Garth Brooks Loses Half A Year's Work Due To Broken Smartphone

Veteran US country musician Garth Brooks has hit an unfortunate roadblock on the way to crafting his expected follow-up to last year's ninth studio LP Man Against Machine after his mobile phone — on which he had spent the past six months recording ideas — broke, wiping half a year's work in an instant.

As Rolling Stone reports (via Milwaukee's Journal Sentinel), despite the anti-tech connotations of the title of November's album, Brooks had actually been embracing new channels of communication around the record's release, setting up Twitter, Facebook and Instagram accounts for the first time last year.

That openness to technology evidently extends — or, at least, extended — to his creative process, with the singer admitting to the Journal Sentinel he had been recording and saving new song ideas on his personal mobile, right up until it went to the great pocket in the sky.

"Here's where the old guy gets into technology, which is bad," Brooks told the Journal Sentinel. "All the new stuff which I've been working on for six months was on a phone that I just fried, and I can't get the phone to come back up.

"I know I should have backed it up... It's like losing your briefcase back in the '90s."

Fans who are worried about what this might mean in terms of the waiting period between albums needn't start sweating too hard, though — the Country Music Hall Of Famer assured the paper that he's not yet given up all hope of retrieving at least some of the unfinished material.

"We're still working on that phone," he said. "We'll get it!"