After all the years of success and loyal fans, the country super star Garth Brooks still gets butterflies before he goes on stage.
Garth Brooks reminisced about how far he’s come over the years during a stop at Jimmy Kimmel Live this week. The icon also performed his latest single, ‘Mom’ — this time without getting choked up. However, no matter how far he has come, he still gets nervous on stage.
“[I] still get nervous,” he tells Indiana radio station WKDQ. “I hope there’s never a show where [I] don’t, but it’s more, the word now becomes ‘anxious.’ It’s just, like, wanting to get out there and wanting to find out how it’s going to go and all this stuff.”
“The first night in Chicago, I looked over at Ms. [Trisha] Yearwood, and I said, ‘Are you scared?’ She said, ‘I’m scared to death.’ I said, ‘Me too,’” Brooks continues. “It was weird.”
Brooks kicked off his tour with a series of shows in Chicago, Ill., followed by stops in several other cities, including Atlanta, Ga., Jacksonville, Fla., Minneapolis, Minn., and St. Louis, Mo.
But while the Oklahoma native now has multiple concerts under his belt, he says he is still tweaking his performance on stage each night.
“I’d like to say I remember the first show. I really don’t. But the second show, I can tell you everything about, and every show since then,” he concedes. “You start to feel, ‘OK, I remember this.’ ‘Oh, this feels good.’ ‘Oh, this doesn’t feel that great.’ All these things, you start to put them in your head.
“This thing is just starting to crack open,” Brooks adds. “You can start to see some light, and you’re starting to catch up, if that makes any sense.”
Brooks also notes that having his wife Trisha Yearwood along helps with his performing in so many ways.
“She’s magic,” he boasts. “When she enters the stage in the arena, when it’s her time in the show to come on, you can tell, all of the band members kind of stand up a little straighter because they all know we’re going to a different level now. And then when she leaves, she’s kind of left you up there, and now you better work your butt off because you don’t want the show to drop back down.”
“It’s great,” Brooks says. “She challenges me, and my thing is, I hope I challenge her back.”