Tonight is the biggest selling solo artist of all time.

He has friends in places low and high and a new book for his biggest fans with six CDs for the ones who still have those players in their cars.

The anthology part four, Going Home comes out a week from Friday.

Please say hello to Gar Brooks.

>> Gar Brooks has lived one of the most heartbreaking stories in music history.

And most people have no idea how deep it actually goes.

162 million albums sold, more than Elvis Presley, more than any solo artist in American history.

Nine Diamond Records, seven times named CMA Entertainer of the Year.

>> He is a record-breaking worldass legendary country artist.

We could go on and on.

>> Stadium selling out in under an hour.

A love story that spanned two marriages, three daughters, and one woman he says he recognized from a past life.

The moment he saw her, he had everything a human being could ask for.

And then, piece by piece, it shattered.

Not because the music stopped, not because the fans left, but because of a first marriage he destroyed with his own hands.

A mother he lost to cancer before he could ever repay what she gave him.

And a lawsuit so serious it now follows him into every room he enters.

>> Country music star G.

Brooks is not backing down after his former makeup artist and hair stylist filed a bombshell lawsuit.

The full story has never been told like this until now.

The living room that built him.

Every Friday night in the Brooks household in Yukon, Oklahoma, there was a talent show.

Not optional, not voluntary.

Every child got up and performed.

You sang your song and you sat back down.

G was the youngest of six, four older half siblings from previous marriages, one full brother named Kelly.

The house ran on the rules of his father, Troy Raymond Brooks Jr., a former Marine and oil company draftsman who taught his youngest son his first guitar chords with hands that did not tolerate excuses.

But the music came from his mother.

Colleen Carol had been a real country singer once.

She recorded for Capital Records in the 1950s under the name Colleen Carol and appeared on a nationally televised show called The Ozark Jubilee.

She had talent.

She had a voice.

And the industry closed the door on her.

Anyway, what most people do not realize is that G.

Brooks grew up in a house where his mother already knew what it felt like to want something with every part of yourself and watch it slip away.

She poured that knowledge directly into her son through those Friday night performances.

He has said they were the single greatest education he ever received.

Three different worlds of music collided under that roof.

His parents played Merl Haggard, George Jones, Bob Wills.

His older siblings brought in James Taylor, Dan Fogleberg, Jim Croachi.

His own friends introduced him to arena rock, Kiss, [music] Queen, Bob Seager, Jouri, Kansas.

He absorbed all of it.

Years later, he would blend those three worlds into a sound that country music had never heard before.

But as a teenager, music was not the plan.

He played football, baseball, basketball, ran track.

>> Now, you guys aren’t full-time musicians, are you?

What do you do in your spare time, if you have any?

>> Um, I work at Depris Sports.

>> Oh, well, look at there.

They got a sporting goods company there in Still Water.

>> He went to Oklahoma State University on a partial athletic scholarship for the Javelin Throw.

He was studying advertising.

Music was a love, not a direction.

That changed slowly, working nights as a bouncer at a college bar called the Tumbleeed Ballroom.

breaking up fights while bands played behind him.

The pull got stronger.

And then one night, a woman walked into the bar who would change the entire trajectory of his life.

Her name was Sandy Maul.

She had gotten into an altercation in the women’s restroom and punched her fist straight through the wood paneling.

It got stuck.

The bouncer came to help.

They talked.

They started dating.

On May 24th, 1986, they were married.

He was 24 [music] and Nashville was already calling.

Rejection, then revolution.

His first trip to Nashville lasted 23 hours.

An entertainment attorney from Dallas had heard him play, handed him contacts and money, and told him to go try his luck.

He drove there believing the world was waiting for him.

He later told a reporter that there is nothing colder than reality.

He turned around and went home, but he did not quit.

He finished his degree.

He kept playing shows.

And in June of 1987, he and Sandy packed everything and moved to Nashville for good.

He was 25 years old.

The next 14 months nearly broke him.

He recorded demo tapes for other songwriters.

He sang advertising jingles.

He managed a boot store.

Sandy did clerical work.

Seven record labels rejected him politely, bluntly, by phone, and by mail.

The answer was always the same.

Then came the evening that changed American music.

Spring of 1988.

A music executive named Lynn Schultz walked into the Bluebird Cafe to hear an act that did not show up.

Sitting on stage instead was a young man in a cowboy hat who sang like he had something to prove.

>> Nine artists lined up.

I was supposed to be number seven.

I went there early in case somebody didn’t show up so I could get out of there.

And the guy going on second didn’t show up and they put me in there.

Capital Records was there to see that guy.

Oh my gosh.

And they saw they saw Gar Brooks live.

>> It was meant to be.

>> Yes, ma’am.

I believe.

>> Schultz called his boss the next morning.

On June 17th, 1988, Capital Nashville signed G.

Brooks for a $10,000 advance.

What happened next is one of the most staggering trajectories in modern music.

His debut album hit number two on the country charts in April 1989.

His first number one single, If Tomorrow Never Comes, arrived that same year.

Then came The Dance, the song he has called his favorite he [music] has ever recorded.

The one he says contains the entire philosophy of a life worth living.

And then No Fences Detonated.

Released in August 1990, it did not climb the charts.

It exploded through them.

All four singles went to number one.

Friends in Low Places became what many consider the most beloved song in modern country history.

The one that showed up at every stadium, every backyard barbecue, every bar at closing time across America.

No Fences was eventually certified 17 times platinum.

Over 17 million copies sold.

Rope in the Wind followed in September 1991 and broke a barrier nobody thought a country artist could touch.

It debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, the pop chart, knocking Metallica’s black album down to number two while simultaneously sitting at number one on the country chart.

No Country Act had ever done that.

Albums kept coming.

The Chase, In Pieces, Fresh Horses, Sevens, and Nearly Everyone debuted at the top of both charts.

He became the first artist in history to earn nine diamond certifications, nine separate albums, each surpassing 10 million in sales.

The Beatles are the only act with more total certified shipments.

A concert promoter said something that sounded impossible until you check the numbers.

Gar Brooks has sold [music] more tickets than anyone alive.

And the person buying those tickets was not a music critic or a cultural theorist.

It was the woman in the third row who had spent the whole week trying to hold her family together and needed 2 hours of someone telling her she was not alone.

But here is the catch.

While all of that was happening on stage, the man behind the microphone was quietly destroying the life he had built at home.

The fracture.

By the late 1980s, as the career exploded and the road stretched longer and the distance between him and Sandy grew wider, G.

Brooks was unfaithful.

He has admitted this publicly with a bluntness that catches people off guard.

He told journalists years later that he was horrible at being a husband, that he had to get his act together.

Sandy found out around 1989 and threatened to leave.

He got on his knees.

He begged.

She stayed.

They renewed their vows in 1996.

But something had already cracked that no ceremony could repair.

And both of them knew it.

And get this, the complication was not just the infidelity.

It was a specific person.

In 1987, just 13 months into his marriage, Gar met a young singer named Trisha Yearwood through a mutual songwriter.

She was there to sing demo tracks.

He later told a television audience that when she left the room, it felt like he had just met his wife.

>> But let’s go back to where we first met.

Okay.

1987.

U she’s married.

I’m married.

Um but the the day that Kent introduces Kent goes, “What do you think when she leaves?” I go, “It’s weird.

I’ve been married for just a year now and I feel like I just met my wife.

>> Except he already had one.

They were both married to other people.

They maintained a friendship for years.

She recorded the very first demo of the dance before it was famous.

He was in the room watching her sing the song that would come to define his entire career.

By March 1999, both were separated from their first spouses.

In 2002, they went public as a couple.

In December 2005, they married in a small ceremony near Aaso, Oklahoma with 77 guests, his father as best man, and his three daughters exchanging vows alongside [music] him with his new wife.

Those three daughters are the reason the next chapter of this story exists at all.

Taylor Maine Pearl, born July 8th, 1992.

August Anna, born May 3rd, 1994.

Ally Colleen, born July 28th, 1996.

And the promise Gar made to the oldest of them, a promise he would spend the next 14 years of his life trying to keep, is the most revealing thing about who this man really is when the stadium lights go dark.

The disappearance.

On October 26th, 2000, G.

Brooks stood before reporters in Nashville and announced his retirement from music.

He was 38 years old.

He had sold more records than any solo artist in American history.

And he was walking away because of a promise he had made to his daughter Taylor that by the time she started first grade, he would be done touring.

>> You kind of stepped away from music and uh devoted all your time to raising your girls right?

>> Just trying to keep up with them.

Yes.

>> Uh-huh.

And how old are they now?

>> They’re 21, 19, and 17.

The last baby’s a senior in high school.

He had missed the deadline by 2 years and the guilt of those two years was enough to make the biggest entertainer on the planet step off the stage and not come back.

For 14 years, he lived it.

He moved to Oklahoma where Sandy had relocated the girls.

The two of them exchanged the children at 6:00 in the morning and 6:00 at night every single day.

So, each parent had them in the morning and the evening.

He coached their soccer teams.

He drove them to school.

He showed up for every game.

He carried the snacks.

He once said the most important days of his life were not the award shows or the certifications.

They were the days he was responsible for snacks after the game.

Think about that for a second.

A man who had heard 90,000 people chanting his name in a single stadium.

Who had been on top of both the country and pop charts simultaneously.

Who had agents and managers and record executives calling every single day begging him to come back.

And the thing that mattered most to him was making sure there were enough orange slices in the cooler after a girl’s soccer game on a Saturday morning in Oklahoma.

The music industry could not understand it.

His fans could not understand it, but his daughters did.

And they were the only audience that mattered.

The comeback happened because of Trisha.

They were looking at photographs from a tour anniversary, and she noticed something in his eyes he had not admitted to himself.

something was quietly missing without the music.

She asked if he had ever thought about touring again.

He later said the love of his life figured out that staying away was hurting him.

On December 9th, 2013, he announced a world tour on Good Morning America.

Within hours, phone systems crashed in city after city.

Between 2014 and 2017, he played 390 shows across 79 cities, selling over 6 million tickets and generating more than $360 million.

It was the largest North American concert tour in recorded history.

Every ticket priced at roughly $70 regardless of seat.

A deliberate choice to keep the shows accessible to the working people who had been with him since 1989.

Stadium tours followed.

He played Notre Dame Stadium for the first time in its history.

>> Music legend Gar Brooks singing the Thunder Rolls.

And if you liked what you heard, you can hear a whole lot more this coming Sunday on CBS.

>> That’s right.

The superstar made history as the first ever performer to hold a concert inside Notre Dame Stadium.

That groundbreaking show will be broadcast as a CBS special.

>> He sold 400,000 tickets across five nights at Croak Park in Dublin.

He opened a Las Vegas residency at Caesar’s Palace in May of 2023 that ran for 72 soldout shows with no set list, different every night before closing in March 2025 to standing ovations.

He was doing all of it in his 60s.

He had somewhere along the way lost 50 lb, gotten back to the weight he carried at 35, and told Irish journalists ahead of those Dublin shows that the motivation was simple.

He had watched some old footage, did not like what he saw, and still had a job that demanded physical endurance.

There was no medical crisis behind it, no dramatic revelation.

He just still took the work seriously enough to change his body for it.

He had reminded everyone exactly why he had mattered in the first place.

And then the ground shifted again, this time in a way he could not sing his way out of the accusation.

In the fall of 2024, the world learned something that had been building for months behind closed doors.

A professional hair stylist and makeup artist who had worked for Trisha Yearwood since 1999 and later transitioned to working directly with Brooks around 2017 filed a lawsuit alleging a pattern of deeply disturbing behavior between 2017 and 2021.

woman in a civil lawsuit against him who says um she worked as a hair and makeup stylist for him from 2017 to 2020 that he um allegedly harassed her.

She describes graphic fantasies reading from the New York Times.

The allegations included what she described as assault in a Los Angeles hotel suite in 2019.

Before the accuser could publicly file, Brooks took a preemptive legal step.

On September 13th, 2024, he filed his own lawsuit in Mississippi federal court, alleging that a former employee had fabricated accusations and attempted to extort him for millions.

On October 3rd, 2024, the accuser filed her complaint in Los Angeles.

Two lawsuits, two courtrooms, two completely different versions of what happened.

Brooks denied every allegation.

His public statement was unflinching.

He said he had spent two months being hassled with threats and lies and tragic tales of what his future would be if he did not write a check for millions.

He called it hush money and said that paying it would mean admitting to behavior he called himself incapable of.

He ended with five words that have hung in the air ever since.

I do not fear the truth.

Whether that turns out to be courage or something else entirely, only time in a courtroom will tell.

As of early 2026, both lawsuits remain active.

The California case was stayed pending a ruling in Mississippi.

No criminal charges have been filed, no settlement announced, no trial date set.

[music] The accuser’s attorneys have expressed confidence in their case.

Brooks has signaled he will fight it indefinitely.

And anyone who tells you they know how this [music] ends is guessing.

What is not guesswork is the toll.

Sources close [music] to him described him in late 2024 as being in a real bad place emotionally.

He reportedly turned to Comfort Food as a coping mechanism after years of maintaining his fitness.

He made fewer public appearances.

He canceled at least one major television booking.

He is by all accounts standing by his denial with the same intensity he has brought to everything in his professional life.

But standing in that position under that level of public scrutiny while the lawsuit grinds forward month after month carries a weight that no number of record sales can offset.

Trisha Yearwood has not addressed the accusations publicly.

She stood beside him at the Jimmy Carter state funeral in January 2025.

She appeared with him at her Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony.

She is currently on her own solo tour in 2026 performing her album The Mirror Across the Country.

whether the public ever learns the full truth of what is alleged the marriage has held.

She has not filed for divorce.

She has not made statements suggesting separation in a situation where almost everything is uncertain.

That one constant appears to matter to both of them more than anything else.

What remains?

There are parts of this story that disappear when the lawsuit becomes the only headline.

The mother who died of throat cancer in 1999.

The woman who first put music in his hands and first knew what it meant to have talent and watch the door close anyway.

His father gone in 2010.

The Chris Gaines experiment, a bizarre rockstar alter ego he created in 1999 that started as genuine creative ambition and ended with him describing his own ribs as sore from the critical beating he took.

the 14 years of anonymity in Oklahoma, showing up at his daughter’s college cafeteria just to surprise her, then walking quietly back out.

Taylor, who holds two advanced degrees and keeps no public social media presence at all.

August, who made him a grandfather.

Ally, who performs under the name Ally Colleen, not Ally Brooks, because she wants to earn it without the family name attached.

The dinners where he and Sandy Maul, his first wife, still gather with Trisha and the girls because that is the arrangement they made and they have honored it for over two decades.

The fans who have followed him since 1989 and still write letters saying a song he recorded 30 years ago helped them survive something they did not [music] think they would survive.

The woman in Georgia who played the dance at her husband’s funeral.

the father in Texas who taught his son every word of friends in low places before the boy left for the military.

These are not footnotes.

These are the actual texture of a life that contains side byside enormous grace and significant failure and one open legal wound that no one can yet read the outcome of.

Gar Brooks turned 64 in February 2026.

He has Summerfest dates booked in Milwaukee for June.

All right, let’s bring it back to the fun news uh that I just mentioned.

The Summerfest announcement with Gar Brooks ready to kick off the big gig in 2026.

He is returning to London’s Hide Park for the first time in nearly 30 years.

He posted on his website at the start of the year, three words in all capital letters, new music, new tour, new year.

It is all on the table.

The man who once played to 90,000 people at a time.

Who walked away from everything for his daughters.

who came back in his 50s and broke every touring record again.

Who is now fighting in two courtrooms to protect the only thing he says he has left.

His name is still here, still creating, still fighting, still showing up.

The ground beneath him has not stopped moving, but neither has he.

He said years ago that the dance is about the whole philosophy of a life fully lived.

That even if you knew the pain was coming, you would not trade the journey that brought you there.

The heartbreaking truth about G.

Brooks is that he has lived that philosophy all the way through.

The music and the failure, the stadium lights and the courtroom lights, the standing ovations and the silence that comes when you walk off stage and there is no one left to perform for.

The story is still being written, but everything that has already been written is real.

And that is exactly what makes it hurt.

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