Actually Never

I haven’t told Mika where this blog is yet, but I did tell her it existed, and she immediately began brainstorming classic albums for me to listen to and talk about. This was not one of them.

What I knew

I knew Chris Gaines was Garth Brooks playing a character, I think for a movie that never came out. This was the only Gaines album, which didn’t have a great reputation, but there’s something kind of fascinating about a huge established star taking a big off-brand swing – made more fascinating by the fact that it completely tanked.

Like most of the world, I never listened to this album when it was new. A year or two ago, I remembered that this whole deal happened, and ordered a used copy of the CD off eBay because Garth Brooks famously doesn’t have his music on streaming services and also because we were in that point in the pandemic where I was buying all kinds of things for the dopamine hit of parcels arriving in the mail. (I may still be doing this.) I could make a list of dumb junk I’ve bought since March 2020 and it would be long and you’d rightfully judge me for it. Case in point: this.

Anyway, I got the CD, ripped it, and immediately forgot about it until I was looking for something to post about and remembered the tweet above.

What I know

I googled, and I was correct. The movie, to be called The Lamb, was never made.

Should I be googling these things? Is it more fun if I go off my flawed memory? Or should I be learning things here? I didn’t read up on Blue until after I was done writing the last post and that may have been a mistake on my part.

My copy of the CD – I still can’t quite believe that I own this – has the “alternate cover” calling it Chris Gaines’ Greatest Hits instead of garth brooks in… …the life of chris gaines. I gotta say, the all-lowercase really fits what he was going for. Not sure the double ellipses work but they’re a bold choice.

The song Lost in You is Brooks’ only top-40 hit ever, which is remarkable. I know there have been all kinds of changes to how the Hot 100 singles are calculated, but still! Garth Brooks is a big star! He has many big songs! And this album isn’t that good!

I mean, it’s not terrible. Unsigned Letter would have made a decent Wallflowers single (by which I mean you can sing One Headlight overtop it, so mostly it just makes me want to listen to One Headlight). But most of it is just kind of forgettable. If Gaines was meant to be a big star, his Greatest Hits needed to be greater than this. It’s not bad enough to make fun of, but not good enough to actually listen to it for anything beyond the novelty of its existence.

Well, Right Now, which features Brooks half-rapping in a We Didn’t Start the Fire kind of way in between choruses taken from Get Together IS pretty objectively terrible in a way that 12-year-old me probably would have liked (much like, say, We Didn’t Start the Fire). At least it’s memorable in a way that the whole album isn’t.