Review: '10th Annual Austin City Limits Hall Of Fame Honoring Garth Brooks'

Every musician whose most commercially successful releases are thirty to forty years old eventually finds themselves at a career crossroads. Radio has changed enough that you likely don't get much airplay with your new releases. And figuring out a way to remain creative and energized when fewer people are buying your latest albums can frustrate even the most ambitious of artists.

Typically, one of two things happens at this point. You either just become an oldies act and spend your days touring and perhaps releasing the occasional live album. Or you continue to tour and play your hits, while also releasing new music that wouldn't sound out of place in your classic song catalog. Even if the newer stuff doesn't get as much attention as it deserves.

Garth Brooks has taken a different path, continuing to tour behind the hits while releasing a string of albums that he has ensured only his fans would buy. Brooks has taken fan service to an entirely different level, figuring out what seems to be an endless number of ways to extract a few more dollars from fans or companies who want to be associated with him. Even if that means his classic music is inaccessible to generations of potential new fans. 

According to the Recording Industry Association of America, Brooks is the top-selling solo artist of all time with 157 million certified albums in the US.  He has had nine #1 albums on the  Billboard 200 and had 19 #1 hits on  Billboard's U.S. Hot Country Songs. And yet, if you're under the age of 30, you've likely barely heard his music, unless you listen to a classic country station or have an older family member who still pulls out the old Brooks CDs every so often.

Since the beginning of the streaming music era, Brooks has been critical of the streaming business. So much so that in 2014, he launched the streaming service GhostTunes, which made his music available for digital purchase for the first time. Although the only way you could stream his music was after you bought a digital copy. That remained the only place to purchase digital copies of his music until 2017, when Brooks signed a long-term deal with Amazon that rolled GhostTunes into Amazon Unlimited Music. It also provided Brooks the opportunity to produce several exclusive Prime Video TV projects, including one that was essentially a multi-episode informercial for his Nashville nightclub.

Things weren't much easier if you wanted to purchase physical media copies of Brooks' most recent albums, because the singer signed a series of exclusive deals with retailers to sell box sets that included his latest album, along with a series of older releases most fans already owned. Yes, you could buy the new album separately. But nearly all of the promotion was focused on the special releases at Walmart or Target or Bass Pro Shops.

The result was that Brooks has become a strange hybrid of a musical artist. He releases solid albums that almost no one outside his fanbase heard, and to this day the only place you can stream his music is on Amazon.

The 10th Annual Austin City Limits Hall Of Fame Honoring Garth Brooks premieres on PBS this weekend and it provides a perfect showcase for where Brooks is at musically in 2024 (which is when the concert was recorded). The first 15 minutes or so of the one-hour special includes comments from the longtime head of Austin City Limits, along with some from wife/singer Trisha Yearwood (she's a fan) and Brooks himself. As you might imagine, the interview snippets aren't especially enlightening, although I have to give Brooks props for wearing both a T-shirt and hat that promote some of his various businesses.

The final 45 minutes is filled with parts of his live concert for the event and he works his way through a number of his early hits: "The Dance," "Two Of A Kind, Workin' On A Full House," "The River," "We Shall Be Free," and "Much Too Young (To Feel This Damn Old," and Brooks sounds nearly as strong as his did in his prime hitmaking days. He's always been influenced by the classic rock era and his concerts have leaned into that big, explosive approach to entertainment.

But watching this performance, you can also see the tells that creep into anyone's performance after they've been singing the same songs for decades. He's still doing a variation of the "secret third verse" spiel for "Friends In Low Places," which he has been doing for at least thirty years. He had an acoustic guitar strapped around his neck, but only intermittently strummed it a few times and often seem to forget he had it on at all. And perhaps it's because he's accustomed to playing stadiums, but his performance included nearly as many examples of him shouting "Yeah!" as late-era Michael Jackson used to include singing "Oooh Hoo" in his performances. And the less that is said about his weird pantomiming during one song, the better.

So I find myself struggling to accurately define my visceral reaction to 10th Annual Austin City Limits Hall Of Fame Honoring Garth Brooks. I continue to be a big fan of his work and if I had been in the studio for his live performance, I would have enjoyed the hell out of it. But from a viewer's perspective, I ended up feeling like the hour was more fan service than a compelling performance. Which is disappointing, because I know that if Garth Brooks could get out of his own way, he could still build a modern-day younger audience from the millions of under thirtysomethings that look back on the 1990s with pop culture nostalgia.