Jon Brooks

Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: 20.But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: 21 For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” 

(Matthew 6:19-21) 

Fans of Jon Brooks will immediately recognize that the songs on Moth Nor Rust II, come from the much loved, 2009 release Moth Nor Rust. Having performed these…

Poets may have more to say to us today than theologians and economists. The poet can offer an 
imaginative way of engaging the issues of our time, a way that speaks to the whole person. 
“There is no revolution without poets who are seers. There is no revolution without prophetic 
songs,” offered Thomas Merton. We might ask, then, what contemporary voices can assist 
people of faith who pursue a vision that transcends the economic and technological mythologies 
of our culture? 

Jon Brooks is one of those…

1. What was your musical vision going into No One Travels Alone, and how did that influence who you worked with on it? 

I’m always looking write songs that make others feel the pulse of the soul of the age.  I begin a new album with the question: what is the current central tension of our times?  I answered this twice.  1. The refugee crisis. Migrants.  The fact that we are all migrants. The fact that there are currently 65 million people living in a barbaric state of homelessness, depravity, and crisis…

Singer-Songwriter Jon Brooks : An Interview

October 3, 2018  

By Mark Pavilons 

What most of us miss, Jon Brooks exposes. 

The accomplished singer-songwriter is more like a modern day standup philosopher, documenting the times. He’s a combination of George Carlin and Leonard Cohen.  That combination is perfect when it comes to creating contemporary music.  The King City native will return to his roots, with an upcoming performance Friday, Oct. 19 at Rockford’s in King City. Show time is 8 p.m.  Brooks…

A songwriter with a rare gift for the poetic, Jon Brooks also possesses a ruggedly virile voice that is the perfect delivery vehicle for these well-crafted songs. They are connected by the corona (circular)  form, in which the last line of each song is the first line of the following song, and Brooks pulls off this feat with impressive ease. On "Proxima B," he namechecks such inspirations as Leonard Cohen, Neil Young, Al Tuck, and Mary Margaret O'Hara, and this compelling album does them justice   -…

EXCLUSIVE PREVIEW! 

Jon Brooks – “Todos Caminamos Por Este Caminito” 

 Heather Kitching 

 May 4, 2018 

“No One Travels Alone is a contrite apology to my 138 super fans the world over for 2014’s murder ballads album, The Smiling & Beautiful Countryside,” Jon Brooks told me in an email this week. 

I had to smile. 

Countryside hardly requires an apology, but I got the humour in what he was saying. 

If great art is defined as work that makes people think and makes them uncomfortable, then Jon’s last…

1. Jon Brooks – The Smiling & Beautiful Countryside (2015, Borealis Records) 

jonbrooks200Jon Brook’s 2012 album ”Delicate Cages” focused on themes of love and fear; and freedom and imprisonment. For the follow up, “The Smiling and Beautiful Countryside”, Jon turned his cynical eye on contemporary North American society in a world gone mad to produce an album of murder ballads the like of which you may never hear again – and one that gives up more and more with each listen. It was easy to make this my…

Making the bodies count: Jon Brooks explores the dark traveller in new album

Singer-songwriter Jon Brooks set out to write a collection of Canadian murder ballads for his fifth and latest album, the Smiling and Beautiful Countryside, figuring he’d give a modern twist to a classic folk-song tradition. 

It’s twisted alright, hearing him sing in the voice of a killer, but the songs are brilliant, adding up to one of the most provocative albums of the past year. You’ll be fascinated by characters like Trevor…

Toronto indie artist Jon Brooks is bringing his new collection of original, rural Canadian “murder ballads” to The Moonsine Café Wednesday (March 4). 

Brooks’ music circles around the Highway of Tears, Christine Jessop murder, domestic violence, mass shootings in the workplace, and the forced relocation of the Sayisi Dene near Churchill, Man., to name some of the subject matter of his songs on his ironically-titled The Smiling & Beautiful Countryside album. 

“With some eerie-sounding, back-water banjitar…

Jon Brooks brings songs from his new album The Smiling & Beautiful Countryside to Halifax’s Company House on Saturday night. 

The Toronto-based musician revisits the folk/blues tradition of the murder ballad, with a collection of several new and original rural tales of death and grieving, filtered through today’s headlines and Brooks’ own dark, literate sense of humour. 

Brooks’ shifting viewpoints range from the laissez-faire attitude of a Gun Dealer to the perpetrator of a workplace mass shooting, in…

With past albums delving into such heady topics as poverty in the inner city and war stories, it may not seem surprising that downtown-based singer-songwriter Jon Brooks’ newest work contains more humour than his past endeavours. What is surprising is that the humour is wrapped in another dark genre – Canadian murder ballads. 

Brooks’s latest album, The Smiling & Beautiful Countryside, offers social commentary while avoiding heavy-handedness or moralizing. 

“I wanted to basically do an…

 by Kerry Doole 

Don’t let the title fool you; the landscape here is populated by serial killers, gunrunners and wife beaters, and the catalogue of horrors is rather unrelenting (his label’s bio jokingly notes the murder ballad…

http://www.sookevoicenews.com/ 

On Saturday night of Easter weekend about 25 people in Sooke ~ mostly members of the Sooke 

Folk Music Society ~ experienced an intimate concert with Canadian singer-songwriter Jon Brooks. An essayist and master of his ‘pet’ guitar, Brooks profiles himself as a thinker, writer, traveller and ‘armchair theologian’ turned full-time songwriter (in 2010). He is already touring all over North America to small audiences of 20, mid-size of 200 (though he calls that big), and…

SOUTH RIVER – Singer-songwriter Jon Brooks says he doesn’t write “happy music.” 

The decision is for good reason. 

“It’s sort of an illiterate request,” said Brooks. “My aim is to inspire. I’m not in the business of taking people away from themselves. That’s the role of pop music.” 

Brooks said he writes music that takes people on the type of introspective journey so-called happy music could never conquer. 

“An hour of pop music could take you away from your life and make you happy for a bit, but when…

By Kenyon Wallace

Unlike most contemporary acoustic artists, Jon Brooks doesn’t mind being referred to as a folksinger. In fact, he embraces the label. 

“I do feel very much a part of the (folk) tradition, which is inherently subversive and always has been,” says the Toronto-based singer-songwriter. “I would not be justified in standing behind a microphone and adding to the glut of noise and vapid distraction if I didn’t believe I had some kind of moral purpose.” 

Brooks’ new album, Delicate Cages, is…

Jon Brooks has an incredible ability to tell intensely personal stories with huge lessons: parables, in other words. His latest CD, Delicate Cages, demonstrates this with full force and a bold but simple theory: life is a series of cages largely built by fear, and love is the only tool we have to live with it. Lyrically this theme is obvious from the title of the record, Delicate Cages, taken from a Robert Bly poem: “Taking the hands of someone you love, You see they are delicate cages”. Bly’s sentiment not…

The ethos of the album is established in “Because We’re Free,” the opening song…

Since his first solo CD in 2006 Jon Brooks has delivered beautifully crafted and intricately literate songs based in his view of the world. A world which is a seemingly depressing and cruel place, but through his eyes, a world littered with shards of grace in amongst the glowing promise of hope that we humans have to cling to. 

With aptly sparse arrangements and help for his gritty down to earth voice from the likes of Lynn miles and Carrie Elkin, Delicate Cages delivers that and more as we follow his…

By Kerry Doole 

Those who like their folk sparse and laced with pointed social and political commentary should definitely check out this undervalued Toronto, ON singer-songwriter. Earlier albums, like his 2006 debut, No Mean City, and 2009’s Moth Nor Rust, hinted at a potential that’s fully realized on this fine release, Brooks’s fourth. His trademark powerful and often dark narratives are on vivid display, whether based on fact (the heartbreaking story of “The Lonesome Death of Aqsa Parvez”) or springing…

Scores of London region students will learn Wednesday how to fire up their songwriting from one of Canada’s top folksingers. 

Award-winning folkie Jon Brooks works with students at a Thames Valley District board conference at UWO affiliate King’s University College. Brooks’s session at the board’s SPARK! conference is about power of song as a form of social media. 

“The idea of singing about wherever there is violence and social inequity in the world, that to me is the essence of folk songwriting, and…