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.
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.
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 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.
Moth Nor Rust enjoyed international chart positions and worldwide airplay, as well as his second Songwriter of the Year nomination at the 2009 Canadian Folk Music Awards.
Another similarity with Brooks's other releases is the wide-ranging, topical and controversial song subjects: the Alberta tar sands ("Fort McMurray"), Bill 101 and Quebec's language laws (Hudson Girl), Palestinian suicide bombers (Son of Hamas), a 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 cheapened or degraded by the modern lie of 'closure'".
It draws on philosophical paradox, gallows humour, impossible love, titillating gore, serial killers, gun dealers, rampage killings, missing women, First Nations injustice and catastrophe, necrophilia, Shakespeare, and John Milton.
The original Moth Nor Rust scratched the itch for an uplifting digression from darker earlier themes of urban disappointment in No Mean City (2006), by Canadian war and post traumatic stress stories in Ours and the Shepherds (2007).