Garth Brooks is all smiles as he announces his new one-man show at the Wynn in Las Vegas, Nev. during a press conference on October 15, 2009. Photo courtesy of garthbrooks.com.

It’s been four months since Garth Brooks launched his series of weekend shows at the Wynn Las Vegas, allowing him to still perform in a fairly intimate setting without actually touring until his daughters are raised.

When Garth shocked country fans by retiring from the road, he shifted his gears into parenting and planned to work on screenplays. But now that he’s been singing in a semi-regular routine again, he’s also discovered that some of the old creative juices have returned, and he’s got scraps of paper with shreds of lyrics lying around the Oklahoma house he shares with his three daughters and wife Trisha Yearwood.

“The way that writing happens is when music is all around you,” Garth told The Las Vegas Review-Journal. “For the last 10 years, the music that’s been all around me has been my girls and whatever they’re listening to on the radio, so I’ve been kind of [creatively] dormant.”

In his Vegas shows, Garth gets to perform some of his own hits, such as “The River,” “Friends In Low Places” and “The Dance.” And he typically threads in songs by some of the artists who influenced him, including George Jones, James Taylor, Billy Joel and Merle Haggard. As a result, Garth has fired up some of the old internal programs that yielded all that music in the 1990s.

“I’m hoping this [Vegas arrangement] is what it’s supposed to be: knock the rust off, get the wheels rolling and get going,” he said.

Garth’s been performing in Vegas only on select weekends, which allows him to minimize the rigors of travel and still makes him available to his core fans, who remain as dedicated as ever. As those fans show up at the concerts, they’ve made the initial part of his re-entry extremely smooth.

“It’s like playing for your own mom,” he said. “They just come in there and seem to be open to whatever you want to do.”

Garth’s next Vegas dates come the weekend of June 25-27. In the meantime, he visited Colorado this past weekend to take part in a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a Child Life Zone pediatric ward at Denver Health. Funded in part by his Teammates For Kids Foundation, Garth attended the event with a bunch of sports stars, including former Cowboys quarterback Troy Aikman, plus some past and present members of the Denver Broncos.

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