Jon Brooks
Jon Brooks is a Canadian musician and singer-songwriter best known as a solo performer but more recently as leader of Jon Brooks & The Outskirts of Approval. Brooks’ music may be characterized as literary, allusive, emotionally intense and difficult to categorize, borne as it is from a broad range of influence and musical incarnations. His 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.’ His albums, often thematic, fixate over love, fear, death, religion, war, post traumatic stress, technology, animal justice, ecology, esoterica, and the stars.
Born and raised in King City, Ontario, Brooks attended Humber College in the late 80s to study jazz piano before fronting a blues-rock Toronto based band in the early 90s as principal songwriter, lead singer, and Hammond organist. As a keyboard player, he played with The Norge Union, Days of You, and The Headstones.
In 1996, Brooks relocated to Kraków, Poland to study Eastern European history and politics at Jagiellonian University. He travelled extensively throughout Poland, Hungary, Ukraine, the Baltics, Croatia, and the recently war ruined Bosnia-Herzegovina. Upon returning to Toronto he attended York University to study an aleatory range of interests including music, politics, theology, and architecture; eventually graduating with a degree in English Literature.
Sometime around 2003 and at the urging of two of his literary heroes and mentors, Austin Clarke and Barry Callaghan respectively, Brooks returned to music, this time with a Taylor 615 acoustic guitar. In 2005 he released, No Mean City – his first of seven thematic albums noted as much for Brooks’ invented and percussive guitar style as his lyrics’ temerity, dark humour, and obsessive interest in violence, love, paradox and the unity of opposites. Brooks’ songs are universal in theme and particular in Canadian subject matter. His songs are often peopled by morally ambiguous and non-binary souls – in his words, ‘those on the outskirts of approval.’ He writes in a variety of forms including linear ballads, list songs, sonnets, ghazals, cyclical coronas, spoken word, and, at times, a more abstract and non-linear form of storytelling.
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. Songwriters and performers past and present Brooks most admires include Blind Willie Johnson, Howlin Wolf, Nick Cave, PJ Harvey, Gord Downie, Sam Baker, Iris Dement, Leonard Cohen, Gil Scott-Heron, Nina Simone, Sanam Marvi, Neil Young, and Morrissey.
Brooks currently holds the dubious record for most nominations at The Canadian Folk Music Awards for English Songwriter of the Year. In 2010 Brooks became the fourth Canadian since 1975 to win the esteemed, Kerrville New Folk Award at The Kerrville Folk Festival in Texas.
