Sooke resident Gord Phillips lives his life one guitar chord at a time, and when it gets too funny, or strange, he writes a song about it.
He certainly keeps busy.
Between driving for the Sooke School District, working as an educational assistant and working at SEAPARC Leisure Complex, Phillips still manages to squeeze spending time with his children and making new tunes with his latest three-piece band, simply known as the Gord Phillips Band.
At the end of the day, he does what he loves, because who knows how long anyone has on this planet anyway.
“One day I woke up and I was just like, if I don’t offer anything and today’s my last day on the planet, then what’s it all for,” Phillips chuckled.
Phillips got all of Sooke Elementary School singing for Lt.-Gov. Judith Guichon during her recent visit to Sooke, and is working on a theme song for the school.
“I wrote it in the frame that the kids will own it, and I wrote it simply so they will be able to play it and sing it,” he said.
This weekend, Phillips and his band will play at the Hilltop House Concert, where visitors can literally walk into a house, grab a drink and relax on a couch while listening to some live tunes.
“It’s intimate, but you can still be who you want be as a musician,” Phillips said, who, as the front man and guitar player, the venue is right up his alley.
When asked if he’s got any Valentine’s Day-themed songs in the works, Phillips said he doesn’t really have any love songs, but has some songs that he loves, such as Survivor Earth, a song about cloning and mixing DNA samples from several animals, a topic he approaches in his music with both humour and seriousness all at the same time.
In the next few months, he hopes to put together two videos based on his favorite songs, Dust and Two-plus-Two, both of which have a special place in his heart.
“[Dust] is almost like a ‘wohoo’ song, starts in a crescendo with the drums going crazy … it’s like, everybody wants to see the earth collide with Hailey’s Comet and everybody wants to see a NASCAR crash with all cameras on it … it’s about all this craziness in the world and we’re all really attracted to it,” he said.
Phillips said two-plus-two “doesn’t equal four anymore” is a song about today’s day of age when no bit of information is really solid or 100 per cent believable.
“We don’t know what to believe,” he laughed.
The Hilltop House Concert will take place Saturday (Feb.11) with doors at 7:30 p.m. and show starting at 8.
For tickets, please call 250-642-0949.
