On October 26, 2000, Capitol Records had a celebration planned in Nashville. Garth Brooks had sold 100 million albums. Before the party, Garth Brooks sat down in front of reporters and told them he was retiring.
He said he would put out one more album and then step away. His three daughters, Taylor, August and Allie, were 8, 6 and 4 years old. “I have asked my wife to be father and mother long enough,” he said that day.
Fans heard it as a superstar quitting at the top. For Garth, it was a promise he was already late in keeping.
A promise made in 1992
Taylor, his oldest, was born in 1992. Years later, Garth Brooks told The Tennessean what he said to her as a baby: “Look, by the time you’re six years old, that’s when school starts, I’ll be done.” Then he added, “I missed it by two years.”
Those two years were heavy ones. His mother, Colleen Carroll Brooks, a 1950s country singer who had been his biggest fan, died of throat cancer in August 1999. His marriage to Sandy Mahl, whom he had married in 1986, was ending. Divorce papers were filed within weeks of the retirement announcement, and the divorce became final in 2001.
Garth later explained why the divorce changed everything about the road. While he toured, Sandy had been the one telling the girls their father loved them, that he was just working and would be home soon.
“Well, I didn’t have anybody to do that anymore.” — Garth Brooks, to The Tennessean, 2019
“There was a lot of real life kind of hitting me,” he said of that stretch.
Six o’clock, every day
Garth Brooks and Sandy both raised the girls in Oklahoma, near Tulsa. They built their lives around one simple routine. With few exceptions, every day at 6 p.m., the girls changed houses. The parent who had not had them overnight picked them up the next morning and drove them to school.
“They saw both their parents in the morning and both their parents in the evening, and for 14 years. That was how we ran it, because we knew it was right for those kids.”
He did not vanish completely. He played a handful of charity shows, recorded a project for Walmart in 2005, the same year he married Trisha Yearwood, and sang at President Obama’s inaugural celebration in January 2009. But there were no tours, and the girls’ calendar came first.
The casino owner who bought him a jet
In 2009, Steve Wynn wanted Garth Brooks for his Encore Theatre in Las Vegas. Garth had no intention of saying yes. By his own account, he took the meeting mainly because he hoped Wynn would donate to his charity foundation.
Garth made it clear that nothing could take him away from his daughters. By his account, the first thing Wynn said back was, “We’re going to have to get you your own plane.” Garth looked at Trisha and said, “This guy is serious.”
When they announced the deal on October 15, 2009, Garth joked, “I told him he couldn’t afford me. I was wrong.” Wynn put it plainly: “I had to buy him a jet plane.” The plan was four solo acoustic shows on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, then straight home to Oklahoma. Dates were released a few months at a time so they could be fitted around school and the girls’ activities, and Garth said he would make no new music until his youngest was on her way to college.
Before he agreed, he took it to the family. He told the Los Angeles Times that when he explained the offer, the girls just looked at each other. Then Taylor asked, “Can we go?”
In the same interview, he described himself as “halfway through” what he had retired to do, and said the second half might matter even more than the first. The residency ran until January 2014.
When the youngest left home
As the girls finished high school one by one, the house got quiet, and Garth Brooks struggled with it. It was Trisha Yearwood who suggested he think about touring again. He admitted the idea terrified him.
Allie Colleen, who carries her late grandmother’s name, graduated in 2014 and chose Belmont University in Nashville, Trisha’s old school. Garth has since said he believes that if Allie had picked a college elsewhere, he and Trisha might still be living in Oklahoma.
On July 10, 2014, he announced a new record deal and a world tour. “Scared? Yes. Old? Yes,” he told reporters. On September 4, 2014, at the Allstate Arena outside Chicago, Garth Brooks walked onto an arena stage to open his first tour since the 1990s, with Trisha beside him.
A few months later, he told NPR how he saw those quiet years. “Greatest gift I’ve ever been given was being able to afford the time off to watch my babies grow.”