Country Music Blog: Garth Brooks

In the hours after Eddy Arnold's death early Thursday morning, country music stars and everyday working class people from Nashville have been sharing their stories of the Country Music Hall of Fame member. And if there's one underlying theme, it's the kindness and decency he showed to everyone he had contact with long after he had anything to prove or anyone to impress.

He was a superstar long before anyone ever coined the expression, but he didn't act like a superstar and you certainly wouldn't pick him out of a crowd as being a multi-millionaire. Up until a few months ago, he could be seen most weekdays having lunch at a modest meat-and-three restaurant south of downtown Nashville. Read more...

Thanks to Garth Brooks, the Second Harvest Food Bank is now 20,000 cans richer. He had a tractor trailer deliver the good stuff to Knoxville, Tenn.
The Los Angeles Times thinks the 5 percent of people who chose George Jones over Carrie Underwood at Stagecoach got a taste of nuance and lyrics the newbies can't match.

Did Trisha Yearwood cheat in high school? You bet, but only on her yearbook entry.

Naomi Watts tell People she knows Mrs. Keith Urban will be a great mum.

Get a front row "seat" to Lady Antebellum's concert on DeepRockDrive.com. It's on May 16 at 9 p.m. ET and is free for the streaming.

There's a new book out -- called How'd You Score That Gig? -- all about people with cool jobs. I know mine's pretty cool. Because when I'm at a concert, taking notes, someone inevitably tells me so. And, yes, it is better than covering, say, school board meetings. But still, it's not all backstage passes and comped tickets. Some nights are downright tough.

What concert-goers don't see is the over-analyzing I put into every word after the show. I have editors who expect that. And I have deadlines and word counts, too. (So to all you folks who berate me for not including the artist's six-minute speech on voting in the primary, that's why.) And concert reviews need to be less of a litany of events and more of a summary the night. You can't just start every sentence with "And then" and end every sentence with "which was awesome!" I also need to be very thorough.

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If there's a downside to this job, it's the anonymity. Readers can get a sense of who I am through my blogs, but I know nothing about them. All I know is what I read in their comments and in the emails they sometimes send. But really, all those tell me is how they feel about that one particular topic. Like how much they love Dolly Parton, or how much they hate my opinion of whatever I've written about. So I'm going to ask a few questions. Okay, more like ten. And if y'all answer them in the comments section, we'll all get to know each other better. I'll go first.

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"Blue Kentucky highway..." That's all it took for me to know Clint Black's "Nothing But the Taillights" was starting to play on the radio last night. My kids were amazed that I could guess a song that quick. I wasn't, because I grew up religiously watching the ‘70s game show, Name That Tune with my best friend Katy. I learned to be quite good, and country music has helped me hone my skills even more. Mostly because I've listened to it for so long, it's as if every song is embedded in my brain from its first few notes.

I'm especially good when a song starts immediately with a lyric. Like when I hear, "He drinks, he smokes," I know Shania Twain's about to break into "I Ain't No Quitter." Or on newer songs, when I hear "I've got a cold beer," I know Ashton Shepherd's about to tell me she's gonna set herself free in "Takin' Off This Pain." But it's cool to get to the point where you can do it instrumentally, too. I hear two seconds of a music box, and I know it's Brad Paisley's "I'm Still a Guy." Or two seconds of a solitary violin, and I know it's Trace Adkin's "Arlington."

But Garth Brooks is still the one to beat. By having a distinctive beginning on one of his early singles, he cemented his status as the guy who values a powerful intro. He can send 20,000 people into a frenzy by just plucking the first four notes of that A chord, and then stopping for the applause. Everyone knows that intro to "Friends in Low Places," just like everybody knows that a really good country song hooks you from the start.

It took Garth Brooks to show me why country music matters so much to so many women my age. In his new single, "Midnight Sun," he goes on about how a cowboy's work just ain't never done, which I'm pretty sure he lifted directly from the old saying that a woman's work is never done (while a man may work from sun to sun). That's what makes this tune come full circle for me. It proves yet again that country gets me, and can constantly reinvent ways to demonstrate that through song.

Musically, the song is classic Garth. And lyrically, it doesn't cover much new territory in its let's-go-out-drinkin'-after-work theme. But to a mother, whose work just ain't never done either, the words can show us all some love if you think on mom terms. Like when Garth's singing about baling his last bale of hay, moms know that feeling. It's the one you get when you've just made the last PB&J of the day. Later, when Garth says that 8:00 comes twice a day, my mind immediately goes to my two 8:00s: breakfast and bathtime. And when he says to fire up that old pick-up truck, I picture myself loading everyone into the minivan. In the chorus, I can't help singing, "A mother's work just ain't never done, in the land of the midnight sun." (For a cowboy, that midnight sun has more to do with partying all night than getting up with a fussy baby all night, but again, the parallels just keep coming.)

Garth's last release, a collaboration with Huey Lewis on "Workin' for a Livin'," peaked at 19, and it's clearly not his best work. This new one is poised to climb much higher, making it obvious that Garth should stick with what he knows: cowboys and parenting.

I saw Trisha Yearwood live this weekend for the first time. And all I could think was, "Why did I wait 17 years for this?" I've loved her since the first time I heard "She's in Love With the Boy." Who hasn't, really? Back then, I had no idea what a hayseed plowboy was, but I didn't need to. She could've been singing some horrible hip-hop song and it still would've had her signature powerful, beautiful sound.

It's a sound she usually puts to good use on the soul-searching ballads and bittersweet downers. But now that she's blissfully happy -- I'm guessing because knows the freeing feeling of turning 40 and because she married Garth Brooks -- she had a few not-so-depressing songs in her set list. "Cowboys Are My Weakness" is classic country, not just in the lyrical adventure of falling for a guy who brings you fresh daisies in a coffee can, but in the way she embellishes every word, with falsettos and growls and runs that prove nobody else could ever do that song justice. Ever.

So while I'm bummed that it took me this long to get to one of her shows, I feel like my love of country has kind of come full circle. The country of the early 90s is the music that shaped the presets on my car stereo and fueled my endless CD purchases. It's easy to get caught up in the flurry of activity around the hot-right-now artists, with all the spins and promos and buzz that Nashville serves up. A concert like Yearwood's, though, brings you back to the moment you fell in love with the actual music. One of the songs she played off her newest album was called "Drown Me." It's about wanting to be drowned equally in alcohol and honesty. And after I left her show, I could totally relate. Because I felt liked she didn't just pour the pure country music on me. She drowned me.

What's Tim McGraw gonna do with a 50,000-square-foot warehouse? Could the north Nashville property he rented for a month be a practice hall? Or just storage space for his upcoming tour merchandise?

Get some good Georgia cooking no matter where you live. Trisha Yearwood's new cookbook, with foreword by her husband Garth Brooks, is set for delivery in early April.

No, it's not an April Fool's stunt. Strait Country, the George Strait radio station, debuts on XM satellite on April 1.

Want some live music with that strip steak? Eddie Montgomery is planning to build a steakhouse and entertainment complex in the bluegrass region of Kentucky.

It's not quite official yet. But to unofficially kick off the Democratic National Convention, Tim McGraw, Faith Hill and Sheryl Crow are unofficially expected to play at an environmental concert in Denver. Unofficially, of course.

Ever since I first heard "This is Me You're Talking To" on Trisha Yearwood's new album, I could hardly wait to hear it live - and I finally got the chance on Wednesday night (March 5) during a private show in Nashville. CMT Radio Network and her label, Big Machine Records, sponsored the showcase, and since it was an industry thing, there was a lot of chatter in the background. But not from me. I was rapt. When she brought out Garth Brooks for a few songs, he said, "It's hard to follow the greatest voice in country music."

One of my friends had never heard Trisha perform before, and she loves that new song just as much as I do. She couldn't believe how those powerful notes come just as naturally as breathing when Trisha sings. It's true - she doesn't have her hands flying everywhere when she nails that high note, and she does make it look easy. (Check out the video above to see what I mean.) The new song may not end up being one of her biggest hits, but I'm pretty sure I'll be listening to it for many years to come - kind of like my fondness for Faith Hill's "Let Me Let Go" and Martina McBride's "Phones are Ringing All Over Town."

Since we're in the midst of Country Radio Seminar, everybody is looking for a hit, as well as the artist who's going to deliver it. Trisha's had so many hits over the years, and she told the crowd that she's made it a point to never sing a song that she didn't love. She said the worst thing would be to record a song that she hated, just because it sounded like a hit, and then she'd have to sing a song she hated for the rest of her life. "The second-worst thing," she added, "would be to record something that sounded like a hit that you hate - and then it isn't, and you sold out for no reason."

That's good wisdom. Here's my favorite thing she said all night: "Sometimes you don't know why you like a song. It just sticks with you." I've written about music for 10+ years now, and it's refreshing to realize that you don't need to fully understand why you're in love with a song. But when Trisha's singing it, that goes a long way toward explaining it.

Sure, some people will look at just-announced nominations for the 2008 CMT Music Awards and insist that the future of country music -- and maybe Western civilization -- is coming to an end because the list includes Robert Plant, Bon Jovi, Huey Lewis and The Eagles.

Those first three may be relative newcomers to the wide world of country music, but the Eagles have exhibited a strong country influence throughout their career. Think back to their first charted single -- 1972's "Take It Easy." It never made it to the country chart, but it sure contained more banjo that most of the No. 1 country singles that year, including Jerry Lee Lewis' "Chantilly Lace," Ray Price's "She's Got to Be a Saint" and Donna Fargo's "Funny Face" and "The Happiest Girl in the Whole U.S.A."

The Eagles made the CMT nominations list for "How Long," a song that reached No. 23 on Billboard's country singles chart. Another nominee -- Bon Jovi's "(You Want To) Make a Memory" -- didn't do quite as well at radio, but it also received substantial airplay. Bon Jovi also picked up another nomination for "Till We Ain't Strangers Anymore," a song and video with LeAnn Rimes.

And then there's Huey Lewis, who's nominated simply because Garth Brooks recorded one of his songs, "Workin' for a Livin'," and later invited him to appear in the video. And what about Robert Plant? The Led Zeppelin vocalist is nominated for his video with Alison Krauss, "Gone, Gone, Gone (Done Moved On)."

Substantial promotional effort was involved in marketing the Eagles and Bon Jovi to the country audience, but that's simply part of the music industry machinery. I can't imagine that either group sat down and said, "Let's see what we can do to pander to the country audience." I'm not a huge fan of either band, but both acts have too much artistic integrity -- and money -- to resort to that. While it's impossible to predict what Robert Plant will do in the future, he still seems to be guided by a true artistic muse. He may do another acoustic-oriented album, such as the one he recorded with Krauss, or maybe he'll do something else. Rest assured, he's not trying to take over country music.

I might suggest that these occasional rock elements help widen the scope of country music without posing any serious danger to the genre's future. The real danger, I think, has more to do with record labels signing too many generic-sounding mainstream artists who are devoid of any genuine artistic vision. That's a trend that should scare the hell out of any true country fan.