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. Read more http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/10/a...ith-a-new-album-man-against-machine.html?_r=0
