Sometimes even Garth Brooks needs a break from Garth Brooks. This spring, Brooks pretended to be a baseball player with the San Diego Padres. With the Sept . 28 release of Garth Brooks in the Life of Chris Gaines, he'll pretend to be a pop star. Brooks sings the album in the character and voice of a star-crossed Australian-born musician who will play a pivotal role in The Lamb, a mystery thriller being produced next year by Paramount Pictures and Brooks' Red Strokes Entertainment.

The album covers a decade's worth of Chris Gaines' fictitious hits, which range from intentionally derivative Beatles sound-alikes to R&B-tinted acoustic ballads. Think of it as a year-long vacation from Garth Brooks, the juggernaut of a country-music stage persona to which Brooks often refers in the third person. "I got to hide behind raising money for kids to get to realize a life's dream of playing baseball," Brooks says. "Here, somebody hired me to do what I would eventually have done anyway (for my own enjoyment). It's not country, and it's not a representation of Garth Brooks. But now somebody has given me the keys to do this and put it out as their project. "But I play this CD at home, and I usually don't do that with my stuff. Usually when it's through, I'm ready to take a break. But this thing, I just play it all the time."

When discussing Chris Gaines, Brooks slips easily into a parallel universe, drawing the listener into the fantasy as he goes. "As you know," he says, holding a mock-up of the CD by Chris Gaines' first group, Crush, "this was the album that was recalled after 20,000 units were shipped with Chris giving the finger on the album cover." Brooks has developed the story in obsessive detail, incorporating elements of rock's great myths - among them Paul McCartney's death, the unfinished Beach Boys' opus Smile and the Kurt Cobain murder conspiracy. Brooks will spend the next year educating potential moviegoers in the history of his alternate world: He'll perform Chris Gaines' material on an NBC TV special Sept. 29.

He has persuaded VH1 to produce a Behind the Music mock-documentary on the character. The film, in which Brooks likely will appear as Gaines, will be accompanied by a second album from the character. "We want you to feel bad when we kill him off," Capitol Nashville head Pat Quigley told the crowd of radio and music-industry executives at last week's showcase, "because then we have six catalog records we can release later on." Capitol has released Lost in You, a melancholy love song sung in an airy falsetto, to radio stations, and VH1 premiered its video Monday. "For the first single, we wanted the most un-Garth thing," Brooks says. "The stations that have played it so far, the name that comes back more than anybody is Tracy Chapman." "Billboard will not take another artist's name off to put another one in at No. 1," Brooks says. " Well, I called them and said, 'Would you take Garth's name off?' So his (Gaines') albums follow his (Brooks') timelines exactly."

Chris Gaines' style changes drastically during the course of the collection. Brooks describes the earliest number as "The Beatles collide with the Partridge Family in a bus wreck," but the character's voice deepens and thickens as he ages. Other songs bear the stamp of Fleetwood Mac, The Eagles or Neil Young. One track combines a rewrite of folk singer Cheryl Wheeler's anti-gun If It Were up to Me and The Youngbloods' 1969 hit Get Together, coming off as part Billy Joel's We Didn't Start the Fire and part Puff Daddy's Roxanne. A couple of songs might not sound completely out of place on country radio - Garth Brooks certainly has recorded less country-sounding stuff than It Don't Matter to the Sun, a tale of cosmic-scale heartbreak highlighted by acoustic guitar and electric piano. And the remarkably soulful vocal performance on Driftin' Away is clearly identifiable as Brooks', especially when he stretches the ends of phrases in his typically melismatic manner. However, Brooks says, if he had cut these songs as Garth Brooks, "I think they'd definitely be squarer. I've never considered myself a hip guy. That's why I stayed out of the studio on all the sessions, let (the musicians) do their thing, then I'd just go in and sing. I'd have somebody else sing the vocal rough so I could see if that's the style we all agreed on, or if they wanted to take that style or make it raspier or something." For In the Life of Chris Gaines, Brooks worked with producer Don Was and songwriters Gordon Kennedy, Wayne Kirkpatrick and Tommy Sims, the trio who wrote Eric Clapton's Grammy-winning Change the World. The three musicians built their reputations in Nashville's contemporary Christian community, and the core of the Gaines band - Kennedy, Sims and drummer Chris McHugh - played in the late-1980s lineup of Christian rockers Whiteheart. Brooks says he modeled Chris Gaines on Sims, a highly regarded producer and songwriter perhaps best known outside Nashville for playing bass with Bruce Springsteen during the early '90s. "I listened to Tommy Sims over and over again, listened to his phrasing, listened to his licks and tried to figure out how to sound like him," Brooks says. "If I could pick how Chris should sound, it would be like Tommy." Using That Thing You Do! as inspiration, Brooks went for thorough historical authenticity, even shooting a video using only pre-1986 technology. ("The old lifts are so American Bandstand," he says.) "We did get to cheat," he says, "because hindsight's 20/20. We would cut the song the way we'd like to hear it. If it didn't fit the time, we would simply move the song to a later album." Every album Brooks has made has sold at least 3 million copies, and three of them have topped 10 million.

Though Garth Brooks won't forsake country music any time soon, success at that scale for Chris Gaines could offer Brooks the opportunity to run parallel careers, as Hank Williams did with Luke the Drifter, or, perhaps more accurately, like author Stephen King and his Richard Bachman pseudonym. "You've got to go back and make these one at a time, like the prequels to Star Wars," Brooks says. In that event, he muses, "Garth Brooks, I guess, will eventually become Chris Gaines." At the very least, Gaines' success could give Brooks the confidence to further expand his musical vocabulary, bolstered by the millions of fans who will have followed him through one stylistic leap. Brooks isn't planning that far ahead, although, as always, he'll leave his options open. "This one and The Lamb, I've promised Paramount," he says. "Anything after that, if it's Chris Gaines, it's because I want to. If the demand's inside me, whether the demand's out there or not, I can make another one that I can sit at my house and play.