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Garth Brooks, dad, returns to being Garth Brooks, super-entertainer

Garth Brooks spent 13 away from country music to raise his daughters. Now he returns with a tour and new album.
(Armando L. Sanchez / Chicago Tribune)
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There were times, Garth Brooks will confess now, when he second-guessed his decision to forsake the life of a country music star to be a stay-at-home dad to his three daughters.

Instead of hustling his kids into a cold car on a freezing winter evening in Owasso, Okla., to get to a school open house on time, for example, Brooks knew he could be standing center stage in a warm arena somewhere with 15,000 people screaming his name and shouting how much they love him.

“Every parent at some point goes, ‘Screw this, I could be …’,” he said laughing, his voice trailing off to let the listener fill in the alternative. “But you chose to become a parent. Those kids didn’t choose to become kids. You chose that, and it’s a great honor to get to be responsible for how they turn out.”

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So the thought of his other life as one of the biggest pop stars in the world during his heyday in the 1990s would usually vanish as quickly as it surfaced.

“That’s simply because the only thing greater than playing music,” Brooks said, “is raising kids.”

Brooks is back now, performing concerts after a self-imposed 13-year exile from touring, with plans to release a new album Nov. 11.

Earlier this month, he spoke backstage at Allstate Arena near Chicago. Arriving in a black SUV with his wife and tour mate, singer Trisha Yearwood, Brooks was still pumped from the night before, when he spent a solid 21/2 hours singing, often at the top of his lungs, playing guitar and racing around the arena’s stage, deliriously reveling in the deafening roar from the fans.

It was just past noon, and Brooks was preparing for his next show later that night. A baseball cap was in his hand, revealing the thinning, graying hair it usually covers. He wore a stylish, comfortably baggy hoodie and satiny black gym shorts that extended past his knees.

Professionally, Brooks spent most of the 1990s on top of the world. He scored eight No. 1 albums — not just on Billboard’s country album ranking, but on the overall pop album chart. Thirteen of his albums earned multi-platinum awards from the Recording Industry Assn. of America, six topping sales of 10 million copies each.

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Personally, things weren’t so rosy. His mother, Colleen, died of cancer in 1999, and in 2000 he and his wife of 14 years, Sandy Mahl, divorced. That one-two punch of personal losses prompted him to reevaluate his priorities. The result?

In 2001, he put his career on the back burner to devote himself full time to raising his daughters: Taylor (who was 9 at the time), August (then 7) and Allie (then 5). His well-publicized promise to them: He’d stay at home with them until the youngest turned 18 and was ready for college.

One of the big adjustments to his new reality was that he was no longer a superstar — just a dad.

“They never, ever, ever, still to this day, have ever acknowledged it,” he said, sitting on a gray leather couch, his feet pulled up onto the cushions. “When you have kids, you can be the president of the United States, they don’t care. It’s all about them. And it should be, in my book. That’s where it was when I was a kid: It was all about me. My dad was strict, my mom was strict, but the truth is, my life was all about me. So I had to remember that.”

He had to remember it chauffeuring his daughters to and from school, to and from soccer and basketball games and in other facets of daily life.

“You did homework at the table, you took boyfriends for walks and talks down the driveway, you kinda lived your life through them,” he said. He also experienced music through them: “Kids run the radio, let’s face it — in the car, everywhere.”

That helped him stay abreast not just of country music but pop and R&B acts such as Pharrell Williams, Bruno Mars, Macklemore & Ryan Lewis and, yes, even Lady Gaga.

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One thing he didn’t do much with his kids was play music at home. Certainly not to the extent he did growing up in Oklahoma in a musical family that held weekly talent nights, a ritual that helped ignite the performance bug in young Troyal Garth Brooks.

“Exactly the opposite,” he said. “Nobody got the bug but the youngest one. She’s just getting into the ‘Hey, dad, we’re getting a band together’ stage, which is a great stage to be in.”

So far, his comeback has also been a little different. After a false start with the cancellation of five sold-out shows in Dublin, Brooks is moving full speed ahead into what he says is three years of bookings across North America. He’s announced only three tour stops after Chicago: Atlanta, where he was scheduled to give the first of seven concerts on Friday, then Jacksonville, Fla., then Lexington, Ky. No Southern California stops have been announced.

He and Yearwood, whom he married in 2005, are able to refocus on their music now that Brooks’ youngest daughter has turned 18 and is off to college. “All that stuff’s done,” he said. “Now I’m a phone-in dad kinda thing, where they’ll call you if they need some advice — or if they need money.”

He’s also got a new studio album, still untitled, coming Nov. 11 and a second that he plans to put out late next year.

One consequence of all those years focusing largely on his kids, Brooks said, is “I don’t trust my pen yet.” Consequently, the new album will largely consist of songs by other writers. The first single, “People Loving People,” is a social-message anthem, while the flip side takes on the subject he’s been so deeply enmeshed in for that last decade-plus: child-rearing.

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“It’s called ‘Send ‘Em on Down the Road,’” he said, “and the chorus is beautiful. It says, ‘You can cry for ‘em / Live and die for ‘em / You can help them find their wings / But you can’t fly for ‘em.’ And then,” Brooks added, “here comes the greatest line in the song: ‘Cause if they’re not free to fall / They’re not free to fly.’

“Nothing hurts more to a parent than watching a kid hurt,” Brooks said. “But you got to. One of the things that I’m a little worried about with our society and the way we’re thinking is that everybody gets a blue ribbon now. And the greatest lessons we’ll ever learn in life are from losing. And we’re taking that away from our children — simply because we can’t stand the pain.”

Brooks was feeling pain of a different sort after his first night back on tour. It’s a considerably different prospect to be doing at 52 the kind of exuberant, physically demanding show he was known for in his 30s, shows that tapped the raucous high energy of a rock ‘n’ roll concert and helped earn him six entertainer of the year awards from the Academy of Country Music in the ‘90s.

“From the neck down, I feel good,” he said, between bites of a banana he grabbed from a fruit basket on the coffee table in front of him.

“From the neck up, I’m thinking, it was a train wreck — a horrific train wreck,” he said, his head dropping, a playful smile spreading across his round face as he started to laugh. “And I’ve never had so much fun in a train wreck in my life.

“I didn’t realize how much I missed it,” he said, his voice softening. “I had no clue how much I missed it.”

Twitter: @RandyLewis2

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