Jon Brooks

Jon Brooks is a multi-award winning Canadian songwriter who believes that, “ultimately, the songwriter is trying to politicise love…a lobbyist for compassion to be our principle representative in government office”. 

Jon’s third CD, Moth Nor Rust, recorded in early 2009, looks inward, and to all that neither moth nor rust can touch.  The new songs attempt a balanced view of who we are versus who we might become.  They warn us, yes, but their first purpose is to offer hope, possibility, and the Gospel of Thomas’ idea that “if we give what’s within us, what’s within us will save us”. In Jon’s songs and stories we hear the urgent, moral inspiration of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Dorothy Day, Daniel Berrigan, Pete Seeger, Phil Ochs, Czeslaw Milosz, Albert Camus, and perhaps, most audibly in the choir of influence: Thomas Merton.  Jon admits, “‘though a return to simplicity and to essences’ is no new theme, we are living in a time that has not only lost its way, but a time that has accepted its lost condition as something ho-hum and inevitable. Moth Nor Rust challenges this dangerous view. Idealistic?  I’m certain of it.  But what is the alternative? I agree with Teilhard: that the mandate is “to see or to perish.  Our present age is need of something greater than ‘happy’ songs – I am offering hopeful songs.“Should you be disturbed by the crying of the times, Jon will comfort; should you be comfortable in such times, Jon will surely disturb.