Garth Brooks' hot takes abound, and his current wife Trisha Yearwood might be the most media-accessible star of her caliber. Yet it's rare to hear the perspective of Brooks' first wife and the mother of his three daughters, Sandy Mahl.

The upcoming, two-part A&E documentary Garth Brooks: The Road I'm On heavily incorporates Mahl's side of the story, however, in a way that's left her talkative ex-husband speechless.

“What really surprised me was Sandy, the girls’ mom. She was phenomenal,” Brooks told reporters of Mahl's involvement in the documentary during a press junket in New York City (quote via Taste of Country). “[I was] gone so much on the road [during our marriage], there were things I guess she was [trying to tell] me that I didn’t hear until this biography.

"It’s rare you get to hear the other side," Brooks adds. "I just saw her and I think I hugged her harder than I ever have now that I know things that either I didn’t hear or that she didn’t say until now.”

Brooks and Mahl married in 1986, just three years before the 1989 album Garth Brooks changed their lives forever. They divorced in 2001, and Brooks married Yearwood -- a guest vocalist on that 1989 debut album, fellow '90s country star and occasional duet partner -- in 2005.

“I had been married 13 months when I met [Yearwood]," Brooks says. "When someone said, ‘What’d you think when I met her?’ I said, ‘I felt like I just met my wife,’ which is weird, right? But the girls’ mother and I were married in a church, in front of our families."

Despite his contentment with his second marriage, Brooks doesn't regret his time with the mother of his three daughters. “If we’d gotten married then, either the career wouldn’t have been what it was in the ’90s or our marriage wouldn’t have lasted. So I have to believe that things happen when they happen," Brooks observes.

"I feel very lucky right now where I’m at," he adds. "So even if I did have regrets, I wouldn’t change anything in fear of changing where I’m at right now.”

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