33 1/3, Chris Gaines

As you may know, I enjoy the saga of Chris Gaines, Garth Brooks fictional rock persona that released one Best Of album in 1999 and kind of pumped the brakes on his career.* I enjoy the whole thing so much I made a podcast about it with Ashley Spurgeon. I'm biased but it's a good listen.

Putting the podcast together took a lot of deep diving research, so when I saw that 33 1/3 was releasing a book on Garth Brooks in… The Life of Chris Gaines, I knew author Stephen Deusner had quite a challenge ahead of him! I finally picked up a copy and can confirm that research was well done and manifests quite enjoyably in the book.

While brief, the book does a good job of balancing the history of the album, the history of Brooks and throwing in some meta-commentary that blurs the line of reality. There's a sizable chunk of the book that is supposedly taken from an erased blog post that I still can't tell is true or not. I choose not to know; the presentation was just perfect.

I wouldn't have minded a few more nitty gritty details about what happened behind the scenes, how the songs were written, why they were all R&B instead of pop but I also understand that I'm a particularly nerdy kind of reader on this subject. For anyone with even the most casual interest on this topic, pick up this book. You'll finish it in 3 days and enjoy every moment of it.

* This is debatable and nuanced but also accepted as kind of the general line of thinking