Garth Brooks nearly talked himself out of the best decision of his entire life. He heard Tony Arata play “The Dance” at Nashville’s Bluebird Café and he absolutely loved it immediately. He promised Arata right then and there: get me a record deal and I’ll record your song. He got the deal. Then he started stalling. The song had a piano in it, and he was from Oklahoma. “It’s always just steel and fiddles,” he told The Kelly Clarkson Show years later. The album was almost done. He still hadn’t cut it. That’s when producer Allen Reynolds had enough. “You don’t cut this song,” he told Brooks, “it will be the biggest hit you never had.” Brooks went into the studio. He cut the song. Everything that followed came from that one afternoon.
Here’s the part that makes it better. Tony Arata wrote “The Dance” in 1986 after watching Peggy Sue Got Married and having an idea so clear he wrote the whole song the next morning in 30 minutes. He then spent three years getting rejected by every label and publisher in Nashville. Every single one. “I was turned down by the biggest and the best,” he said. Then Brooks heard it at the Bluebird, and it cut through everything. He could hear every word Arata sang — which was apparently unusual for Arata. “The two songs right up to ‘The Dance, ‘ I didn’t understand a word,” Brooks recalled. Then “The Dance” came and it was clear as a bell. He made the promise. He meant it.
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The night before they finally recorded the song, Brooks and his wife Sandy went to see a film in an almost empty theater. There were only four couples total. A slow-motion scene played over a piano riff that stayed with him. The next day he described it to his manager Bob Doyle. Doyle said, “Let me play you something,” and rolled tape. It was how “The Dance” started.
Doyle had been at the same movie. Same theater. Same piano. They cut the track on November 1, 1988. When Arata heard the final version, he didn’t even recognize his own song. His demo started on a major chord with no piano. Brooks’s version opened with a dramatic minor chord and strings. “I thought to myself, ‘Well, I guess it didn’t make it,'” Arata said. It was the last track cut on the album. It made it.
The Biggest Hit He Almost Never Had
“The Dance” was released as the fourth single from Brooks’s debut in April 1990 and hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot Country Singles chart that July. It won ACM Song of the Year and Video of the Year in 1991. Rolling Stone ranked it among the 200 Greatest Country Songs of All Time. The music video featured JFK, Martin Luther King, John Wayne, Keith Whitley and the crew of the Space Shuttle Challenger — people who died pursuing their dreams. “To me it’s always been a song about life,” Brooks said. In his 2019 documentary The Road I’m On, he said if he were remembered for only one recording, he hoped it would be this one.
He almost didn’t cut it because it had a piano. Reynolds told him he’d regret it forever. He was right.
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