Headliner: Garth Brooks featuring Trisha Yearwood
Date: December 12, 2014
Venue: Verizon Arena (North Little Rock, Ark.)
Garth Brooks’ second show at North Little Rock’s Verizon
Arena on Friday, Dec. 12 was a dream come true for many in the audience. The
three night stop on his World Tour was the artist’s first concert appearance in
Arkansas in 23 years.
The multiple time CMA and ACM Entertainer of the Year
recently came out of an almost 15-year retirement with a massive world tour and
new music. His album Man Against Machine
was released in November and instantly topped the Billboard country albums
chart. Brooks announced during his show on Friday night that it was the 50th
show on his tour, which has only been to eight cities across America thus far.
Brooks opened up his second night in North Little Rock with
the hard-rocking title track from his newest album to a thunderous ovation from
the sold out crowd. He would only perform two songs from that album (he also
performed his first single “People Loving People) as he knows most of the fans
coming to his shows want to hear the “classic Garth Brooks” songs.
The Garth Brooks classics is exactly what he would give the
jam-packed audience over the next two hours of the night. If you’ve ever
listened to Brooks’ wildly popular live album Double Live then you know the intensity with which he performs and
the number of country hits he has in his repertoire and both of these factors
were on display Friday night.
Brooks sailed through hit after hit like “Rodeo,” “The
Beaches of Cheyenne,” “Ain’t Going Down (‘Til the Sun Comes Up) and “Two Pina
Coladas” while running all over the stage like a wild man on the loose. At 52
years of age and after such an extended early retirement it’s a miracle Brooks
can perform with the intensity fans came to love him by without dropping dead
of a heart attack mid-performance.
Brooks got a chance to show off his fantastic vocals on some
ballads rather early in his set when he performed “The River” and “To Make You
Feel My Love” back-to-back saying that it’s always been the cardinal sin of
concerts to perform ballads consecutively, but he just felt it was right
tonight.
Among his best performances of the night where his biggest
hits like “The Thunder Rolls,” “Callin’ Baton Rouge” and “That Summer” which
had the crowd in an utter pandemonium state of being.
Another highlight of the show was when Brooks performed the
very first song he ever released way back in 1989 “Much Too Young (To Feel This
Damn Old),” one of his underrated classics, that sounds even better when
thousands in attendance are singing in unison.
Brooks finished his set off with the crowd-pleaser “Friends
in Low Places” that had nearly everyone in attendance singing along at the top
of their lungs, including the notorious final verse which you can only hear
performed live or on live recordings.
There was no way that this massive audience was going to let
Garth get away without performing an encore and the incredibly talented
entertainer ended up giving two encores. The first was a performance of the
raucous “The Fever” and the second encore was truly one of the highlights of
the night when Brooks rattled off “Papa Loved Mama” and the inspirational
“Standing Outside the Fire” before sending the audience home with large smiles
on every single face.
Everything you have ever heard about Garth Brooks’ concerts
is true – there just isn’t anybody like him in country music and there likely
never will be. The only other artist one could even adequately compare Brooks’
shows to is Bruce Springsteen, who also gives his all every single night and
has his shows feeling more like a religious experience than a typical concert.
Arkansas fans waited more than two decades for Garth Brooks to return and every
one of them certainly got their money’s worth.
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