Back in the late ’90s, country music staple Garth Brooks introduced us to Chris Gaines, his hard-rocking alter ego “who liked fast cars and even faster women.” Initially planning to feature the character in a film called The Lamb, the 22-time ACM Award winner released the album Garth Brooks in…the Life of Chris Gaines. Despite yielding the only Top 40 hit of Brooks’ career with “Lost in You,” the album largely failed to perform commercially, and the Oklahoma native has mostly pretended that era never existed. However, Brooks again switched up genres with his KISS tribute performance at Tuesday’s (Dec. 23) 48th annual Kennedy Center Honors ceremony.
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Watch Garth Brooks Honor KISS With “Shout It Out Loud” Performance
The 2025 Kennedy Center Honors celebrated this year’s class of honorees: country legend George Strait, best-selling disco/R&B singer Gloria Gaynor, rock band KISS, British actor-comedian Michael Crawford, and Oscar-nominated actor Sylvester Stallone.
A 2020 Kennedy Center honoree, country superstar Garth Brooks took the stage during the ceremony at the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. However, he wasn’t there to honor George Strait. Instead, he performed KISS’ Top 40 single “Shout It Out Loud,” off their 1976 album Destroyer.
It wasn’t Brooks’ first time performing a Kiss song. Back in 1994, the “Unanswered Prayers” crooner made a cameo on the tribute album Kiss My Ass: Classic Kiss Regrooved. He performed “Hard Luck Woman,” the lead single from their 1976 album Rock and Roll Over.
That summer, Brooks also joined his heroes for a performance of the song on The Tonight Show With Jay Leno. The unabashed Kiss fan drew inspiration from the shock rockers for his own over-the-top live performances in the ’90s.
“The great thing about the Kennedy Center is it kind of shows you the diversity of the music that I grew up on,” Brooks said. “Getting to be part of honoring Loretta Lynn and George Jones and rock and pop acts like Billy Joel, c’mon, Gladys Knight—how cool is that? And KISS just kind of fits in that wild, diverse kind of music that we were all raised on!”
Featured image by Michael Tullberg/Getty Images
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