So many Saturdays our house was awoken by mom throwing on a Garth Brooks album, whipping open curtains, and divvying out house chores. These were awful days.
Brooks exploded on the country scene in 1989, with his self-titled debut rocketing to diamond status. To put that in perspective, that's awarded for selling over ten million albums. To further paint how much of an achievement that is, only twenty-eight albums in the entirety of the 80's achieved that. That in and of itself is intriguing to me, and a post on that will surely be forthcoming.
All throughout the 90's, women came out of the woodwork for the man. They were head over heels in love with him, and the jealously ran rampant for his wife, Sandy Mahl. It got so out of control that one could argue that they were more enraptured with the man himself than his actual music. I know mom was. She collected every form of release he put out; cassettes, vinyls, CD's, longbox CD's, and even exclusive McDonald's released compilations.
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Listening to this album felt like childhood trauma. Hearing tracks like If Tomorrow Never Comes, Much Too Young (To Feel This Damn Old), Nobody Gets Off In This Town, and The Dance took me back to a time I hated. One full of lost Saturdays doing chores, and arguments between mom and dad. Weekends with nowhere to go, nothing to do, all painted around a portrait of awkward teenage development. It wasn't my personal favorite time of life, for sure.
With that said, I can appreciate the music as a whole. Putting all of the above aside, it's still a solid album. Mind you, that's coming from someone who really doesn't favor country music. Perhaps, with regards to this one, it's more so favorable because of how engrained in my head it's become. Will I listen to it again? Absolutely not. Will I trek into his 90's albums? That's definitely a hard pass for me. Not that I need to hear them (again), as they're already tucked deep in the back of my mind from a decade of being subjected to them.
It's a little sad when I think about it. How I have a love / hate relationship with a man I don't know and normally wouldn't even listen to. On one hand, I don't like country music, so it has that knock. It further gets hindered by all the emotional baggage it brings with it for me personally. Yet on the other hand, it's also a perfectly preserved snapshot of my life at the time. Hearing the tunes takes me back to those days, for better or worse.
In 1999, Brooks made the unique decision to change personas to Chris Gaines, and release Garth Brooks In...The Life Of Chris Gaines, switching genres to rock and roll. From there, he would return to his country roots with 2001's Scarecrow.
By this point, he had already separated from, and divorced Mahl, and following this, announced he would be retiring from music to focus on raising his three daughters. He'd remain out of the spotlight until 2005 when he married Trisha Yearwood and signed a major distribution deal with Walmart. This made his entire catalog exclusively available through the retailer.
At the time, this was a unique move for an industry that had seemingly shifted to digital distribution and streaming consumption. In retrospect, it may have been the smartest decision any artist had made in a long time. This route allowed him to control his persona. A calculated business decisions by a wealthy artist prioritizing personal choice over relentless commercial output.
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