Canadian singer/songwriter extraordinaire, Jon Brooks, will be performing at Studio Live at 2679 Beaufort Ave. in Cumberland on Sunday evening, Nov. 23 at 8 p.m.
Brooks is looking forward to reconnecting with his B.C. audience.
“I write songs to calm those who’ve looked into, and seen, what is in their hearts. I also write songs to terrify those who have not,” he said, describing his work.
It was in 1997, at 28 years old, and at the end of a year of travelling throughout Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union – and particularly, throughout war ruined Bosnia-Herzegovina - when Brooks discovered what kind of song he wanted to write.
In 2006 he began singing that song.
In 2014 Borealis Records released his fifth album, The Smiling and Beautiful Countryside. Brooks is a Kerrville New Folk Winner and a three-time “Songwriter of the Year” nominee at the Canadian Folk Music Awards.
No Mean City, released in 2006, was the first in a trilogy of albums of sparse instrumentation and densely layered poetry – a singular writing style characterized by paradox, understatement, overstatement, and by allusion to Western religious, literary and folk traditions. It was followed by Ours and the Shepherds in 2007 and the solo acoustic set Moth Nor Rust in 2009. Each album is imprinted with a theme: architecture and homelessness of the modern urban soul; war; and all the things that neither moth nor rust may touch: love, hope, faith, memory, gratitude, trust, inspiration, and forgiveness.
Delicate Cages was released by Borealis Records in May 2012.
The album earned Brooks his third ‘Songwriter of the Year’ nomination in five years from The Canadian Folk Music Awards. Like its predecessors, Delicate Cages’ songs were inter-woven by themes of love and fear; and freedom and imprisonment.
The idea was inspired by the Robert Bly poem, Taking The Hands: ‘Taking the hands of someone you love,/you see they are delicate cages.’
Also consistent with Brooks’s albums, the song subjects were as wide ranging as they were topical and controversial: the Alberta tar sands (Fort McMurray); Bill 101 and Quebec’s language laws (Hudson Girl); Palestinian suicide bombers (Son of Hamas); Bosnian child soldier turned Canadian mixed martial arts fighter (Cage Fighter); and so-called ‘honour killing’ (The Lonesome Death of Aqsa Parvez). Morally and politically ambiguous, Delicate Cages offered what Brooks has since called, “necessary and alternative understandings of ‘hope’ and ‘grief’ that are neither sanitized, dumbed down, nor degraded by the modern lie of ‘closure.’”
Advance tickets ($20) are now on sale at Bop City Records in Courtenay and Rider’s Pizza in Cumberland.
Get yours early as seating is limited. Tickets at the door, if available, will be $25. This will be an evening to remember!