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Chris Gaines is a one-off fictional Rock music persona created as a movie character for Garth Brooks to explore musical styles far removed from his success as a country music singer.
Initially, Brooks planned to feature the Gaines persona in The Lamb, a motion picture that never materialized. In 1999, Brooks released Garth Brooks in...the Life of Chris Gaines, his only album as Gaines. The album produced two charting Billboard singles, including the top 5 pop hit "Lost in You".
To promote the album's release, Brooks appeared as Gaines in a television "mockumentary" for the VH1 series Behind the Music and as the musical guest on an episode of Saturday Night Live, which he hosted as himself.
The album – and Brooks' promotion of it – received a lukewarm reception. The album received mixed reviews, and Brooks' fans responded with general confusion as to the purpose of the project. Although the album made it to No. 2 on the Billboard 200, expectations had been higher and retail stores began heavily discounting their oversupply. Less than expected sales of the album (more than two million) and no further developments in the production of the film, as a result, brought the project to an indefinite hiatus in February 2001, and the Gaines character quickly faded into obscurity.
Despite the less than spectacular response to the project, Brooks gained his first – and, to date, only – Billboard Hot 100 Top 40 single with "Lost in You", the first single from the album (Brooks had previously prevented his songs from appearing on the chart by refusing to release them to pop music radio stations). Critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic speculated that the alternate persona and elaborate marketing scheme backfired, writing, "When Brooks' new persona and his album were revealed to the public, they were unforgiving – they didn't think he was playing a role, they simply thought he'd lost his mind." However, Erlewine gave the album a 3-out-of-5 stars rating and in the same review later wrote: "Judged as Brooks' first pop album, it's pretty good, and if it had been released that way, it likely would have been embraced by a wide audience."
In March 2021, Brooks announced that The Life of Chris Gaines was to be rereleased on multiple platforms, including digital and vinyl, adding that previously unreleased songs were also forthcoming.
| 1999 ! scope="row" | "Lost in You" | 5 | 9 | 62 | 2 | 1 | 55 | 70 | | align="left" rowspan="4" In the Life of Chris Gaines | |
| 2000 ! scope="row" | "That's the Way I Remember It" | — | 26 | — | — | — | — | — | ||
| "—" denotes releases that did not chart | ||||||||||
| 1999 ! scope="row" | "Lost in You" | Jon Small |
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