Watch Garth Brooks Perform ‘Stronger Than Me’ at 2018 CMA Awards

Garth Brooks gave one of the stand-out performances of the 2018 CMA Awards on Wednesday, Nov. 14, when he sang his new single, “Stronger Than Me,” for his wife, Trisha Yearwood.

“Life is made up of great moments like this!” Brooks wrote in a Facebook post sharing the performance.

The Oklahoma native reflected on his performance backstage at the CMA Awards, admitting that “Stronger Than Me,” which Brooks did not write, was going to be beneficial for his marriage to Yearwood.

“There are points in your life you never get across,” Brooks said. “You both just get to this point, where you argue and argue and then you just get exhausted, and you’re done, and that’s kind of our way. We have two or three points in our life like that.”

“That song addresses two of those three points, so I noticed when I looked up at her, at those points, she was kind of laughing, smiling, and crying at the same time,” he continued, “so this song’s going to actually make our relationship better, whether it does anything in the business or not.”

It was Brooks’ idea to perform “Stronger Than Me” for the first time for Yearwood, an idea that was initially rejected.

“The thing was, doing a ballad, and a new song, probably wasn’t great TV, so they weren’t sure about it all,” explained the singer. “And then when they started to come together and realize, ‘Okay, we’re going to suck everything down, where everything’s big choirs, big lights, big everything. We’re going to suck it down to just a singer and the guitar. I think it seemed to … Hopefully, I hope it works for them. It was a cool moment. She cried, so I was just happy about that.”

Brooks was determined to keep even the song’s message from Yearwood, although playing the song for her in front of a live audience was more of a challenge than he expected.

“If my life depends on it, then I can keep a great secret, but that one was for somebody else,” explained Brooks. “That’s for Miss Yearwood, I really wanted it to be a surprise for her, so it was good. When it came to the last verse, when it says, ‘I’d give her anything in life that is mine to give her / ‘Til the last breath that I leave, and if I have a choice / I pray God takes me first, because she’s stronger than me.’ That was a little … I couldn’t get to it.”

“I kept sitting there, just replaying,” he continued. “They were very sweet. They let me get my speed up, my momentum up, to go into that last verse, but it was good. She took it very well. She’s classy and she’s too sweet.”

Photo Credit: Getty images/Erika Goldring