Oh Great, Garth Brooks Promises More Chris Gaines Coming
Bust out the black eyeliner and get ready to party like it’s 1999, because the G-man has promised that some new, unreleased Chris Gaines material is on the way along with a re-release of the previous stuff. During his “Inside Studio G” segment last week, Garth Brooks was fed a canned question from one of his fans about his controversial alter ego, and responded,
“When it comes to Chris Gaines, I can’t tell you anything except you’re going to have it in every format you can possibly imagine. It’s coming, even in vinyl. And, you’re going to have Chris Gaines stuff nobody’s ever heard before either. It’s all coming, but the Chris Gaines thing you just gotta handle it with kid gloves and put it together, but it’s coming. I love that project, so I’m excited.”
Chris Gaines was a fictitious emo pop character Garth Brooks debuted in 1999 on the album Garth Brooks in … The Life of Chris Gaines. The album was supposed to be the preamble to a full-blown motion picture called The Lamb where Garth would portray the dark and troubled character. They even put together a VH1 Behind The Music episode for him, and Garth hosted Saturday Night Live as Gaines.
But the idea was met with very mixed results for Garth, who at the time was a massive star in country, and commanded major attention. Though The Life of Chris Gaines went on to sell some 2 million copies—which would be astounding sales numbers these days—it was a flop by Garth standards and the motion picture project was scrapped. Chris Gaines was mothballed … at least by Garth. But the Chris Gaines episode is regularly recalled by Garth Brooks critics whenever his name is brought up.
The Chris Gaines project came at a time that Garth had absolutely dominated music, and was looking for other stimulation. In 1998, he unsuccessfully tried out for the San Diego Padres baseball farm system. When that failed, Chris Gaines became Garth’s foray into pop rock. It was shortly after Garth’s 2001 album Scarecrow that he announced his retirement entirely. He would return in 2014.
Garth’s announcement has stimulated conversation on if Chris Gaines may be hitting the comeback trail too. Maybe he is, but it’s more likely Garth is just looking for a good excuse to repackage the Chris Gaines material and give it a boost. After all, Garth Brooks is the master of selling fans the same songs and albums over and over. Like much of Garth’s music, availability is limited due to his exclusive deal with Amazon. But perhaps Chris Gaines doesn’t fall under that arrangement, and will be distributed everywhere.
We’ll see.
Mike Honcho
March 21, 2021 @ 10:38 am
The hubris of a complete narcissist. Cringe.
norrie
March 21, 2021 @ 10:41 am
FFS have we not suffered enough ?
NPC
March 21, 2021 @ 11:04 am
Chris Gaines felt like Garth’s attempt at a George Strait/Pure Country setup, but he let his ego and terrible marketing get in the way. If Garth had just been a character closer to Garth as George was to Dusty, it probably would have taken off. Instead, it just confused the public and felt hokey from the start. The most memorable part of the Chris Gaines album is how dozens of copies lined the shelves at our local Walmart, but nobody bought them… just like Windows Me a short time later.
Seak
March 21, 2021 @ 11:05 am
Gross, but hey at least he’s not calling it country
Dave F
March 21, 2021 @ 11:21 am
I actually enjoyed the Chris Gaines material. I never once considered it country, though.
Sir Adam the Great
March 21, 2021 @ 12:53 pm
Same here. The ball was dropped on the execution of the whole movie deal, but it’s a great album. I look at it as a true pop/rock album by Garth.
Dayna
March 21, 2021 @ 7:27 pm
I love Chris Gaines music! I’m so excited that he’s coming back!
Jake Cutter
March 21, 2021 @ 11:38 am
Exactly how much more “fictitious” is Chris Gaines than Garth Brooks?
NPC
March 21, 2021 @ 12:15 pm
Good point; were the cowboy hats and country shtick just an extension of his marketing chops? He sure drops both like a bad habit when it’s “Studio G” time…
stellar
March 21, 2021 @ 1:04 pm
yes
Corncaster
March 21, 2021 @ 11:52 am
I’m impressed. This is just as embarrassing now as it was in 1999. That kind of consistency is just hard to find nowadays.
Stellar
March 21, 2021 @ 11:51 pm
This comment section did not disappoint
Woogeroo
March 21, 2021 @ 12:07 pm
Unlike most folks I get that it was supposed to be a character for a movie, but what little I heard of it back then, did not flip my switches, at all.
It took him how long to finally release FUN ?
Maybe he should get down to music row and hit up the songwriters for some new material.
hoptowntiger94
March 21, 2021 @ 12:12 pm
Chris Gaines was my Garth Brooks jumping off point. Sevens was the last album I listened to by Brooks.
Spoony
March 21, 2021 @ 11:50 pm
Ditto. And last purchased.
Hank Charles
March 21, 2021 @ 12:27 pm
If Garth ever wonders why the running Tom Segura joke about him being a serial killer seems to have an unlimited shelf life, this is exactly why.
stellar
March 21, 2021 @ 1:02 pm
what the actual fuck
Hey Arnold
March 21, 2021 @ 1:19 pm
Sounds like F.U.N.
Let me spell it out for you..
F is for Fans that buy all of Garth’s crap exclusively from the Walmarts.
U is for Undefined release dates.
N is for his Needy ego
Down here deep Inside Studio G. 🎵🎶
You can say he’s Shameless, perhaps even Shallow. And i ain’t referring to his discography.
NPC
March 21, 2021 @ 7:08 pm
The rerelease of Chris Gaines may have been better as an Unanswered Prayer… definitely wish it wasn’t More Than A Memory… it would be better buried on the Beaches of Cheyenne… okay, I’m done.
Bonus points for the SpongeBob reference! Plankton’s version would fit Chris Gaines perfectly…
glendel
March 21, 2021 @ 1:57 pm
1999: separates from Sandy; releases Chris Gaines album.
2001: divorce from Sandy complete; releases Scarecrow album and retires.
Were these attempts to decrease income, in order to decrease maintenance and child support??
Ang
March 21, 2021 @ 2:17 pm
That’s just stupid.
glendel
March 21, 2021 @ 6:10 pm
Ang, if I had a dollar for every time a divorcing husband did something “stupid” or counter-intuitive in order to decrease income in order to decrease maintenance and child support, I could afford front row tix to Garth’s next live show.
Ang
March 21, 2021 @ 7:06 pm
Divorcing women do the same.
CountryKnight
August 1, 2022 @ 9:46 am
Well yeah, husbands are completely screwed by the family court system. They have to perform tricks in order to survive financially.
NattyBumpo
March 21, 2021 @ 2:04 pm
I was gifted with pretty good radar and picked up on his gimmicky ways back in the very early 90’s. To his credit though he pulls this off as well as anyone has ever done. Very few people see through the games and the ego. When the day comes that his luster has warn off get ready for seeing one the biggest meltdowns you’ve ever witnessed as he will not know what to do and will do anything for a headline. It will be priceless.
strait county 81
March 21, 2021 @ 2:30 pm
I’d rather hookup with my ex again instead of listening to this.
Stellar
March 22, 2021 @ 12:08 am
“I’d rather drink a hot beer” etc etc
Sad man
March 23, 2021 @ 10:39 am
There are actually hot beers. A few. And they’re supposedly good.
Keepin it Country
March 24, 2021 @ 7:21 pm
At leat that would be FUN, Lol
Lex
March 21, 2021 @ 2:32 pm
I enjoyed the Chris Gaines music. Unlike so many others, I got that he was just trying something new for a bit. The way a lot of his fans reacted was ridiculous! It wasn’t supposed to be country. And he wasn’t leaving country music. God forbid someone try different things!
Country Music Disciple
March 21, 2021 @ 3:21 pm
I also really enjoyed the Chris Gaines album especially It Don’t Matter to the Sun and Main Street. But the look he came up with for that album was just awful and cringe-worthy. I think it would have been more successful and the movie might have been made if not for that dumb image he created for the character.
Acca Dacca
March 21, 2021 @ 3:49 pm
I’m a bit at a loss for where this is even coming from. The Chris Gaines album was noticeably absent every time that Garth has reissued his material. As far as I know, it’s been exempt from the streaming deals as well, so the only way to listen is to track down one of those original discs. The unspoken idea there seemed to be that Garth was ignoring it due to the reaction and largely didn’t consider it part of his legacy.
What changed? 20 years is obviously more than enough time to change your mind, but I’m more interested in why that has happened? Did Garth discover that his fans really love the album? Apparently it’s Trisha Yearwood’s “favorite” Garth album. Did the last round of reissues not sell very well, causing him to try an album that HASN’T been repackaged 15 times? Garth’s world is so far removed from the one the rest of us inhabit that I really don’t think he’s as embarrassed of the whole stint as he probably should be. But the fact that he largely ignored Chris Gaines for 20 years means he was at least somewhat aware, even if the only thing that he noticed were the poor sales.
I’d genuinely like to know why Garth is suddenly pulling a 180 with this.
Sam Cody
March 21, 2021 @ 3:55 pm
Anyone gotta a pasture we can put him out on?
Jeff Perkins
March 21, 2021 @ 4:59 pm
It’ll never happen. Garth has disowned this. The videos, NBC special, and SNL appearance have all but disappeared from the net. VH1 is still out there, as is Jon Stewart’s Daily Show report.
Side note: “Lost in You” reached #5 on Billboard’s singles chart largely because it was released at 49 cents when most singles from that era were $2.99. It was yet another example of Garthy Boy hedging his bets.
Erik North
March 21, 2021 @ 5:24 pm
While I am as frustrated as anyone by the antics that “Garth Vader” has been pulling for the last twenty years or so, the man is a businessman, first and foremost; and I would think that should have been evident after thirty-plus years.
But this is a process that had already been going on, even if at such a slow rate that nobody really noticed until it was all over, since at least 1974, which is when Linda Ronstadt, back in 1977, went on record as saying: “There isn’t any country left. When they closed the Grand Ole Opry, and I know they didn’t really close it, but when they moved it out to an amusement park, that sort of officially closed an era.”
The era that Linda talked about was the half-century prior to that when country music reflected a rural way of life. Then with the Opry’s moving out of the Ryman, it morphed into a lifestyle. In the Eighties, it had become an industry. And starting with Garth’s bursting onto the scene in 1989, not just him, but almost everybody else that followed him in, armed with a business degree to go along with it, there came the process in which, by the turn of the millennium, country music had finally become an almost singularly corporate-driven, arguably cold-blooded, business, in which the music itself was mere wallpaper or, to use another colloquialism of Linda’s, “mall crawler music”, and image, awards, and money just drowned out everything else.
I’m not in any way defending Garth Brooks or any of his antics. But he is arguably the natural climax of something that had already been going on in Nashville since 1974; and we’re all living with the end result (IMHO).
Wayne
March 21, 2021 @ 6:21 pm
The ONLY positive about this is maybe he will again retire! Take his quivering lips and fake tears and just go away.
Jim L.
March 21, 2021 @ 6:32 pm
I’d rather have a return of Tony Clifton.
albert
March 21, 2021 @ 10:27 pm
I’m not a fan of GB, the ‘person” ….though I like some of his music
I AM a fan , however , of Chris Gaines mostly because of the songwriting on the album and the sparse but effective production. It wasn’t a COUNTRY record by an stretch ….back then . today it sounds more country than ”country” radio .I’d look forward to a CG album more than I would a GB album .i wouldn’t however , attend a CG concert for fear of GB appearing and I cannot stand watching GB strut around a stage soaking up the fan worship .
Jimmie Hughes
March 22, 2021 @ 5:31 am
Complete with his “aw shucks” bit that grew tiresome twenty-five years ago!
Jimmie Hughes
March 22, 2021 @ 5:25 am
I’ve always maintained that had he just slapped his own name and likeness on that album, it would have been just as huge a hit as the rest of his albums. I think people were just confused by the presentation. The album wasn’t great, by any stretch, but was far from being that out of the ordinary for him musically.
Country When Country Wasn't Cool
March 22, 2021 @ 9:25 am
He’s probably working on a second Legacy vinyl box set, so naturally he would include that album. Also, he is overdue for Anthology Part 2 with all the extra demos. Part 3 (all live albums) was already released in 2019.
Luckyoldsun
March 22, 2021 @ 10:16 am
Then, there’s the theory that Chris Gaines is the actual person–a middling, going-nowhere Australian singer songwriter–and “Garth Brooks” is his creation/ alter-ego of a Oklahoman cowboy/country singer–which turned out to be successful beyond Chris’s wildest dreams.
Nice to see Chris making a rare appearance as himself, again.
robbushblog
March 22, 2021 @ 11:46 am
He’d be better off tryin’ to rope the wind.
Rickie Jon Connors
March 22, 2021 @ 3:38 pm
Garth has picked the wrong year to revive his Marylin Manson look.
Fourth Blessed Gorge
March 22, 2021 @ 7:36 pm
So Chris Gaines…Garth Brooks’ answer to “Music From The Elder”…is due for a nostalgic hindsight re-assessment already, eh? “Hey! Remember that bizarre artistic choice no one cared for? Well, maybe it was actually good after all!”…um no, I don’t think so. “Chris Gaines” is right up there with “Elder” and “Lulu” in the Artists Who Got Way Too Full Of Themselves Hall Of Fame. While I was never a fan, Garth never really bothered or perturbed me in any specific way, but jeepers, Chris Gaines was a blunder and a half. You goth up the biggest country star of the era and give him a soul patch no one could possibly stomach, he might as well have dressed in drag and gone on tour as Gayle Brooks. At least that might have been funny.
luiz
March 24, 2021 @ 9:32 am
Chris Gaines´s album are way better than the last GB album.
Wendi Wonderly
March 25, 2021 @ 8:47 pm
Should Garth brooks have made a pop record?Sure anybody who is anybody has. If an uncompromising artist like Emmy Lou Harris can record on the radio there’s room for Garth. The problem was by that time Garth brooks was so overblown and overexposed he didn’t know what his audience wanted from him much less what he wanted from himself. The whole bloated project just collapsed under its own weight. He and Trisha year wood are still flogging that dead horse trying to convince us it was all a good idea. Give it a rest
Roscoe Brown
March 26, 2021 @ 7:16 pm
Dear god…
Wendi Wonderly
March 27, 2021 @ 12:50 pm
Garth brooks as Chris Gaines looks like he won 3rd place in the Nikki six lookalike contest at the county fair. Same goes for Tyler Hubbard and Scott stamp with worse music. Garth keeps flogging a dead horse trying to convince us that Chris Gaines was a good idea. He reminds me of mick fleet wood endlessly trying to sell fleet wood macs endless reboots. They’ve both become as scripted as tag team wrestling and just about as relevant