Singer-songwriter Brooks John Martin
is a highly structured and intensely private person. Yet when he picks up a guitar, Martin becomes a conduit for freewheeling romantic narratives set in faraway worlds, transporting listeners far beyond the routines of his everyday life.
His latest album, War All The Time, conjures a baroque Americana that sweeps us away to exotic locales through vivid imagery and emotionally evocative lyrics. In addition to his sharply crafted originals, Martin applies his Brian Wilson-like sense of orchestration and arrangement to two profoundly reimagined covers. War All The Time also features a pair of stunning duets with female vocalists Lilly Hiatt and Amy Speace. The album was recorded at legendary Catamount Recording Studios by Billboard-charting producer and engineer Travis Huisman.
“When people hear my music, they don’t think it’s me because I have a stoic personality, but I go for the emotional payoff with my songs. It’s an outlet for me to go on adventures”
Martin’s taciturn temperament makes him a unique and somewhat mysterious artist. “I don’t perform live. I don’t care for it. I’m a songwriter first and a recording artist,” he says. To date, Martin has released six albums, some under the band monikers Toast and The Blue Danes, and others under the alias Frank Hansen.
His previous album marked a new era of creativity, as he released it under his own name. It became something of a surprise success, with songs from the album amassing more than 400,000 streams. It was an artistic high watermark, and Martin had suggested it might be his final musical statement. Beneath that sense of accomplishment, however, was the nagging reality that new songs weren’t coming. Fortunately, the creative drought passed. Martin was soon hit by a deluge of inspiration that resulted in two albums comprising 50 songs.
The first album to emerge from that prolific period is War All The Time. Martin describes it as a “California country” album, recalling the breezy, introspective roots music made in the 1970s by Laurel Canyon artists such as Eagles, Neil Young, and Jackson Browne. The album blends high-lonesome pedal steel guitar with majestic string arrangements and Martin’s richly expressive baritone. His songwriting relies on detailed scene-setting, vivid imagery, and imaginative storytelling—often far removed from his daily life—to reveal an inner world of deep feeling.
Though the songs don’t directly recount experiences from Martin’s life, autobiographical fragments surface here and there. The mesmerizing, Western-flavored “It Never Rains Here” is a hard-luck tale set in the unforgiving Arizona desert. “I did live there years ago,” Martin acknowledges. “But I didn’t experience what happened in that song. I just imagined what it feels like to be broke and screwed—losing all your money and the girl leaving. I wrote around that.”
The jangle-pop ditty “Do” came from something of a challenge: Martin wanted to prove to his wife that he could write a happy song.
The track is an homage to the books of Lewis Carroll, with a narrative set in Japan during the country’s era of rampant substance abuse in the 1960s. “Do” teases a storyline while drawing on fantasy and nonsensical lyrics. Its video brings that sensual, zany sensibility to life, unfolding in a luxurious Japanese paradise that looks as elegantly exotic as a White Lotus set. The delicately haunting piano ballad “Maybe” explores loss and the paths not taken, blending Pink Floyd’s eerie emotional distance with the lush Americana of The National.
War All The Time features two cover songs that Martin thoroughly makes his own. He challenged himself to record a hit from the 1980s by a female artist and, after careful consideration, chose Gloria Estefan’s “Don’t Wanna Lose You.” Martin reimagines the song as a romantic acoustic ballad with a stately string arrangement. Hearing his baritone sing Estefan’s soprano melodies is startling—you almost don’t recognize the original. “I was thinking, what would Johnny Cash do?” he says.
The second cover is a rendition of Modest Mouse’s “Ocean Breathes Salty,” inspired by the Sun Kil Moon interpretation. Martin’s version features duet partner Lilly Hiatt and a gorgeous orchestral arrangement. The classical accompaniment on this song, and throughout Martin’s music is a callback to his childhood. He grew up in a musical family, beginning piano lessons at eight and picking up guitar at 14. He has studied music theory extensively enough to write all of the instrumental parts for his albums, including their sumptuous string arrangements.
Martin’s fluency in the compositional conventions of Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart is a sensibility he plans to explore further on the follow-up to War All The Time. That album will feature stirring classical chord structures and movements. And after that album, who knows? “Songs come to me in waves, and right now I’m in a lull,” Martin says. “Whatever happens, I have a full life with my family and a good job.”