Garth Brooks Dishes How His “Dive Bar” Duet With Blake Shelton Came Together: “I Called Him Up”

NCD

Garth Brooks Dishes How His “Dive Bar” Duet With Blake Shelton Came Together: “I Called Him Up”

Garth Brooks and Blake Shelton have a Top 20 hit on their hands with their new duet, “Dive Bar,” which is currently No. 19 on Billboard’s Country Airplay chart after 13 weeks. Penned by Garth, Mitch Rossell and Bryan Kennedy, “Dive Bar” will be featured on Garth’s upcoming album, FUN.

If you were wondering how two of country music’s biggest stars ended up joining forces for the duet, it was a simple phone call. As Garth tells Kix Brooks of American Country Countdown, he was inspired to make the call after watching Blake’s performance of “God’s Country” during the ACM Awards in April.

“I saw him on the ACMs—he was doing ‘God’s Country,’ his current single,” says Garth to Kix. “And I just saw it in his face. It was like, ‘Wow.’ . . . Every entertainer, if you’ll listen to what you’re saying and if it still gets you, that’s a statement to the song, it’s a statement to how you’re treating the song. And something got [Blake], you could see it in his face when he was singing ‘God’s Country,’ so I called him up afterwards just to say, ‘Hey, man. I was just real impressed. That was cool. Would you ever think about doing a duet?’ And it wasn’t, ‘Let me think on it.’ It was, ‘Hell yeah, I’d like to do a duet,’ so we picked ‘Dive Bar,’ and it was fun.”

Watch Garth’s full interview with Kix below.

photos by NCD