Liberty 98743
Producer: Allen Reynolds
Track listing: We Shall Be Free / Somewhere Other Than the Night / Mr. Right / Every Now and Then / Walking After Midnight / Dixie Chicken / Learning to Live Again / That Summer / Night Rider’s Lament / Face to Face
October 10, 1992
7 weeks (nonconsecutive)
With The Chase, lightning struck twice. For the second time in less than a year, a new Garth Brooks album had entered The Billboard 200 and the Top Country Albums chart at Number One. Meanwhile, Beyond the Season, Brooks’s Christmas album, released a full four months before the holiday, was at number five after peaking at number two.
Yet in spite of all the success Brooks was experiencing, the time making and leading up to the release of The Chase wasn’t particularly happy. “The Chase was tough because of the personal thing I was going through at the time,” Brooks says. “I was expecting a child, I wasn’t real happy with my record deal, and I was wondering what my future was.”
In fact, just before the album’s release, Brooks publicly contemplated retiring, saying that he wanted to spend time with his family. His wife Sandy had gone through a difficult pregnancy. Finally, on July 8, 1992, his first child, Taylor Mayne Pearl, was born. She was healthy, and Brooks was happy with his new life as a family man, yet he wasn’t quite sure he wanted to continue to live life as a superstar, touring for months on end. Meanwhile, his contract with Liberty, signed long before he became one of most popular performers in the world, suddenly seemed onerous. “I was just feeling really dark and while all that was going on, I was still trying to do what I enjoyed most — making albums,” he says.
“We Shall Be Free,” one of five tracks co-written by Brooks on the album, suggested the country star still had not found what he was seeking. The song was inspired by the riots that erupted in Los Angeles after the Rodney King verdicts (Brooks was in Los Angeles the night portions of the city burned, picking up Entertainer of the Year honors at the Academy of Country Music Awards), but neither King nor Los Angeles are mentioned by name in the lyrics. “We Shall Be Free” also speaks out for sexual as well as racial tolerance.
Another song on the album, “Face to Face” addresses date rape. The heaviness of the topics addressed on The Chase perhaps hinted at Brooks’s mood while making the album. “My eyebrows were real low,” he says.
Yet there was some relief. The album also also features several lyrical snapshots days gone by, and Brooks was also working on Beyond the Season while making The Chase. The Christmas album, he says, “was my favorite album make. The Chase was very intense and Beyond the Season was very light and well felt, so it was a good marriage. It was exactly what I needed at the time, or I probably would have gone off the deep end.”
THE TOP FIVE
Week of October 10, 1992
1. The Chase, Garth Brooks
2. Unplugged, Eric Clapton
3. Some Gave All, Billy Ray Cyrus
4. Ten, Pearl Jam
5. Beyond the Season, Garth Brooks