Friends In All Places: Garth Brooks’ Full House Of Country Anthems

It’s been quite a ride for Troyal Garth Brooks. One that has taken him from Willie’s Saloon in Stillwater, OK to global stadium tours and exalted status as the bestselling solo album act in U.S. recording history, with sales of well over 160 million album units.

Along the way, Brooks has collected just about every honor known to showbusiness and amassed a brain-bending nine Diamond-certified albums of ten million shipments each. But beyond every accolade, what rings out as loudly and clearly as his dozens of signature hits is an undimmed passion for music and for giving his legions of fans the time of their lives.

He has become a country music statesman and elder, lending his presence to numerous Nashville occasions, as well as receiving his own Kennedy Center honor in 2021. “There’s country music, rock, gospel, honky-tonk…and then there’s Garth Brooks,” said actor Bradley Cooper, introducing him on that occasion. “Garth is a power hitter who swung for the fences and shattered the barriers between music genres, forever expanding the vocabulary of country music and changing American culture.”

Living on Tulsa time

Born in Tulsa on February 7, 1962 and raised 120 miles south-west in Yukon, the proud Oklahoman was something of a late starter as a professional musician. He already had a degree in advertising to his name when, aged 23, he began playing those local bars. He was 27 when, after relocating to Nashville and performing in 1987 and 1988 at the Bluebird Café, he made his major label debut on Capitol, who had signed his mother, Colleen Carroll, in the 1950s.

Garth’s self-titled 1989 album started his working relationship with producer Allen Reynolds. Brooks was, he later confided, “definitely scared to death.” That set’s flagship single “Much Too Young (To Feel This Damn Old)” had been on the country charts for two months before the album joined it there, and the track, written with Randy Taylor, peaked at No.8, while the album eventually reached No.2.

The long player turned gold in August 1990 and platinum two months later, by which time Brooks had started his extensive collection of No.1 singles, and had joined the Grand Ole Opry. The eponymous debut prompted no fewer than five CMA Award nominations for Brooks, of which he won two, and the record eventually progressed to Diamond certification in 2006.

Garth Brooks contained two ballads that have stayed the course as all-time favorites, “If Tomorrow Never Comes” (penned by Brooks with Larry Bastian and Sandy Mahl) and “The Dance,” written by Tony Arata. “That first album is always a big one for any artist,” he reflected, “and I, without trying to sound egotistical, I’m very proud of my first one.”

Breaking down the fences

If that was a rewarding start, then what happened in 1990 was off the scale. No Fences spent 41 weeks at No.1 country and was 16-times platinum in America alone, turning Brooks into the premier flagbearer of a new crossover country sound both at home and beyond. Four singles releases in a row all went to No.1, demonstrating his versatility along the way, from the feelgood singalongs “Friends in Low Places” and “Two of a Kind, Workin’ on a Full House” to the humble “Unanswered Prayers” and the darkly atmospheric “The Thunder Rolls.”

By 1991’s Ropin’ The Wind, Brooks was leaving no further room for doubt about his talent for stadium-filling sounds and spectacles, not to mention his ear for quality pop music, as proved by his country chart-topping cover of Billy Joel’s “Shameless.” Indeed, Garth’s crossover to that mainstream audience was now incontrovertible, as the full-length became his first to top the all-genre Billboard 200. It was also his second in a row to be named CMA Album of the Year and delivered further No.1s in “What She’s Doing Now” and “The River.”

Classic albums and tracks continued apace through the 1990s. On The Chase, Brooks again broke through his supposed boundaries by introducing his vast audience to Californian roots-rock pacesetters Little Feat on a cover of their trademark “Dixie Chicken,” and bagged bestsellers with “Somewhere Other Than The Night” and “That Summer.” As his reign became unassailable, he co-wrote on that album with no fewer than five partners and had a rare solo credit for “Mr. Right.”

In 1993, In Pieces performed Brooks’ usual domestic chart acrobatics, also hitting the top in Australia and debuting in the U.K. at a career-best No.2. It contained his next three rock-solid singalongs in “Ain’t Going Down (‘Til the Sun Comes Up),” “American Honky-Tonk Bar Association,” and “Standing Outside the Fire.” Entertainment Weekly marked the album’s release by observing that “each of his albums has skilfully blended the old (Western swing, story songs) with the new (heartland rock, admirable message songs).”

Global adventures

Brooks burnished his national and international reputation as a spectacular performer on world tours spanning 1993-94 and 1996-98. After his pitstop for the Diamond-plated The Hits retrospective in ’94, he came back with a sixth studio set, Fresh Horses, the following year.

An eventual eight million domestic sales were stoked by two new country chart rulers, “She’s Every Woman” (co-written with fellow artist Victoria Shaw) and “The Beaches of Cheyenne,” which he created with Bryan Kennedy and Dan Roberts. The LP also had Brooks acknowledging his rock heroes again with “The Fever,” a reworking of Aerosmith’s 1993 track “Fever.”

The Sevens album of 1997 was introduced by “In Another’s Eyes,” Garth’s duet with Trisha Yearwood, whom he would marry in 2005. His fondness for providing opportunities for country artists he admired was reflected in the No.1s “Longneck Bottle,” co-written by Rick Warnes and 1980s mainstay Steve Wariner, and “Two Piña Coladas,” penned by former Reprise signing Shawn Camp, Benita Hill, and 1960s recording artist Sandy Mason.

After a significant movie hit with a version of Bob Dylan’s “To Make You Feel My Love” (from the 1998 picture Hope Floats, starring Sandra Bullock), Brooks saw out the 1990s with the Double Live and The Magic Of Christmas albums and the often-misunderstood “alter ego” set Garth Brooks in…the Life of Chris Gaines.

Business nous and self-determination

Then, following a retrospective hit with “Wild Horses,” revived from No Fences, he was very much himself again, so to speak, on 2001’s Scarecrow. Notable tracks included “Wrapped Up In You” and his duet with the great George Jones, “Beer Run.” Brooks ended his association with Capitol in 2005, and a keen business brain and flair for self-determination ensured that he would, most unusually, retain his rights and his independence in an era in which streaming and video play became mainstream metrics.

Brooks announced his retirement from both recording and performing in 2000, and while he did enter an extended hiatus, a live engagement in Las Vegas in 2010 restarted his engines, leading to 2014’s Man Against Machine, accompanied by a new world tour. The lead-off track “People Loving People” was written by Lee Thomas Miller, Chris Wallin, and one of the new century’s brigade of prominent writer-producers, busbee.

In the 2010s and 2020s Brooks has gone on to record far more regularly again, including with 2016’s Gunslinger, at which stage he told The Guardian: “As an older artist, you want to reinvent but there has to be that vein in there for why people were listening to you before in the first place.”

That set was followed by Fun in 2020 and 2023’s Time Traveler, the latter part of a boxed set, The Limited Series, available only through Bass Pro Shops. It featured such guests as Kelly Clarkson (on backing vocals on “The Ship and the Bottle”) and Ronnie Dunn (“Rodeo Man”).

As his business empire expanded with his Friends In Low Places Bar & Honky Tonk in Nashville and The Big 615, the radio station he programs for his own Sevens Network at streaming platform TuneIn, no one would question that Garth Brooks has ensured a lifetime supply of friends in all places.

Listen to the All Time Greatest Country Hits playlist.