Garth Brooks has long been a vocal advocate for inclusivity in country music, words he’s putting into action with his new global country radio station, The Big 615.
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On Thursday (June 15), Brooks launched the station on the Sevens Network via TuneIn Radio, a digital platform that streams to more than 100 countries, allowing country music to touch the ears of people around the world. During a press conference with members of the Nashville media, Brooks described the station, and genre at large, as a “family.”
“I think it means who you’re with, who you can lean on, that’s what family is,” Brooks told American Songwriter and other media. “Family sometimes isn’t blood. Sometimes your closest family members are not blood.”
Brooks compares the station to his forthcoming bar, Friends in Low Places, on Broadway in downtown Nashville, which he calls a “church” where people can gather and share life stories in hopes of creating a compassionate ripple effect.
“It’s supposed to be a place where you can come to share your problems, share your laughs, we got a chance to shrink,” he explains of how the bar’s mission connects to the radio station’s. “Everyone listening to the same station, and that station tells stories of stuff in their life that somebody in Singapore goes, ‘That’s my life.’ But in a different…city, the story is still the same in my life. You shrink this world and hopefully, you get a better chance of us not killing each other so much and loving each other more.”
The Big 615 bucks country radio industry norms by playing deep cuts as well as the hits, in addition to playing female artists back-to-back.
“I want to hear new stuff from George Strait, I want to hear it right next to Luke Combs,” Brooks said at the press conference. “The chance we have here with a global conversation is to spread love, spread family. That’s what it’s all about. If we made this world smaller through music, then hopefully we can understand each other and fight less. So this is a good chance for us to do something really good.”
Photo by Martyn Goodacre/Getty Images
