about the way out of the stage. Vet you Now, do I have this right? You had a whole new stage for the Notre Dame show, which you're scrapping and building another stage for the stadium tour. Yeah, the Notre Dame show was supposed to be the blueprint

for it. But what we did with Notre Dame was we realized to all the things that work really well and the things that don't. What are some of things? Give me an example. It wasn't working. So let's take the Cowboys Star. So the Cowboys Star looks like a star on a badge. Right, So at one point, the point is going to be facing fifty yard line one side of the stadium, but the other side has two legs on it that neither one of them face the

middle of the stadium. So never are you getting to play to more than of the audience at any time in the round. That was a big lesson. So now replace it with a Mariner star which points north, south, east and west. Elongate your east and west because the field is longer than it is wide, and now you're getting closer to everyone. Because the whole thing with us is it all starts with the very first premises. We

don't golden circle. You don't pay more to be on the floor than you do at the very top of the stadium. It's all luck of the draw. When you see somebody sit. If you're up high and you see somebody sitting on the second row, they just got the luck of the draw in the computer when it flag went down for the ticket on sale, every ticket the same price, and that's something we've always had, always done that, never done the golden circle, where the closer to the

stage is more expensive. A gets no offense against people that do that. It's just never been our thing because it just makes the crowd one family. So you've always kept it. Every ticket is the same price. There's a philosophy on merchandise too. For me, we didn't come from money, so anything you can ever get that you feel like you gotta steal on or bargain on. It fits better, it tastes better, all that stuff, so it's pretty cool, man. You. So you do your merch you do it out of

a dent cotton, so it's gonna last forever. I see those shirts twenty years later at concerts. I see those shirts on eBay. They look brand new still, So that's what we do, and they're not fifty bucks a piece or bucks piece something like that. And it's cool. My thing is as an entertainer, you're what they call working. Okay, this has never been work ever. Okay, last time I worked, I was rough on houses when I was twenty three.

This is you come out of the hole and they look at the ticket, they see the price, they look at the stage, the lighting, rig, everything, and they go, holy crap show and even started yet. And I feel like I got my money's worth already. Now when you come out of the hole, that crowd is happy. That crowd is not sitting there going okay, you better make this worth it never And when you get to come out to there, it turns to a party like that,

and then the party goes all night long. It's fantastic, man, because you're never playing a gig for the gig itself. You're always playing the gig for the next time you come back. You want to be invited back. And I have shamelessly at the end of concerts had such a good time like in Notre Dame, and just pretty much invited myself back because I'm having the best time in

the arena in the stadium. You were just talking about that feeling you get when you you come out of the hole, you come to come up to the stage. Do you still get nervous, because there's an interesting moment. Anthology three, the very start of it starts with the HBO special in Central Park, and there is documentary evidence. There's photos where you say I looked white as a ghost, and indeed there's photos of you backstage before you go on and you do not look well, brother, don't. I

was scared of that. I mean literally scared of that. Shaken, and this is kind of what you do for a living, so you think you're gonna be okay. The problem was I didn't want to see the audience before you saw me see the audience because it's live TV and I want all those reactions. What I didn't plan on was walking towards the stage, the parks guys with me. He hands me a note. I said, what this. He goes, this was ninety minutes ago. This was the count ninety

minutes ago. I under the note. The note says eight hundred and fifty thousand, and I look at him. I said, you're telling me we have eight bout there. He goes no, I'm telling you, ninety minutes ago you had eight d fifty people, and man, when when you look, I'm my town seventeen thousand people when we moved there. Okay, my towns now bedroom community of Oklahoma City. It's a lot bigger.

But I've never seen that many people in my life in one place, and it scared the hell out of me, I'd be honest, and it took the whole show for me to even kind of absorb it. There's a lot of things when I see that show now that I don't even remember because you're just so damn scared and you still get nervous coming on stage. Yeah, that's the fun part, though, isn't it. It's the fun part. I don't know if you ever do like water slides anything

like that. You're scared of death standing up there, but as you go, it's the most fun thing on the planet. Will imagine that getting to be new every time, And there's only two things in my life that are like that. Music is new every time and Miss your Wood is new every time you see her, And those are the things that bring you touring. Let's talk about how touring has changed for you over the years. Because when you

go out next year, you're gonna be celebrating a thirty anniversary. Now, I want to go back to something you talked about in the anthology about your first tour in I'm gonna quote you here. I love getting in a van with a bunch of stinky guys, laugh your ass off, go to a club, eat shitty food that's been there three days.

The bologna has the rainbow on it, and then the girls show up for the boys and the band to play for It's the greatest thing, Yes, it is, so imagine the food's gotten a little better, yes, but it's still for the girls, isn't it. I mean, it's just is I mean the thing about music that people don't understand, which I get. You don't get into this thing for money, because if you do, your your ship out of luckmost there is none. Right, there's no money when you start

this thing. So when these guys come in and they want to make big business deals and they throw the money around, you look at him, go, that's laddering. I'm humbled. But the truth is, have you seen the stars born? When he looks at her and says, you're gonna have to dig in your soul and find your legs. Why are we doing what we're doing? So if you're gonna come and throw money around, great, that's that's fabulous. But what are we doing? Are we doing something that's going

to define the time? Something like that. That's what I want to be a part of. I think that's what we all want to be a part of. But what things have changed? I mean, these songs, some of them have been with you for thirty years. How does the songs change for you? I'm not sure that they do tell you the truth that the thing all starts with

the seed. And the seed for here was Alan Reynolds, the producer and the mentor, and his goal was he told me this when we first started, He goes, my goal is for you to look at that set list and the song that you're singing doesn't sound anything like the song you just sang, or the song that's coming after.

And when you look down there and you see the thunder Rolls and you're playing the thunder Rolls, your goal this is any thing like Rodeo And it's sure nothing like We Shall be Free, which is coming up next, and after we Shall be Free. As much too young to feel this damn old that doesn't sound like anything we've done yet he did a great, great job that way.

So you do interviews with people all the time that might not really know who you are, or they're doing it because that's their job for their magazine or whatever. And the one question they continue to ask is if there's one song you wish you never had to sing again, what would it be? Because they always want you to say friends and now Places. But what they don't understand is I haven't seen friends and no Places in twenty five years. I played the first chord and I watched

the rest. The rest of the performance, it's it's a joy mad by bringing the crowd to the music, and by bringing the music to the crowd, it gets if you've ever seen a guard show, it gets to where you don't know who the entertainer and who the fan is. It certainly is that way now, right. I mean, the crowd can do most of the job for you. They always have, and it didn't matter if there was nine of them in the crowd. There's nine, They still do the job for you. They because we just don't want

to come and sing, don't we. It's my favorite thing at a show if you want to hear me sing But okay, I do, man, I do want to hear you singing, because it's the voice of your soul. That's what singing is. It's the voice of hope. It's the voice of love. And I truly think if God sat down it and he opened his mouth, you would hear the music. You know, you're talking about the voice of hope,

the voice of love. And you just mentioned we shall be free, And I want to ask you about that songs from and for a long time, it felt like we were traveling towards the wishes of that song, racial and sexual equality and all the other things. And there are moments now where it feels like we're traveling back, you know, like it feels like we're more divided than ever. How does it feel like that song or People Loving People and more recent songs, how do those songs play

for you now? They play the same now? And if you're not more relevant, if not more needed to be heard than ever right now. Because here's the thing I don't buy into what's going on right now. I think what's happened is someone has given a microphone to the extremists to the point zero zero one of us the far left, the far right, and social media has given a mic to them that other ninety nine percent of us that live in the middle, we're still here. We're here.

I get to see them every night, thank god. And they come and they hug each other, and they'll come with a Red Sox jersey on, a Yankee jersey on, and they got their arms around each other and they're singing. Because for me, music is the bridge, and so that's that's what it's all about. So we can talk about all day about how bad a shape we're in. I'm telling you, when it comes down to the cutting time, we'll show up and we're the same country we always where,

we love one another. We'll pick on each other, but somebody outside picks on us, good luck to them, because we'll stand together. I mentioned before. One thing I really liked about Anthology three is it tells the story of your life by talking about you as a performer, going way back, going through your college years, back to your childhood when you were performing with your family. So we did this thing called talent Night at the house. Once

a week. Mom would disappear one night out of the month to go sing at the mooselat Yeah, that's how Mom kind of still got her fixed to sing and still was a mom with six kids because she used to she toured with the swing band and stuff before she had children. She was a teenager. But once the kids started coming, Mom had to put it away for us. And I think that was one of the greatest joys of my life was for Christmas when she got a tour bus and said, Mom, anywhere we're at any time,

here's your driver. You can tell us you're coming, not just go up and man, they lived on the road. They were gone. They were touring all the time. And it was the greatest time in my life as far as his son, because my sister was out, my brother was out with us, our mom and dad was out there. That was that was heaven for me those family nights that you were mentioning, what kind of stuff would you

be singing that? Well, the crazy thing is, man, you know, we do music in sports, that's what our family does. So we have all Americans, we have all Staters, and I was never one of those. So I'm gonna tell you it's the same way in music. We have some of the greatest musicians, greatest singers, and I ain't one of them in our family. And it all spawns from my dad was a great musician, and my mom was, I'm gonna put her in the top five female voices

I've ever heard in my lifetime. That's where you learned to saying, do you feel that's where school started? For sure? Mom always then Betsy was the consummate entertainer, so you learned a lot from there. So before I ever picked up a guitar, I had so much of it in my head that playing the guitar was kind of like just a formality of where I guess it was hidden.

But I always thought I was going to be a professional athlete because I always thought I was better than I was the only thing that kept me from being a professional athlete was my athletic ability or lack of, you know. And so uh so it was college when you realized, Okay, real life now is way, and you're not gonna be a professional athlete. What are you gonna do?

And I got my degree in advertising, I thought I was gonna be an advertiser and ended up one credit hour short to graduate and had to go back and I started playing music to support myself. You say, college is where you realize real life is waiting. But there are also these stories. In Anthology three, there's a great

story from Tie England saying I met him. I was living two floors up, started playing music and we used to put a blanket on the windows so we could go all night into the day and just keep playing music. So that doesn't sound like real life, was there quite? Then? Well, you know, college is that thing where you can run from real life. But once you graduate or get out, and you've got no excuses left. The difference. The problem that killed Ty and me was I was a senior

and he was a sophomore. So I had the routine down. I had all my classes in the afternoon. Ty had those seven am classes that want you to play until five am just playing music. You ain't gonna get up for the seven am. So his dad he ainked his bud out of college because his grades were horrible and took him back home to Oklahoma City. But then again, there it is, there's another year of my education. It's Tie England. You're walking around with a guy that's a

beautiful young kid, fantastic guitar player, unbelievable voice. Anywhere we would go with hey, garth grade. But that kid right there, that ty kid, he can sing. So it was school for me. I enjoyed our time together, learned a lot, and it only made sense that me and him would be buddies when we launched out as a solo artist for Capitol Records. So let's talk about Triple Live, the sequel.

I guess to Double Live, yes, and commemorate. It's the tour three hundred and nineties shows, seventy nine cities, six point three or is it six point four? It was a bunch of voices. It was beautiful. I always say, if you've ever seen any from me, I can't call them fans, and you sure yourself can't call them tickets. You can't call them customers voices because I hear every one of them. I've read. Tell that you have incredible

recall on on the shows you've played. Yeah, I mean it's the same way if you hang around baseball players, they can tell you what the count is, where they're at all and they play, you know, a hundred eighty games a year, and you're like, I don't know how they do that. But music, yeah, all just comes back to you. If somebody says, Land Over Maryland and the US are Arena. I remember it was the sickest day

of my life. Remember those things, so you know you're talking to the UH, the Beach Wagon and Myrtle Beach. There's a lot of things that went on there that we can't even talk about, but you remember them like they were yesterday, even though they were the clubs that held maybe people all the way up to the stadiums that you know that the people just went on forever. Triple Live. There's a few new songs and recent records, but there's one I want to ask you about your

version of and Ashley McBride's Yes. For her, it's Girl Going Nowhere. For you, it's Guy Going no What made you want to do that song? But when you first hear it, it's like if you hear and people go, are you kidding me? You're going to compare these two songs? Yes, I will compare these two songs, Guy Going Nowhere and turn the page their road anthems. If you've done this for a living, you've lived turned the page and you've lived Guy going Out and she just she nailed it.

I just took it to kind of apply to me. She took it to apply to her, so her lyrics a little different. And so when we did this thing live and it got the response, I couldn't believe it. This will tell you what kind of song it is. There's a sign in Notre Dame eight five thou people, and you don't want to stop this show. You don't want to slow it down. You don't want to slow down. You sure don't want to slow down with a ballad. And you sure don't want to slow it down with

a ballad they've never heard. Then you play it a Notre Dame stadium and it got so quiet you could hear a pin drop. And on the things that she put in that song where you want the crowd to respond, they responded like they had heard it their whole life. That's a mark of a great song. It's a mark of a great songwriter. And you talk about Ashley McBride, she does singing in a songwriting better than anybody. This is a song about being told you're gonna go nowhere

as a country singer. And then when you hear the crowd when the lights come up, you feel like you're in your place. Yeah. Um, it used to be a little tough for me. My dad. My dad and my mom were my biggest fans. They really were. But my dad was very much a realist, the same way I am with my children. So he wouldn't squash your dre aam. So she's just gonna tell you, if you're really gonna dream like that, it's a hell of a lot of work. I don't know if you want to put that much

work into it kind of thing. And uh, he said, Garth, way in the world you move in to Nashville. I said, Dad, I'm gonna tell you. I got people that come and watch me when I play, and they just say, you need to pursue this. And I remember his words the rest of my life. He says, Garth. They tell everybody that, yep, you're right. They do, You're right. But I'm going to believe them to fill in the confidence I don't have in myself. I'm gonna take the confidence they have me.

We're gonna pack up, I'm gonna go, We'll try it. And uh, really really glad I did. Obviously, there comes a point down the line where you must have had a follow up conversation. No, my dad was always a realist. I remember telling Dad, I said, Dad, because I didn't even know how to tell you this. But we just put on her first kind of big outdoor concert, I said, Dad. We we sold twenty three thousand tickets to this thing. He's congratulations, Bud, But never forget that's twenty three thousand

people you could disappoint. So, like Holy Count, I never saw the other side of the coin. So what he was saying, I believe what he was saying. Do your homework, study, be ready for it. The victory did not come in the selling of tickets. The victory comes by those people walking out that stadium going if that guy comes back here, I'll be here. And that's what he taught me. You know.

It's funny. Going back to Anthology three, there's a moment where you talk about being on tour and losing touch with your own music and Canada, and the advice you get from Alan Reynolds is are you listening to the songs you're singing? God? Could it be that simple? Could it really be that simple? We're in Canada, we're making the run across northern Canada, so it's all the greatest towns to play too. So it's Winnipeg, it's Edmonton. It's Calgary. Great places to play, but I cannot find did in

my soul for the life of me. So I don't know if we talk about this in the mythology. If we don't, I should have put a bounty on my own head to try and get things jumped up. And it was a five dollar bounty for anybody who could knock me on my ask during the show. Yeah come up, Okay, So this was exactly so. It was just to get everybody fired up, and we had fun and it was

moved around. But still, no matter all the tricks, and no matter how you dress it up, if it ain't burning inside, there's this cold air that comes out when you see And so I called Alan Reynolds said, Alan, I'm not done. I don't know what it is. I don't know if I'm tired or what. And Alan Reynolds goes, are you listening to what you're singing? And what do you mean that they want the thunder Rolls. We played exactly this. Now he goes, but are you listening? Man?

That night I listened to the lyrics of Much Too Young. It took me back to sitting on that There was a coffee table in a house and still water, no chairs around it, or on our knees, sitting there scribbling on notebook paper, writing much too young. When Randy Taylor looks at me, goes, I just want a line that says, a worn out tape of Crystal Dude. That's all along, and it all brought it back, and man, everything came with it too. Once that fire starts burning, then the

whole arena started to get on fire. And I have not looked back since that day. I have never had a cold Speller dry spell since shows some of them were fourteen sixteen in twelve days. You were doing two shows a day. In some of these places, you're doing matinee shows, which used to be you go back to the nineteen sixties, that's the way it was done. Even in the seventies. The Stones played two shows a day

on their seventy two tour. But nobody does that anymore. Yeah, but I gotta tell you, there wasn't one of those shows that was just another show. Never was all because of that talk, and that is the power of the song. And when people go, what's the future of music and music business? We have no future if it's not for the song. Okay, since you brought up the future of the music business, albums are streaming on Amazon now, but you've resisted the streaming era and you still want people

to interact with your stuff as albums. How long are you going to hold out or you gotta you gotta hold it. It's it's who I am, So it's it's just who I am. All streaming does is become for me and and no offense to anybody. This is my opinion. Streaming just simply becomes background music for whatever you're doing. It's not the reason why you do what you do. There's gonna be people that find music and find songs.

But the truth is, let's define what music is. A radio single is the song that pisses the least amount of people off. It's safe, it's commercial, fair enough. And I've got songs like Unanswered Prayers, i got songs like the Change that We're singles that I think you're the most important pieces I'll ever speak as an artist. But what is that song when you have the barrel of the gun in your mouth and you hear that makes you stop, makes you think. If you're anybody that's thirty

years old or older, there's album cuts. It was the things that weren't safe. There were the things that really took the music and the lyric into your world. Those things are here and those things are important to hear. So you sit down to listen to Hotel California. There's a single on there called Hotel California. The album is called Hotel California, and for me, it's thirty something minutes of just righteousness of highs lows turning it up. There's

not a greater song for me. There's that room where all the great songs live. Life in the Fast Line might be the perfect rock and rolls on, but pretty Maids all in a row? Are you kidding me? Just as equally strong, as equally as important. One was a single and one was not, but yet both affected my life. So my thing is just what the album does is

give the artist a voice. When you look and you've listened to a hundred songs and it's a hundred different artists, you have a chance of losing what an iconic artist is. We're expecting another studio album from you next year. All Day Long is the song we've heard from it, but that's been out since the summer. What can you tell us about this record. It starts with a song called

the Road I'm on right Now with Amazon. If you do the album, you get the Road I'm On with and the Road I'm On is just a simple salute to very much like if you had the album Fresh Horses. It was a song called the Old Stuff on It just talked about touring and The Road I'm On just talks about the road I'm on now as an entertainer as he and being where we're at. Because for me, I think music should give you a piece of the artist. With everything that's out there, you should know something more

about the artist once you hear a song. And Notre Dame you played something the Music one oh one Trilogy, which was a Gabe Dixon song like again and then also let it be in hage you how did this come to be called the Music one oh one Trilogy. What it is is we're gonna launch a new tradition. We started at Notre Dame and we played colleges. We're gonna do this thing called Music one oh one, and we're gonna make sure the kids in the audience do

not forget the greatest artists and the greatest song. It's kind of feel like it's our job. So what we'll do is we'll mix something new was something old that kind of ties together. So for us, Gabe Dixon, everybody here in town knows him. Great session player, great singer. He was an artist for a little bit, but you

can tell his love and passion is in songwriting. He was with Paul McCartney for a run and then legend has it that Paul asked him to stay on, and he said, Man, I just really want to pursue songwriting and do my own thing. I don't care who you are. If Sir Paul asked you to stay on, I would say, yeah, what do you want me? When we sell my family? Yeah, I know what you know? Whatever I need to do. Yes. And this kid was so hell bent on just creating music that that's what he does and he's fabulous, a

great artist. So it starts with Live Again off him. But when you play Live Again, if you ever heard the song, it's Billy Joel meets Sir Paul McCartney head on. It's gorgeous, but it only lent itself to let it be and hate Jude. Pretty cool, but that is the one and only time probably will ever be played, so the music one on one trilogy, then we could maybe get Askley McBride's guy Going Nowhere with Bob Seekers to turn the page. Yeah, so our job is to just,

I want to say, educate. But the truth is, when songs are so great, I think the kids already know them. It's just to make sure that they understand what a great song is, what great artists are. And uh, my thing is if we go, hey, you know what, we already know that, that's a lesson. I don't think you can learn enough. Something you brought up a little while ago when you were talking about the sanctity of the album, what's the song you want to hear? Gun to your head?

What's the song you want to hear? So, so let me ask you, since you brought it up, what's the one you want to hear at any time? And we've mentioned a couple of them, turn the page. Ricky Skag's got a song called two Highways. George Strait has a song called I Can't See Texas from Here. The crazy thing, though, is we take a fifteen minute break, you come back Gun into your head, tell me the songs. There'll be three different ones minutes there'll be three different ones. That's

what I love. I just love music, and I love where it comes from. So when you hear Girl Going Nowhere or Pretty Maids All in a Row or Princess Musicology, all these things come into your head as just great music that have kind of built and defined you as a person. I would have to ask somebody who's not in music for a living to see if music means the same thing to them, if it's a fabric of

their life that they can point too. I'm sitting here in this room staring at a young lady that I've known since she was a kid, and even though she's in the music business, she's not an artist herself, but songs have built every minute of her life. When she remembers her mother, she'll remember certain artists. Remember your dad, You remember certain artists. And I think that's the power of music. So here's the bottom line. Record labels own

the music. Artists do not. So that's the first mistake we commonly make is, oh my god, why did that artist allow his song to be on an ex Lax commercial. Well, we as artists don't own our music. Very rarely does that happen, So it's the record labels, so it's more like a commodity or a piece of product for them, but for us the listener, it's everything. So when you say what's the future of music and music business, it's still always going to be a business. It's still gonna

be product that's traded. But for us as a listener, I think it's the gospel and I would love to see music treated like that. But you understand why I can't, because art and business I can't live together. Sometimes they do. Sometimes you've harold a little too hardticke and on a mildly I want to take page from you know, before we go, I just want to ask you one question.

I'm pulling out Anthology Part three, lovely book that I've mentioned a few times, and we open up for those of you are listening home, and open up to a page with a picture of Garth with one of his first Tell me about that mustache. Don't you love it? Man? Okay? So this must have been when Sandy, right about when Sandy and I got married, because in all our wedding pictures I have that mustache. Oh yeah, and Sandy hated it. I didn't know anybody that liked it. Well, yeah, I'm

not surprised you didn't. What were you thinking? And then why did you keep it? Are you kidding me? Man? It's cool? Look at that? Is that not cool? It's the ugliest thing on the planet. I would vaguely describe it as you look like the cable guy, but also like you're gonna steal something out of my house. Yeah, that was us, man, But everybody in that band had facial hair, so I had to be cool, right. That

is a great picture. Man. So the kid next to me, Mike Skinner, when you say you go to school, he's one of my years of education. This kid was a self taught fiddle player that played kind of southern rock getar. So when I heard a fiddle playing with this kind of muscle, it made sense that I love George Straight and I love Crystal Doo, but also love Boston Can These two music's live together. Two songs in Garth Brooks's career. If people are familiar with Garth Brooks's career, Alabama Clay

and a song called Fit for a King. Alabama Clay was off the original album Fit for King off sevens. Both of them have the hardest electric guitar i've ever heard in country music, and they're both the most traditional country music songs that I've ever cut in my career. So Mike Skinner was the bridge that showed me you could put those two things together. We go through here, Jed Lindsay, Tom Skinner, Troy Jones, they all taught me stuff.

I'm really lucky that anybody that I have sat and talked with has been a founding block that has built my life. And the great thing is twenty stories later, a thirty stories later in the career, as far as years ago, I'm still laying down foundational block. Yeah, there are things that change my life that I get to do in music and fine, which makes me think things

that last forever usually take forever to build. So my job is to do everything I can do while I'll live in and breathe, and if I've done my job right a hundred years after I'm gone, hopefully the music we care about, the artist, the music lives. Garth. Thank you very much for joining us all that. It's my pleasure. Man Inside the Studio is an I Heart Radio original podcast. This episode was written and hosted by me Joe Leavy.

We'd like to give a big banks to Garth Brooks and of course Pearl Records, and you can follow inside the studio on I Heart Radio per subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.