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By Grace Miller – Entertainment –

The lights darken, everyone in the arena stops talking immediately to wait for one of the most famous country singers in the world: Garth Brooks.

All of a sudden, the big screen hanging above the center of the stage lights up. It plays videos of some of Brooks’ previous tours, his many many awards and other random clips of his life. Then, with the speed of a lightning strike,  Brooks appears on stage from a hidden door on stage. Everyone in the arena explodes with noise and applause at the sight of the singer.

When everyone in the arena was screaming and yelling, I really felt like Brooks had built a super strong fan base that cared about him. As soon as he started talking about the tour and his life, I could really tell that he cared about what he was doing which made the concert seem very important to him.

Garth Brooks has won over 50 musical awards, including five World Music Awards. He put on a world tour out of his retirement. His tour is becoming one of the highest grossing tours ever. Brooks is known to be one of the most famous country singers in the world, and it was an amazing opportunity to be able to go see him in concert at the Pinnacle Bank Arena on Oct. 20, 2017.

I had seats in the middle section of the 2nd row on the ground. Being so close to the stage was an amazing experience, I was about 5 feet away from the stage once we were standing and moving forward. I had enough adrenaline to get up on stage and start singing with him.

A lot of people on the floor, like me, were feeling extra special considering the process you have to go through to get seated up close. Brooks never sells tickets in the first three rows at his concerts. In the hour or so leading up to the concert, security officers or his crew go up into the nosebleed sections to find people to sit in the first three rows.

The crew basically looks around the area and chooses someone at random. They will go up to people and talk to them about the concert and Brooks. The crew mainly chooses people who look particularly committed or in my case, people who have never been to one of Brooks concerts or a concert in general. I was one of those lucky people.

The energy in the nosebleed was nothing compared to the floor. Before the concert, everyone up in the rafters was excited but not really super excited, and that energy was tripled when I got down to the floor. Everyone was super excited to be so close to such a great performer.

The concert experience is so different when you are close to the stage. The performers can look at you, make eye contact with you and some of them even waved to our cameras. Being close that close to the stage made it feel like the performers were really trying to make you have the best time of their life. Everyone on the stage was very committed to what they were doing and that played a big role. Everyone on the crew and musical staff seemed liked they loved what they were doing and the performers looked like they really wanted to be there. 

The stage was a 360 degree design so everyone in the arena could see what was going on at all times. The performers would walk around the stage during songs to try and include the whole audience which was really nice, especially for the people who were sitting on the back end of the stage.

One of the coolest things about the stage was the setup of the drums. There was a large spherical ring that the drum set was sitting in. During a few songs, Brooks climbed up onto the set and spun it around while he was on it.

There were many technical elements that went into this production. There was smoke, confetti, streamers, lights and many visuals on small monitors on the stage as well as the usual large monitors for the people who are not close enough to see everything clearly.

The sound technician did a phenomenal job of making sure that you could hear Brooks the entire concert, and when he was not supposed to be heard you could only hear the thing that was supposed to be going on which takes a lot of attention and focus. 

Brooks did an amazing job of including the audience in his performance. There were many cheer-offs between the different sections of the audience.One of the things that I liked the most is that he took song requests as his encore. If you showed up to the concert with a sign saying what you wanted to hear, during the encore he would play those songs to make sure that everyone there had an enjoyable time.

He was also very respectful to the people who were putting in requests and did everything he could to make sure that their experience was the best they had ever had at a concert. The Pinnacle Bank Arena was filled to the brim even hours before the concert had started.

Before Brooks came out on stage, he had an opening act perform –  Mitch Rossell, a singer/songwriter from East Nashville, Tennessee. He performed 4 or 5 songs that he had written about his life. When he was performing, he was blown away by the support the Lincoln crowd gave him. Everyone in the crowd could feel the support they were giving to the young artist.

When Brooks finally came up on the stage through a door on the ground, the arena turned into what sounded like a war zone. Sound was exploding from every corner of the arena. Brooks was blown away by how loud the crowd was. His reactions to the thunderous applause and yelling the crowd was giving him helped the concert become very upbeat and meaningful.

During the concert Brooks’ wife, Trisha Yearwood, came out on stage to perform a couple songs for the welcoming crowd. This helped the audience see how truly family-oriented Brooks wanted

this concert to be. Yearwood and Brooks both took time out of the concert to introduce the other performers on stage and some of the crew.