Garth Brooks has been sitting on the sidelines for 14 years. But in that time, he's been watching, listening-and waiting.
"We were at rehearsals here yesterday and with all the love in the world, man, trying not to cry the first time I sing because it's the first time you're on stage again," he said at a news conference Thursday in Rosemont. "And then at the same time I'm going down the steps to get something and I'm going, 'Damn, I feel like I was just doing this last week.'"
Dressed casually in a hoodie from Eskimo Joe's in Stillwater, Okla., and what can best be described as Dad jeans, Garth was clearly thrilled to be kicking off his 11-show residence in Chicago, a place he deemed an "obvious choice" to start his world tour.
"The crowd's very sweet here, hopefully they'll be very forgiving, because tonight's show's gonna suck," he said. "Trust me man, you want this to be the worst show of the tour, because you want it to get better every night. There's a lot of moving parts to this show, and we're all old and slow. ... But we know these people come to party."
In the 14 years since Garth's been away, the music industry has undergone huge changes in the face of technology. But instead of taking to Twitter when tickets went on sale for his Chicago stint, the singer called up country station 99.5 FM to check in throughout the day-"You are my social media," he told host Ramblin' Ray Stevens. "I haven't figured out a way to do it yet without telling you when I'm going to the bathroom." (This totally sounds like something our dads would say.) He also combated scalping by requiring that credit cards be shown upon entry.
"I haven't seen a robot with a credit card yet," he said. "For 14 years sitting on the bench and the sidelines, there's a lot of crap piling up between the artist and those people that allow them to be the artist and it's getting thicker and thicker. So it's kinda like a man-against-machine kind of feel."
But that doesn't mean Garth's not trying to adapt to the times. The conference also served as a platform to announce the release of a new digital bundle, featuring all eight of his studio albums and a 20th-anniversary edition of his "Double Live" album, as well as his upcoming album releases from this fall and in 2015. Fans can download it from Garth's website or from ghosttunes.com, a new site that allows artists to control the pricing of their albums. It's his way of letting fans access his music online while still paying the people who create it.
"[The people who run music websites] all look at me with the sweetest smile and say 'Oh Garth, music was just a victim of the Internet. It was a sacrifice. The genie is out of the bottle,'" he said. "I'm creating the genie every day. Every artist is. So we just need to protect, that's the main thing."
So about that wall of crap he mentioned earlier. Has Garth's relationship with his fans evolved because of it? He can't answer that just yet. But he does know that 40 percent of the tickets sold in Chicago were to people who "were either 5 years old or not even born yet" the last time around.
"If you've ever been to one of our concerts, the main thing is how people sing. That's it. I wanna know who knows the words out there," he said. "And these people from '96, '98, they just didn't know the singles, they do the album cuts, they do the verses, they do it all. So that's what I'm looking for tonight. ... And if all these people are singing, young and old, we've got a seriously good shot at a second half of a career, which I never thought we'd have."
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The Garth Brooks World Tour with Trisha Yearwood
Sept. 5, 6, 11, 12, 13 and 14, Allstate Arena (6920 N. Mannheim Rd., Rosemont)
Tickets: $55 at ticketmaster.com
