Jon Brooks's lyrics attend to, in Brooks' words, 'calming those who've looked into and seen what is in their hearts and terrifying those who've not.
10 Facts About Jon Brooks
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In 1996, Jon Brooks relocated to Krakow, Poland to study Eastern European history and politics at Jagiellonian University.
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Jon Brooks travelled extensively throughout Poland, Hungary, Ukraine, the Baltics, Croatia, and the recently war ruined Bosnia-Herzegovina.
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Sometime around 2003 and at the urging of two of his literary heroes and mentors, Austin Clarke and Barry Callaghan respectively, Jon Brooks returned to music, this time with a Taylor 615 acoustic guitar.
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In 2005 he released, No Mean City - his first of seven thematic albums noted as much for Jon Brooks' invented and percussive guitar style as his lyrics' temerity, dark humour, and obsessive interest in violence, love, paradox and the unity of opposites.
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Jon Brooks' songs are universal in theme and particular in Canadian subject matter.
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Jon Brooks's songs are often peopled by morally ambiguous and non-binary souls - in his words, 'those on the outskirts of approval.
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Jon Brooks cites Czeslaw Milosz, John Milton, Thomas Merton, Svetlana Alexievich, Mary Oliver, Simone Weil, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Platonov, Dostoyevsky, and Anton Chekhov as his foremost literary influences.
9.
Jon Brooks currently holds the dubious record for most nominations at The Canadian Folk Music Awards for English Songwriter of the Year.
10.
Morally and politically ambiguous, Delicate Cages offered what Jon Brooks has since called "necessary and alternative understandings of 'hope' and 'grief' that are neither sanitized, dumbed down, nor cheapened or degraded by the modern lie of 'closure".