Garth Brooks

Garth Brooks went to Oklahoma State University on a track scholarship as a javelin thrower. He was also playing in bars around Stillwater, and after graduating with a degree in advertising he moved to Nashville, then came home within a day, discouraged. He tried again in 1987. Within a few years he was the best-selling solo artist in American history by certified album sales, and he changed country music into an arena spectacle.

He was born on February 7, 1962, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, at 1:07 in the afternoon, a time Astro-Databank rates A. His chart contains one of the most striking concentrations of planets in this collection: the Sun, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn are all in Aquarius, and all six fall in the ninth house. Aquarius governs crowds, communities and collective causes, and its keyword is often given as friendship. The ninth house is about wider horizons, belief and big ideas. A six-planet Aquarius cluster in the ninth describes someone whose purpose is bound up with bringing large groups of people together, and Brooks's concerts were built on that, with stadiums of strangers singing every word.

His mother, Colleen Carroll, was a country singer who had recorded for Capitol Records in the 1950s, and he grew up in Yukon, Oklahoma, in a large blended family. He has often spoken about his parents' influence on his values.

His Moon sits late in Pisces and falls in the tenth house, where a life is lived in public view. A Pisces Moon is emotional and empathetic, and in the tenth those feelings are on public display. Brooks is known for weeping on stage and for songs of open-hearted sentiment, from "The Dance" to "If Tomorrow Never Comes."

His 1990 album No Fences included "Friends in Low Places," which became one of country's great singalongs. His next album, Ropin' the Wind, in 1991, was the first country album to debut at No. 1 on the Billboard 200. He brought rock-concert staging into country music, swinging on ropes above the crowd and smashing guitars.

Gemini is his rising sign, which adds curiosity and a restless need to try new things. In 1999 he released an album as Chris Gaines, a fictional rock star with a different look and life story, an experiment that confused his fans.

Uranus, retrograde in Leo, sits in his fourth house of home and family, and in 2001 Brooks did something unusual for a star at his height: he retired from touring to raise his three daughters, promising not to return until the youngest had finished high school. He kept that promise and came back in 2014. He married the singer Trisha Yearwood in 2005, after proposing on stage.

The six Aquarius planets in the ninth house describe a man whose music was always about the crowd, and the crowd never stopped answering.