Garth Brooks stood on the stage of the Delta Center in Salt Lake City, the arena he first played in July 1998 during the World Tour, and admitted he could not promise the crowd what comes next. He was back in that arena for the first time in nearly 11 years, and he is 64 now.
“I’m not sure what the future holds, but I can tell you this,” he said, according to a post shared by the venue.
Then he said that if he tours again, Salt Lake City would be top of mind as the opening stop.
“If we tour again after this, I would be cr𝐚zy not to make, let’s just say it, the opening city of the next tour in Salt Lake City,” he said.
Garth Brooks played the Delta Center on Friday, October 9, and Saturday, October 10. When tickets went on sale, the online line for each of those nights topped 50,000 people, and the overwhelming demand brought a third show, a Sunday matinee on October 11.
He has said nothing official about retiring, but Taste of Country called his Salt Lake City comments the closest he has come to teasing it.
In a statement on his website, Brooks said the great state of Utah has always been the place for him to play.
Garth Brooks Is Rebuilding the Tour That Came Before His First Retirement
The Blame It All On My Roots Tour mirrors the World Tour Brooks mounted between 1996 and 1998, down to the set design, the lighting rig and the drum pod. He is recording it for a live album, just as he did the first time.
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For You
That earlier run took him to Central Park on August 7, 1997, before an estimated 250,000 people, and it was his last major headlining run before he stepped away from music.
That first retirement came with a date and a promise to a little girl. In 1992, he made the promise to his daughter Taylor.
“I said, ‘Look, by the time you’re 6 years old, that’s when school starts, I’ll be done,'” he told The Tennessean.
He has admitted he missed that deadline by two years. He announced his retirement in 2000 to raise his daughters and released Scarecrow, his last album of new studio material before retiring, in November 2001. For 14 years, he and the girls’ mother, Sandy, traded them at 6 p.m. almost every day, so the girls saw both parents in the morning and in the evening, until the youngest turned 18.
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That was the year he went back on the road. He ended his retirement in July 2014 by signing with Sony Music Nashville, launched The Garth Brooks World Tour that September and kept it running until seven Nashville shows in December 2017. Randy Bernard, one of his managers, told Fox News that Brooks came back bigger than when he left.
The first time he stepped away, he gave Taylor a deadline, and he kept it two years late. This time, at 64, Garth Brooks has named only the city where a next tour would start, if there is a next tour at all, and on October 10 the Delta Center posted its reply on Instagram, “ready when you are @garthbrooks.”
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