Garth Brooks recently added two shows in Ontario, Canada, on December 4 and 5, as part of his Blame It All On My Roots Tour. For Brooks, there isn’t a better place for him to play.
“We’ve been everywhere from Nova Scotia all the way to Vancouver, and everywhere in between,” Brooks says, in a video shared on social media. “The thing with Canada is, nobody gives them credit for knowing their country music the way they do. I’ll put places in Canada that know their music as well as Nashville, where the music was born. So I love coming up and playing for Canada. I just feel very, very lucky for the chance, and I hope somebody else wants to come to the party as well.”
In July, Brooks announced his Blame It All On My Roots Tour, playing in arenas all over North America. Unlike traditional tours, Brooks is announcing the tour stops city by city. He has already played in Indiana, Colorado, Illinois, Washington, D.C., Florida, Utah, and his home state of Oklahoma. Brooks also has shows scheduled in Missouri and Washington, in addition to Ontario, with more concerts expected to be announced.
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Why Garth Brooks Chose an Arena Tour Over a Stadium Tour
Brooks has sold out plenty of stadiums in his lengthy career. But for Brooks, he was eager to return to arenas, even though the crowd is decidedly smaller.
“I like the arena because everything’s just much more personal,” Brooks tells WUSA. “The stadium tour was cool, and I got to tell you, size does matter. I mean, 95,000 people singing ‘Unanswered Prayers,’ that’s impressive. I gotta tell you though, in my history of arenas, 17,000 people can sound like that. It’s all about sincerity. So when you get in a room where everybody loves one another, and everybody’s kind of singing the same song, even though when they walk in, they might not agree on certain principles. While they’re in here, they all sing ‘The River’ together, they sing ‘Friends in Low Places’ together, ‘The Dance.’
“That’s the world I want to be in,” he adds. “But also, the greatest thing arenas versus stadium tour, you don’t look out the hotel window in the morning, going, ‘Oh God, is it going to rain?’ We enjoy perfect weather every night inside the arena tour.”
Brooks’ debut album was released in 1989. Decades later, the 64-year-old is still grateful to be part of the genre.
“Here’s the great thing about country music: other formats are going to change,” Brooks says. “Country music has been the same. My granddad listened to it, my grandkids will listen to it. It’s still the same. So what I love about it is, they come here, it’s just a different generation. But the songs are the same, the sincerity is the same. If you get to play for a country audience, you’re the luckiest guy on the planet.”