Anyone who knows Garth Brooks understands he means what he says. And if his voice becomes a little bit quieter when he’s talking, it’s time to lean in. Brooks is the consummate entertainer, songwriter, storyteller, singer, dad, husband, and friend. He’s the unifying communicator, the open book and the closed shop. Brooks is the first call, the decision maker, the one who shows up and always remembers every face and name.
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The Anthology IV: Going Home, available now, is a bound and profoundly personal collection of 208 photos, stories, and six discs of music from the 14 years when he did just that –retired and went home. Going Home is the latest offering in The Anthology series, including Part I: The First Five Years, Part II: The Next Five Years, and Part III: LIVE. And while the other volumes offer insightful stories about his life and career, Going Home reflects what made Brooks the man he is today.
Going Home pulls the curtain back on his 100 Million Party-turned-retirement announcement, learning to parent his three daughters, integrating Trisha Yearwood into his Oklahoma household, 9-11 in New York City, recording songs, returning to the stage, and more.
Brooks will host an Amazon Live event on Friday, December 6, at 6 p.m. central/7 eastern from the stage at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, where he just kicked off his final residency shows before Christmas.
Six Life Experiences to Share with Garth Brooks From The Anthology IV: Going Home:
The Announcement: The music community thought Brooks had planned a formal gala to celebrate his 100 million albums sold. He did that. But on October 26, 2000, he also announced his retirement. Going Home starts there. Even his closest friends and colleagues didn’t know what he was planning, and this Anthology reveals what he was thinking about in the moment.
His big reveal changed his life and the face of country music, but he wouldn’t change any of it.
“Those fourteen years of my life are the ones I’ll always remember,” Brooks wrote. “It was life at its best. I learned to be a dad, my girls got to know me, and I’d never for one second regret walking away from a career in order to find all of that.”
Eat Like a Dog with Trisha Yearwood:
When Brooks told his three daughters that Yearwood was coming to Oklahoma in 2001, he had 50/50 custody with his ex-wife. He promised his ex-wife that he would sleep on the couch if Yearwood slept at his house while his daughters were there for the night. He says he spent many nights on the couch.
His daughters knew of Yearwood because she and Brooks had toured together. Still, when Yearwood first visited their two-bedroom yellow house in Oklahoma, Brooks hoped to impress her with a good meal. His daughters had a different idea. They wanted to do their Eat Like a Dog Night. Brooks was horrified but was outvoted three-to-one. That meant he cooked some pasta and dressed it in mild sauce. When he served it, everyone threw their forks over their shoulders and dove into the bowl face first.
He noticed that Yearwood and his daughter, August, didn’t plow in. Brooks watched as August pushed Yearwood’s head into the bowl. Without missing a beat, Yearwood put August’s face in the pasta, and he knew everything was going to be fine.
Garth Brooks’ The Lost Recordings:
While Brooks found a new life in Oklahoma with Yearwood and his daughters, finding himself in a recording studio wasn’t part of the plan.
However, that changed when Walmart executives made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. Walmart wanted to release an exclusive boxed set with songs from his vaults. Garth Brooks: The Limited Series, which contained Sevens, Scarecrow, Double Live, and The Lost Sessions, a collection of previously unreleased recordings from 1997 to 2001, was the result.
Brooks even worked out a way to parent his daughters in Oklahoma and work in Nashville simultaneously. The Anthology says Brooks would fix the girls’ breakfast and take them to school, fly on a Walmart corporate jet to Nashville and work in the studio, fly back in time to pick the girls up from school, then do soccer, dinner, homework, and bedtime.
The Anthology also details how Walmart became responsible for Brooks owning his masters years before he was due the freedom.
Building Bridges with Garth Brooks:
Brooks was the man who built the bridge between arena rock and country music. In Oklahoma, he was the dad who built a compression bridge with his three daughters strong enough to hold a dump truck.
Yearwood and her friends did annual 60-mile three-day walks for breast cancer, and they needed to train. Yearwood would come home with muddy feet, and given Brooks obsession with bridges and teaching his daughters to be inquisitive, well-rounded, strong women, he decided they’d build her a bridge over the mud. He taught the girls to pour concrete, torch cut metal and work with nail guns while they completed the 56-foot structure.
Stories Behind the Songs:
There are plenty of stories behind Brooks’ private life in this book, but there are pages and pages of stories that offer windows into his unparalleled songwriting brain and creativity. There’s a reason Garth Brooks is GARTH BROOKS.
However, when Brooks got ready to revisit country radio with a song, he didn’t lead with one of his own. He chose “More Than a Memory,” which debuted on top of the charts, breaking all kinds of records. Lee Brice, Billy Montana and Kyle Jacobs, wrote “More Than a Memory,” which Brooks teamed with Scott Borchetta to release. Borchetta, Brooks and the songs’ writers weigh in on what it was like creating the track, watching it succeed and making history.
Garth Brooks Returns to the Stage:
Brooks started dipping his cowboy boot back into the performing waters a little at a time. He began with benefit concerts, then moved to his first Las Vegas residency at The Wynn. He had to construct a way to be present for his daughters but also be on stage. He conquered that, and when his youngest daughter, Allie, said she wanted to move to Nashville and go to Belmont University as Yearwood had, it opened up a new set of ideas for Brooks that put him on the path to today.
(Photo by PG/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images)
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