Garth Brooks, America's all-time best-selling solo artist, is coming out of an eight-year retirement to perform 16 weekends a year in Las Vegas, according to the musician.

The country star will play at the Wynn Las Vegas resort in an unusual five-year deal that required the hotel group to buy the singer a private jet to ferry him and his family to Nevada from their home in Oklahoma.

Brooks, 47, only agreed to the comeback on the condition it would not interfere with driving his young daughters to school in Tulsa, Oklahoma every morning, Wynn Resorts chief executive Steve Wynn said at a press conference.

"He said my music was something people should hear and I thought that was sweet," said Brooks, who has sold more than 110 million copies of his 19 albums. "I told him he couldn't afford me. I was wrong."

Best known for hits "Friends in Low Places" and "The Thunder Rolls," Brooks rocketed to fame in 1989 as one of the first country music artists to also top the popular music charts.

The Vegas shows, with the first scheduled for December 11, will be a freewheeling production in which he may or may not appear with a band. The song list will not be set and Brooks's wife, three-time Grammy Awards winner Trisha Yearwood, is likely to share the stage occasionally.

Source: AFP