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Jon Brooks returns to Amarillo on Saturday, October 25

HPPR welcomes Jon Brooks back to Amarillo for a Living Room Concert on Saturday, October 25! This show will be held at HPPR Studios, located on the NW corner of 6th and Polk; we are in the basement of Amarillo National Bank’s Special Assets Center, in the heart of Downtown Amarillo.  The doors will open at 7:00, and the show will start at 7:30.  We will have the usual great coffee from the good folks at Evocation Coffee Roasters, and fresh baked cookies from Kristy Fuller.  To make a reservation for this show, call us at 806-367-9088 or send an e-mail to us at music@hppr.org.  Don’t miss it!

About Jon Brooks

Taken from Jon’s website(jonbrooks.ca):

“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.” — Jon Brooks, September 2013

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 – it was during this time when Jon discovered what kind of song he wanted to write. It was in 2005, 8 years later, he decided he was ready to write and sing that song.

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 literary and folk traditions.  It was followed by Ours and the Shepherds in 2007 and 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 initially released independently in November, 2011 but was formally re-released by Borealis Records in May 2012. The album earned Jon his third ‘Songwriter of the Year’ nomination in 5 years from The Canadian Folk Music Awards. Like its predecessors, the 11 songs on Delicate Cages were inter-woven to the larger common 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 Jon’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 Jon 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.’”

Mike Fuller remains our station's favorite prodigal son. Former Music Director of High Plains Public Radio, and host of High Plains Morning (2010-2015), he has returned to HPPR with a new show called What The Folk?—a signature mix of folk, roots, Americana, and more—woven together by a unifying theme. Tune in every Saturday night at 7pm CT for a two-hour mix that could only come from the man himself.