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USA Today
28-04-2025
- Entertainment
- USA Today
Luke Combs surprises Stagecoach 2025 crowd with Garth Brooks for 'Friends in Low Places'
Luke Combs surprises Stagecoach 2025 crowd with Garth Brooks for 'Friends in Low Places' Show Caption Hide Caption Coachella campers face festival traffic nightmare Coachella campers arrived ahead of the start of the famed festival only to face massive traffic lines. What's enough to knock the focus off Luke Combs during his headlining set at Stagecoach over the weekend? Try a surprise guest appearance by Garth Brooks to sing the country hit to end all country hits: "Friends in Low Places." Yep, that'll definitely do it! And so, it was that Combs put a most thunderous finishing touch on what will surely go down as one of the most epic headlining sets in recent Stagecoach history. Combs keyed up expectations as he told fans something special was on the way to help him close out an already-rousing festival set. Playing somewhat coy, he sang the first portion of "Friends in Low Places," only for Brooks to quietly appear on stage and take over. Why did Luke Combs write 'Ain't No Love in Oklahoma'? See the lyrics, story behind the song The crowd, at first shocked, and then raucously delighted, seemed unable to believe their ears. What transpired over the next few minutes felt like a shot — or three — of pure Stagecoach adrenaline, stronger and more intoxicating than any of the varied liquors that had been guzzled all over the Empire Polo Club grounds over the previous 72 hours. The Garth Brooks news is a big disappointment − and an important reminder It felt like nearly everyone in the crowd was singing along as Brooks and Combs — both sporting big grins — drank in the moment, turning the vocal work over to the crowd for large portions of the song but interjecting just enough to remind us that we were witnessing country music lore in the making. Finally, Combs yelled, "It's Garth Freaking Brooks, everybody!" We didn't need the explanation, but the crowd, of course, roared anyway. It was Brooks himself who delivered what will probably be the most-remembered line of the night when he referred to Combs as a "future Hall of Famer." It's a title that Combs earned through a grueling 90-minute set in the California desert, leading the crowd through a commanding barrage of his biggest hits. Tracy Chapman's 'Fast Car' is topping charts thanks to Luke Combs: 'Honored to be there' The country music star headlined Stagecoach just three years ago, but his set this time around was strikingly different. Many of his most beloved hits, featured heavily during the April 27 show, had not even been released at the time of that last show. It served as yet another sign that Combs' career is as white-hot with success now as it was then. While Brooks stole the show, he wasn't the only high-profile guest to join Combs on stage. Pop punk band Good Charlotte also made an appearance to sing their hit "The Anthem," alongside Combs and Bailey Zimmerman — an up-and-comer who appeared at Stagecoach in 2024 and 2023 — came out to perform a new song called "Backup Plan." Still, it was Comb's voice that kept audiences captivating, his signature country croon ringing out over a rapt stadium. Watch Cleveland native Tracy Chapman perform 'Fast Car' with Luke Combs at the Grammys While there was no shortage of highlights, it was hard to beat the sheer power of his "Hurricane" performance, or the cover of Tracy Chapman's "Fast Car" − a sleeper hit for the country artist. Then again, I'll also have a hard time getting over the hard-charging spectacle of "Ain't No Love in Oklahoma." When he was finished wrapping up his own set, Combs hopped stages to lend his talents to the festival's actual final act: the Backstreet Boys. Showing up to sing "I Want It That Way," he helped give the classic 2000s hit a country twang. I have a feeling it won't be the last time we see Combs show up to blow the doors off someone else's set at Stagecoach. Someday, an elder Combs might even have to come back to crown the next "Luke Combs" just like Brooks did tonight. Contributing: Anna Kaufman, USA TODAY
Fox News
12-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Fox News
Garth Brooks found Nashville 'gutted' after returning to country music after 14-year retirement
In 2014, when Garth Brooks made the decision to return to country music after leaving the industry for 14 years to raise his children, he found a remarkably different world than the one he'd known. The singer-songwriter announced his retirement in 2000 when he was at the top of his game, having released mega-hits like "Friends in Low Places" and "The River" during the '90s. After several years out of the spotlight spent taking care of his three daughters in his home state of Oklahoma, Brooks moved to Nashville after his youngest child made the decision to attend Belmont University in the city. When he arrived, he found that Music City had turned into a "gutted town." As Brooks wrote in his new book, "The Anthology Part V," after he and his wife, fellow country superstar Trisha Yearwood, made the move back to Nashville, "I saw that we'd lost over 80 percent of our songwriters. They were gone." He continued, "It was a gutted town when it came to songwriters. And, I'm sorry, try and feed the world without farmers. The songwriters? They're the farmers that feed music, and they were gone. So you kind of said, okay, you're getting back into this thing. But there's a lot I am not happy about that's happened in the last fourteen years. … It created a mood. Things got darker." "As much as I love songwriting, and as much as I love the publishers that independently push their songs, what's happened to the songwriter is technology." Brooks touched on the same topic again in another portion of the book, once again saying that Nashville had been "gutted" when he returned from Oklahoma. He wrote that he'd seen before "how songwriters made a living and how dreams come true," but in 2014, all he could see "was all we had lost." Later in the book, when discussing his comeback album and its title track, "Man Against Machine," Brooks explained more about what had changed in the 14 years he'd been gone: technology. "As much as I love songwriting, and as much as I love the publishers that independently push their songs, what's happened to the songwriter is technology," the singer-songwriter explained. "For fourteen years I watched from the sidelines as music fell a victim to technology." "The iPod comes out, which leads to the smartphone. And music made the mistake of backing down to technology, because the threat that technology made to music was this: 'If you're not going to play our game, then all the iPods and smartphones will be filled with illegally downloaded stuff. And there's nothing we can do about that.'" He added, "Music blinked, and bam!, they let technology price their product. And all I can say is, can you believe 'Hotel California' is worth only 99 cents? … We understood that technology was taking over music, would eventually choke and damn near kill music while the technology prospered." Brooks struggled with navigating the change in the music industry as he also dealt with all the changes in his personal life — the move from Oklahoma to Tennessee and his last child leaving home (he admitted that "the empty nest hit me a lot harder than I ever dreamed it would") — but he said that the idea of streaming music "might have been the hardest to get my head around." Coming from a time when fans had to buy physical copies of albums and singles and entering into a new era when so much was focused on digital products was something that he admitted he "wasn't seeing a way through." To combat the issues he saw with digital music, Brooks launched GhostTunes in September 2014, his own digital music store, with the intent of giving a greater portion of money from the sales of the music to songwriters and artists. In 2017, GhostTunes was absorbed into Amazon Music, but as he wrote in "The Anthology Part V," he doesn't consider it a failed business venture. "Anybody that calls GhostTunes a mistake can't see the writing on the wall, that technology is f---ing music over. The genie is so far out of the bottle at this point. I never want to offend anyone. With that said, my opinion is technology has no love for art. None whatsoever. It just has a love for something that can sell its hardware and software," he explained. Also in September 2014, Brooks kicked off The Garth Brooks World Tour — his first since his previous world tour wrapped in 1998. He recalled being "scared s---less that no one would show up" when he first announced new concerts, and when a ticket queue was set up for the first show, which took place in Chicago, he told his team that he'd be happy to see 100,000 people waiting online to buy tickets. By the time the tickets went on sale, there were over 300,000 in line. Brooks added shows to meet the demand, eventually performing 11 concerts in Chicago alone. As for the decision to kick off the tour in the city, Marci Braun, a program director for US99, a Chicago radio station that helped promote the tour, explained, "Put Garth's first comeback show in Nashville, and it's a country story. Put it in Oklahoma, it's a Garth story. Put it in Chicago? It's an American story." In the end, the comeback tour went on for three years, concluding with seven Nashville shows in December 2017. Randy Bernard, one of Brooks' managers, said, "Garth came back bigger than when he left. It made a difference for country music as a whole, just like what he did in the '90s made a difference. … There was no one in the world doing the numbers he was doing." In 2016, Brooks won the Country Music Association's Entertainer of the Year award — something he'd won four times before in the '90s, but that he pushed for in 2016 for the sake of his band and crew, who he said "were doing something nobody had done before. They were killing it. I mean killing it. Three-hundred-ninenty-one shows in something like seventy-two cities. It was absolutely nuts." Brooks won the award again in 2017 and 2019. In 2020, he announced that he no longer wanted to be considered for the honor. Brooks believes that, being an entertainer, the work he and his team did during that lengthy comeback tour is what ultimately made his return to music such a big success story. "The one thing that no one can take away, that nobody rules but you, is live," he shared. "The live show, that's when it's just you and the people that determine whether your stuff is a success or a failure. … It's about passion. It's all on the line every time. You're just going straight to the people." Brooks continued: "Live music was there before radio, before records, probably goes back further than any of us might even believe. One person throwing down a melody and rhythm for another: I'm guessing that if there was love — and surely if there was sex! — there had to have been music. Something like the age of streaming will never be powerful enough to take that away. Live music will win every time. When I think about this, really think about it, I stop worrying about the future of the music business."
