Garth Brooks, who rushed to finish his latest album for release in conjunction with his Aug 7 Central Park/HBO concert won't be releasing it at all in the foreseeable future.

That's because of "the whole annihilation of the New York office of EMI," the country superstar notes -- referring to the recent departure of record company honcho Charles Koppelman and others. "They're the ones who set up the Central Park concert, everything," he reports.

"I'm a business partner with my label, and this business partner was scared to death that between the staff being cut and the moving boxes being packed, the album would get lost in the shuffle... I want to make sure that EMI's objective is not just to ship albums to retailers, which is the easy part -- it's to also get them out the retailer's doors. I still haven't heard anything that convinces me of that," he says.

Meanwhile: Brooks not only has the ongoing national tour and massive Central Park concert to think about, he's also moving forward on his deal to produce movies for 20th Century Fox. His Red Strokes Entertainment banner is developing "The Lamb" a thriller about a murder plot in the music industry in which Brooks will appear -- and for which he'll do the soundtrack.

And he has another project, a supernatural story of good and evil based on his own idea, the he's personally taking forward. "All the writers the studio brought in to work on it took it in different directions than I wanted to go. Finally, they said, 'Why don't you write what you want?' So I've been working on it"