A little over a decade since Garth Brooks officially ended his retirement from touring – he’s released the newest edition of his popular Anthology collection. Anthology V| The First Five Years is a collection of interviews, stories, and six albums from 2014 forward when he re-emerged in Nashville with plans for an album on Sony Music Nashville and a record-breaking years-long arena tour.
In 2001, Brooks retreated to Oklahoma for more than a decade when his daughters were small to give them a normal life and raise his three girls out of the spotlight. He left the door open to relaunch his career when his daughters were out of school. However, Brooks’ wife, Trisha Yearwood, recently realized the date to return to Nashville was more up for debate than she thought.
During a conversation about Anthology V, Brooks asked Yearwood if she thought they would have returned to Nashville when they did if their youngest – Allie Colleen – hadn’t opted to attend Belmont University as Yearwood had done.
Yearwood said absolutely. Brooks was less convinced.
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Garth Brooks Might Still Be in Oklahoma If Not for Belmont University
“We were looking for colleges, and she said, ‘Hey Dad, Can I go to Belmont visit there?’” Brooks recalled Allie’s surprise request to visit the private Nashville University. “I don’t know where this came from. She hadn’t mentioned it. I had no inkling of it. So me and her came here and visited, took the tour. She loved it and decided she would go to school at Belmont.”
When Brooks’ “baby” decided she would move to Nashville for college, Brooks said he felt like her decision opened the door for him and Yearwood to come back to Music City – and for him to tour. Yearwood didn’t realize there was a chance they weren’t coming back after Allie graduated high school.
“You can’t be an entertainer and not think about entertaining,” Yearwood told Brooks. “And you can’t love music the way you love music, the way I love music, and not, we live and breathe it. And you didn’t do it very much for all the time we lived in Oklahoma. You don’t regret those decisions at all. But it’s in you. It’s who you are. And so for me, I think Allie’s decision to go to Belmont kind of gave you a way to go, ‘I can go do this.’”
Yearwood called her husband “not an empty nest guy” and said moving to Nashville softened the blow that his last child was leaving the house. This way, he got to be in the same town as her. But if she hadn’t chosen a Nashville school, would the couple still have returned to Nashville in 2014?
Trisha Yearwood Said Yes. Garth Brooks Said No.
“I believe when she went to college in the fall of 2014, wherever she went, we would’ve moved to Nashville,” Yearwood said. “She’s in college, and your job is, if you do your job right, your children fly. You want them to fly, and then you figure out what you want to do.”
Yearwood wondered why they would have sat home in Oklahoma and waited for Allie to graduate college. Brooks’ answer was simple – it’s what they did for their other two daughters.
“You want to treat them all the same,” Brooks said. “I think we’d still be living in Oklahoma. I really do.”
Yearwood called the couple’s move back to Nashville as bittersweet. She also admitted she questioned her choices when she initially moved to Oklahoma to live with Brooks.
“I thought, ‘I don’t know, what am I doing?’” she said. “But I was in love with a cowboy, so I moved to Oklahoma. Then I got entrenched in that life.”
Yearwood said the couple made lifelong friends and that she had great memories of “all those” soccer practices and games.
“As much as I loved Nashville and knew that that’s where we need to be to make the music we make, it was still hard to go back,” she said. “It was the right decision, but it was hard to do.”
Garth Brooks Offers Advice
Anthology V also delves into Brooks’ ill-fated 2014 Ireland concerts, launching the comeback tour in Chicago, and documents his career surpassing where it was when he stepped away. He talks about Ghosttunes, gives the stories behind the songs on Man Against Machine and Gunslinger, and examines his return to entertainer of the year status.
“You left at the height,” Yearwood told Brooks. “So, to come back, and that’s what a lot of the Anthology V is about is when you come back, you’re not only taking a chance moving back to Nashville. You are starting over. You’re making new music. The second time is not ever as big as the first time. Your career became bigger, and that just doesn’t happen. You had to be thinking, ‘How do you do this and make it bigger than it was before?’ It’s impossible, yet it happened.”
Brooks said: “If I could give any kind of advice without sounding like an old guy, country music is not about just labeling seven or eight things that belong in country life. It’s about how those things churn inside you.”
(Photo by Omar Vega/FilmMagic)
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