Garth Brooks Is Back With a New Album, 'Man Against Machine'
More than a decade ago, Garth Brooks did the most admirable thing any successful performer can do: He walked away.
Yes, country music was shifting underneath his boots, and the pyrotechnics that made him the most vivid country star of the 1990s were becoming commonplace. Yet Mr. Brooks's departure wasn't a slow fade into irrelevance, but a magician's disappearance while standing in a spotlight. He wanted to spend more time with his family, so poof, there he went.
And poof, he's back. Leaving on top allows you to return much the same, even though the planet's still moving. He has come back to a world, one could argue, that is far more country than he is, though certainly the markers of country-ness have changed. In his heyday, Mr. Brooks's pop theatrics marked him as an outsider and a challenge to the norm. Now, 13 years since his last album, he is a figurehead for open-minded values that the genre has fully internalized. There are new rebels, and Mr. Brooks, 52, is not among them.
So ' Man Against Machine ' (Pearl/RCA Nashville), his first album of original music since 2001, is defiantly behind the times, and skillful enough - mostly - to transcend them. It is grand scale and hammy, in places eye-rollingly schlocky and in others outrageously moving. As has always been true of Mr. Brooks, there is no correlation between the quality of a song and how well he sings it: His most affecting moments are often his corniest.
Unlike, say, George Strait, whose longevity is based on his commitment to the micro - cowboy nostalgia or stoic romance - Mr. Brooks is a small-town guy interested in big questions, big systems, big problems with messy solutions. He's not political, per se: His preoccupations are more cosmic, like an Oklahoman Bono. With great success comes the freedom to think on this scale, and on this new album, Mr. Brooks isn't shy. The title track is, in essence, an anti-modern rant taking up the cause of human power over technology, with lyrics that could have been plucked from a Rush album: 'John Henry's 'bout to show on the scene/ In this war of man against the machines.'
It's bracing, awful stuff, so unaware of its absurdity that it is completely appealing. It was designed with Mr. Brooks's headset microphone in mind: He's not singing, he's preaching. 'People Loving People' is much the same, though less effective. 'Doctor you ain't got a pill/For whatever's making this world ill,' he sings, going on to lament drugs and politics as escapist fantasies. Even Mr. Brooks's token cowboy song, 'Cowboys Forever,' is really about how cowboy values are the pillars of a wholesome society: 'That one generation transformed a nation,' he insists, extremely earnestly.
Mr. Brooks is a populist, the type of guy who, to prime the pump for his return, released a boxed set of cover songs from several genres exclusively through Walmart. It served as a memory trigger for his fans, naturally, but also for anyone who liked any kind of music at any time in the last six decades.
But while that genre catholicity has always been part of Mr. Brooks's arsenal, he's too savvy to ignore the country base. He nods to that world here on the fiddle-heavy 'All-American Kid,' which feels as if it might veer skeptical but never goes there, instead neatly telling the story of a local football hero who goes off to war, then comes home. (It's even more tepid in the wake of Kenny Chesney's sleeker and more modern ' American Kids.')
And there's the parable 'Fish,' in which Mr. Brooks learns the wisdom of simplicity, and the rejection of big-city capitalism, from a guy with a fishing rod. Again, it's brutally hackneyed material - less complicated and less funny than Brad Paisley's ' I'm Gonna Miss Her ' - but Mr. Brooks takes it so seriously it's hard not to be charmed.
That sincerity also enlivens the code-red melodrama of 'Cold Like That,' with its meatily pounded piano, and the grade-A treacle of 'Mom,' which is framed as a conversation between a frightened baby and God, sung heartily by Mr. Brooks, who never met a hokey concept he didn't squeeze tight. (See 'Rodeo and Juliet,' with faux-Shakespearean language sprinkled throughout.) It's less evident on the grade-D treacle of 'Send 'Em on Down the Road,' about a father learning to let go.
When Mr. Brooks is most potent on this album, besides his mystic feel-good moments, is when singing about love, usually of the broken kind. On 'You Wreck Me,' he's excellent with the emotionally spent verses, though there's tension between those and the almost-bright chorus laden with cheapo slide guitar. 'Midnight Train' is bursting with dark imagery: 'Whiskey bottle on the floor/King James Bible from the drawer/Neither won but Lord they've done their best.'
'She's Tired of Boys' is a classic Brooks love song, with a crucial, unusual detail that makes it stand out. In this case, it's a May-December romance between a young, white-collar woman and an older blue-collar guy: 'When she walked on to the job site we damn near died/She was a young man's dream full of college and pride.'
The detail is there to grab your attention, but it's not played lazily, for laughs or shock. And the song is given added poignancy with a chorus featuring lovely harmony sung by Mr. Brooks's wife, Trisha Yearwood, who adds a layer of empowered fatigue to Mr. Brooks's knowing wink.
Like Mr. Brooks, Ms. Yearwood was a country star of the 1990s, though a less divisive one. And like Mr. Brooks, Ms. Yearwood has new music, too: There are six new songs on her greatest-hits album, 'PrizeFighter: Hit After Hit' (Gwendolyn/RCA Nashville), which will be released next week. She, too, has been largely silent of late, with no album of new material since 2007. But on her new tracks here, she's still full of easy smolder, especially on songs about romantic transgression like 'End of the World' and 'Your Husband's Cheatin' on Us.'
Ms. Yearwood is more transparently concerned with morality than Mr. Brooks, who is instead motivated by passion. His songs aren't about intrigue, they just bleed. And when he's severely wounded, his howl is transfixing. That's the case on the album closer, 'Tacoma,' a slab of unadulterated white-soul fire in the vein of Michael McDonald that scorches everything that came before it:
Might leave some tears in Topeka
A couple of sleepless nights in Cheyenne
Every time that I miss you baby
I'll hit the gas as fast as I can.
This is familiar country structure - the road song - but an unleashed Mr. Brooks takes it from Nashville through Memphis and Muscle Shoals and maybe a Birmingham church. He is beholden to no one place or style, an upsetter of norms before, and an upsetter of norms now.
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