Reviews from Bruce Archer

He describes himself thusly: “ Bruce Archer - a noxious, Ontarioian invasive weed inadvertently transplanted to Vancouver Island back in the last century - who has known Del for almost 40 years - and is busy giving Mental Jolly-Cues when he’s not being a Gentle Molecule…”

I not only have had a friendship with him dating back almost 40 years but he has consistently been honest, critical and encouraging about my foray into the world of being a singer songwriter. I highly value his friendship and his opinion. The following are Bruce’s unedited takes on each cut on my album, and then…my response. Hope it makes for an informative read. — Del Phillips

1. Dog Salmon
Bruce Archer: Del strikes a lighthearted tone leading with this bouncing country influenced tune. He also sets the west coast vibe. The Dog Salmon - or Chum Salmon - is not very highly regarded among fisher folk - but is the common everyday backbone fish of the west coast ecosystem. Del gives it folky flair, a likeable chatter and a silly demeanour. Finally- a bit of a gentle swipe at the fish farm industry that is decimating our wild stocks. A catchy tune for a catchable fish.

Del Phillips’ Response: Thanks Bruce. Yes the Chum Salmon on Canada’s west coast doesn’t get the respect it deserves. It’s my belief that it’s the Rodney Dangerfield of the Salmonid species. I wrote the lyrics quite some time ago as a poem and presented as such for a decade or more. I tip my hat to Alexandra Morton in this tune, acknowledging the amazing work done on putting fish farms in the public spotlight, My accompanist of many years Scotty Donaldson fleshed out the lyrics and Marc Atkinson arranged and solidified the chords and instrumentation. Both of them share song writing credits on this one. It’s certainly one of my favourite tunes to do live.

2. Maidens Blush
Bruce: Written about a time and place where Del uses his most sensitive conjuring abilities to crawl into the skins and hearts of a different people from a different time. But he beautifully paints a story that shows how unrequited love is both timeless and timely. I think of an Octogenarian fellow sitting in his wheelchair thinking back on the hardest days of his life and the hardest toll on his heart. I get a lump in my throat every time I listen to this sad song of lost love. And no, it’s not my Adams Apple. A Maidens Blush.

Del’s Response: Thanks Bruce. The core of this song came from a passionate conversation between my friends Larry Berg and Scotty Donaldson. They both had experience with the fruit of the Maiden’s Blush Apple tree.

Larry from his East Cider Orchard on Denman Island, and Scotty from growing up with the fruit in his hometown of Whitevale Ontario.

After the conversation I went home and the seed of the song was planted. I incorporated both hometowns of my friends, Scotty’s Whitevale and Larry’s Saskatchewan village of Sturgis. His dad ran Berg’s Garage, the Ford Tractor dealership in the 1940s and beyond. I worked fast and loose with facts and fiction, with the fictional characters winning the day. I didn’t mean to make this song so sad. It just happened in the stream of consciousness that came from my writing. Basing the structure from several tunes on Bob Dylan’s Blood On The Tracks album, I presented the challenge to Marc Atkinson. Within the hour the song base was laid out and the haunting guitar that starts the tune evokes a prairie landscape that is painted further with piano. It is Canadiana, pure and simple.

3. Down At The Riverside
Bruce: Iris Chrysanthemum Mulberry Root: A spirited sing along kind of tune that gets in your head and moves the furniture around. Sometimes at night I trip over the lyrics but that’s ok - always a soft landing. Just shows how even when Del isn’t saying a lot he still says plenty. Oh yeah - we’re down by the riverside…

Del’s Response: Thanks again Bruce. Originally this was a boisterous poem about the favourite watering hole of my youth, Lake Cowichan’s Riverside Inn.

Somewhere along the line I turned it into a song and in doing so it became a Celtic Ode to chasing after women with fruitless results. Parts of it fit with the Pub’s influence on me, other parts are imported from odd things like the ingredients of Clairol’s Herbal Essence Shampoo. Go ahead and Google that! So is it about the Riverside? Yes and No. It is an infectious invention musically of my mentor and collaborator Marc Atkinson and helped out with extra vocals from James Emerson of Hornby Island.

It is ultimately a pursuit and failure to hold onto love kinda song. Enjoy.

4. Little White Pills
Bruce: A hauntingly personal song. For those of us who experience issues with emotional health and well-being. It’s a difficult song to digest as it grips my throat. Perhaps that’s just me. The repetitive refraining and the causal allusions touch my heart and soul. Sometimes if I’m feeling low and particularly vulnerable - I skip past it. But usually I listen and thank my stars I’m still here in spite of it all. Thank you my friend for sharing your pain. I feel it.

Del’s Response: Bruce, I’m glad it moves you to avoidance at times. It is a personal song, written from scratch as a song, unlike many of my tunes that started life as poems. I battle depression, anxiety, and anger. Mostly I’m winning, sometimes I don’t. Medications help but sometimes they hinder and when mental mixes with physical pain and opioids are the solution, it can be a slippery slope. I have such a support system starting with my wife Shirley and my children Arlen, Tynan and Jori and so many other family and friends, I always end up on the right side. The promise of longer days and warmer times that the Vernal Lady, ( Spring ) offers, is what gives me hope. The song is personal but much of it is reflecting the pain and suffering of others who have paid an ultimate price when their little white pills have been laced with deadly mixtures. It’s not an opioid crises, it’s the unknown of the black market drugs and their deadly fentanyl mix that is the true crime here. Marc Atkinson built the musical bed from nothing other than the lyrical content and he nailed the music into the building and crashing turn of the words. I thank you all for your support.

5. Nice Girl
Bruce: To me the most different song on the album - it is sneaky and hidden and out there all at the same time.  Makes you think of a girl you knew in the distant past but never really thought of until this song makes some kind of subliminal awakening happen. It’s light and airy and stacked with images. I love it so. So nice.

Del’s Response: Bruce, so nice of you! This song, again was a poem and a true work of fiction. I see the main character as a voyeur of sorts. He sees the woman he wants to be with but never actually makes that happen and so he builds the story of her uniqueness as something he shares, when in fact all he is doing is looking and longing. In a nice way of course. Too shy to actually try and make the relationship happen, he pretends it is a relationship, and in a way I guess it is. Always a friend, never a lover. 

Marc Atkinson took some of my rudimentary musical loops as a jumping off point and built a unique song bed that is bouncy and addictive, and oh, So Nice.

6. No Place To Hide
Bruce: A sad and troubled song of relationship/ marital breakdown.  Beautiful images of hurt and harm, longing and loss.  It feels like the words and music of someone who is not very good at sharing until it’s too late. Once the ship of emotional connection has left port - the island of regret is too real and … beyond salvation. Stirs the universal emotions of love, neglect - and loss.

Del’s Response: You’ve read this song as I intended Bruce. My first ever collaboration with my musical friend Randy Duncan. I came to him with this poem in the late 1990s and he had an answer musically. A number of years later I was honoured to have this song featured on his album “ Monday Nights “

Randy and all of my musical friends and collaborators in his band, Tom Kirwin, Richard Sauve and Scotty Donaldson did a wonderful job.

Years later though I looked at the lyrics of the song and I had new ideas. I felt I needed to give this song a different interpretation than Randy had. I wanted it darker, slower and something that investigated the threat of spurned lovers suicide in the lyrics “ Bleed Bleed All Over My Sleeve “

Yes quite a different interpretation. At The Mill Street Studio in Grass Valley California I recorded a scratch track with drummer and guitarist Beau Askew. Although that recording helped me find the tempo and feel for the new interpretation, it was Marc Atkinson who ultimately set the tune up properly. I re-wrote some of the lyrics to reflect the new reality and thus the song is reborn. Different but similar in its own way. There are three song credits on this tune, Randy Duncan, Marc Atkinson and myself.

7. Oyster Lease
Bruce: Red & White: Folksy west coast maritime jig. Del really comes out of his shell with a nod to his past life experiences in the shellfish industry. Oyster Shells cut like razor blades - no truer words were ever spoke and I have the palm scars to prove it. Not much of a clam to fame but whenever I seafood I must pun-der the consequences.

Del’s Response: Bruce, punning about bivalves is a shell game in itself! We first came to Denman Island in 1964 and spent many summers thereafter in the rustic Hadley’s Beach Cabins. It was a childhood paradise. No electricity, just outhouses and a hand pumped well, shared by 6 cabins. Beside the cabins in Metcalf Bay was an Oyster lease. A government granted intertidal use zone for harvesting of shellfish, mostly Oysters. The young men who worked the lease were loud and boisterous for the most, one fellow had several tattoos, a rarity in the 1960s. They swore, smoked, drank beer and told ribald stories when they took their breaks near us. It was fascinating to me and for a short time I thought I too would like to do that work, especially when they drove a huge World War 2 vintage Jeep Wagon onto the beach.

Speed ahead to the mid 1990s. I’m now living on Denman Island doing 15 different jobs to keep our family dream of living here alive. Don Candy and Margaret Fraser offered me work on their Oyster Lease at the end of Scott Road. It was labour intensive and you had to work fast according to the tides. Later in the year Roger Vinnedge offered me work on his Oyster Lease, located right beside The now defunct Hadley’s Beach Cabins on Metcalf Bay. I had come full circle! One day Roger was talking about the shellfish industry and how in the old days leases could be sold or traded with other Islanders in a casual manner, not like today’s bureaucratic hoops. He mentioned a fellow who after a night of drinking sold his lease for a beat up pick up truck and some rum. That’s reflected, almost word for word in one of the stanzas of this song.
This then is the spawn of this song. I wrote it as a sea shanty, plain and simple. Repetitive story telling. The fictional character is coming to the end of his career of decades on the beach. He eventually sells to a Vietnamese family and he retires.
Fictional tale and fictional people but based on some hard times and cuts to my hands that bleed in Red and White, Red and White.

Marc Atkinson determined the song should start with a stomp to set the pace. He dashed into his house and returned to the Barn Studio and presented a beautiful pair of patent leather Italian shoes with hard black soles. “ My Wedding shoes! “ he exclaimed, he slipped them on and that’s the sound you hear to begin the tune. Backing vocals from James Emerson. Marc, as in all of my tunes, plays all the instruments. Yes he does play the fiddle although he said he was just learning. I’ll take his fiddling around anytime.

8. Turpentineville
Bruce: One of the last songs added to Gentle Molecules - and one of the best - in my humble opinion. It’s a folky ballad that could have been written about any one of a thousand small mill towns - it leaches an air of everywhere and nowhere all at the same time. I can’t drive past or through a mill town - alive or gone - without looking into the passing pickup truck windshields for the men who lead those lives of quiet desperation. It’s a song that is both a celebration and a lament. Sometimes a great notion, indeed.

Del’s Response: Bruce, you’ve pretty well nailed it. I purposely made this song occur in a fictitious Canadian town, borrowing the idea from the Spoon River Anthologies by Edgar Lee Masters and in particular an offshoot of that, a brilliant song written by Michael Smith, Spoon River. I heard Steve Goodman’s versions decades ago and was transported. My goal was to do the same with this bit of Canadiana. I’ve lived and worked in a lot of Mill and Pulp Mill towns in my day. Lake Cowichan, Youbou, Campbell River, Nanaimo, Prince George and Prince Rupert. The places are different, the stories the same, especially back in the 70s when there was still vibrancy in the communities and money in the pockets of owners and workers. It’s always been a struggle, this song reflects that. Working in Port Alberni one winters day, I left my basement suite for work only to see black snow falling. The Pulp mill ash was so thick that the snow was muddy and then black. It’s a real thing. I also pay tribute to Ken Kesey and his breakout novel about Union and Non Union struggles in the woods industry, Sometimes A Great Notion. Marc Atkinson laid out the chords and track and read my mind on every verse and chorus, coaching me to take time, let the pauses work musically. As usual, he was brilliantly right.

9. Lady In The Lake
Bruce: A saucy romp through the smart ass flippancy of a fellow who would rather be funny than rejected. It’s another catchy tune - the one I sing along with as I drive in my car and recall how humour has kept me out of the kind of deep water that can swallow a careless heart. I love it.

Del’s Response: Again Bruce you’ve grabbed the essence of this jaunty, awkwardly fraught relationship song. Yup the fellow doesn’t read the body language, probably doesn’t want to as well. Miscommunication at its finest and sheer puzzlement that the woman in the song wants no part of the one dimensional guy. Where did she go? Why did she leave? Since the dawn of humans this bewildering set of questions has been thrown into the ether and usually the answer has blown away in the wind. A ripple effect, overall. I co-wrote this song with Cafe Pete, AKA Pete Keher a few years back. Marc Atkinson took the basic structure and gave it an Everly Brothers kinda Pop-a-Billy feel. That’s Marc doing the harmonies and ascending and descending “ eeeewwwwww “ vocals. It’s pure ear Candy.

10. She Likes
Bruce: A song about love and lust - infidelity- marital status, yearning and desire - all wrapped up in a disjointed quest into an emotional crossroads where both directions look as much wrong as right. Stirs a plethora of emotions that I am convinced most of us can relate to but can never risk sharing. Del goes there. Brave soul.

Del’s Response: Thanks Bruce. A complicated song, both lyrically and musically, about marital break up, which is always complicated. It portrays a minefield of emotions and thoughts that rush to the fore, all the while there is so much going on in the background to make this a complex study of the human condition. I watch and learn and then I fictionalize to my best abilities. Again this song is not about a particular couple, or trio, it’s an amalgam of stories I’ve heard and events I’ve seen. The imperfections of the human mind and soul are far greater than the physical. I presented this song to Marc Atkinson in its entirety with a crude musical bed built out of GarageBand loops. Marc took one listen and he was off. Taking the cue, he built an original score and bed that matched the lyrics to a tee, heavy synth and guitar overlays makes this tune quite unique in the album with its complex rhythms and a dark bed that supports the shadowy imagery.
It’s ultimately a bitter fruit, this story, and it’s never really clear whether the fruit is ever bitten into or just rolled from hand to hand. Decisions, decisions, decisions.

11. Mars Needs Women
Bruce: I wasn’t very fond of this song the first few times I heard it. Then I sort of realized it was about the kind of men who inhabit our Earth whom I have great difficulty relating to. Once I realized that - I understood the song and the characters between the lines. I’m probably wrong - but - hey - it grew on me - like red red wine.

Del’s Response: Bruce, I paired this song with the previous one because of the nature of the musical scores and the fact that this is the only pure Poetry driven song on this album. These two tunes are the outlier songs on an album of otherwise fairly mainstream Folk Indie creations. Mars Needs Women is the name of a very B grade Sci Fi movie and the title grabbed me after suffering through a viewing. Mars is a fresh start, or could be. To make it a fresh start I believe that Women must be the responsible adults on the Red Planet. Men have fucked up this Mad Old Mother Blue Planet we currently live upon.
It’s a hope towards an unknown future. Either here at home or faraway. Our World, Mars, the Solar System, The Galaxy, The Universe… needs Women in control.

12. Just A War Wound:
Bruce: I think Del is a magnificent writer. A wonderful poet. This is his masterpiece. One of my favourite songs of all time. Of all songs, of all music, of all time. First time I heard it - I knew. I told him so. My only hope is that the whole world will eventually hear this song and love it as much as I do. I’ll leave the themes and technical details to the experts. Just a War Wound is the heart of the message. The message: that’s for you to decide. Thank you for listening.

Del’s Response: Bruce, Marc Atkinson refers to this tune as “The Big Song“ and he’s not wrong. On so many levels I believe, this piece was our biggest challenge and our biggest success.

Rooted originally in my father’s story of being pulled off the Italian front in 1945 with “ Shell Shock “ and put aboard a medical train bound for The Netherlands. His diet of Eggnog and Whiskey did the trick, put some weight back on and numbed his head so he could return to the battlefield and be part of the Liberation of Holland. That was the seed of this song, but that’s not how this tune developed. I have yet to write the story of my Father’s Wartime activities and subsequent PTSD, and I will in time. In a strange turn of events, my Fathers PTSD became generational by his abusive indiscretions with family members over the following years. I’m not ready to go there…yet.

So, this Song is about PTSD victims among the entire spectrum of life. Nurses, Police Officers, Paramedics, abuse victims, physical, mental and sexual, bystanders at horrific scenes of carnage by vehicle, gun or act of Nature. The list is inexhaustible, children to seniors, the effects of PTSD are devastating and life altering. My take is on the emotional level, can he ( she, they ) feel anything at all? My experience and my research has shown that this is a common symptom. The freezing of emotion, that lack of empathy at times, the lack of caring or being capable of feeling, anything…anything at all.
I brought the lyrics, a Poem originally, to Marc Atkinson with no real idea what to do with it. I suggested perhaps a military snare to set the pace, other than that, it was Marc’s musical project. We tried the snare and agreed it was a bit harsh so he used brushes. He chose piano for the backbone of the song and we experimented with stanzas and chorus. That night he sent me home with the piano track so I could practice my vocals within that context. I was almost in tears that night, I couldn’t find a way to sing it and make it work. I was convinced the tune would die. The next day back at the Barn Studio Marc listened to my dilemma and suggested a few alterations to the lyrical order and a fresh approach to the chorus. Within half an hour I was back on track and we carried on. Marc plays all the instruments on all the songs on this album, but on this particular song his brilliant command of piano, guitar, bass and drums made for some true magic. Within the week he suggested that a female voice to harmonize and improvise over the lengthy instrumental ending would be a good addition. I gave him the go ahead and that night Kim June Johnson a singer songwriter from Hornby Island, laid down her haunting vocal track. The “ Big Song “ was complete! I’m very proud of this tune, full of emotional music and lyrics and my tribute to those who battle PTSD. There is help out there.

13. Gentle Molecules
Bruce: The title track - and really - this sums up the vibe around Del and friends. I’ve known Del for almost 40 years - no quite- but close. We worked together in a tiny radio station at the end of the line. Literally. The train tracks stopped there. I was a single fella who wasn’t good at taking direction. Del was an older (by 1 and a half years) married guy who wanted to learn as much as he could as quickly as he could about news and current affairs radio. He says he learned a lot from me. But in reality- I learned a lot - and continue to learn a lot from him - about letting go - losing the chip of my shoulder - being the person I was meant to be. Del is an “old soul” as they say. He makes a difference. He changes you. By example. Gentle Molecules. His tribe. Love you Del.

Del’s Response: Awwwww Bruce you are too kind! Thank you for your comments.

There were many times in my radio career that I thought to myself that my life stories were way more interesting than the people I was interviewing. Particularity politicians. So when I bowed out of the career in Broadcasting, it was necessary for me to tell my stories, if I believed they were that damn interesting. It seems quite a few of my fellow Denman Islanders and others over the years have reinforced the idea that my particular view on life is worthy of listening to or reading about. Thank you. You folks have evolved in my mind to become my Gentle Molecules. People of good heart, empathy and honesty who support me in my creative expression and my mental trials. It also became an introduction to some important posts on my Facebook page almost a decade ago.

It may sound a bit hypocritical that I prefer only the company of people who think as I do. Not really the case. I have many friends who lean to the right politically and have quite opposed views of the world from me, however if they are open to discussion, facts and dialogue then I consider them among my Gentle Molecule support group. I prefer to spend time with people who think like me, it’s only natural, but far from exclusive.

Big thanks to all of my Gentle Molecules, if you’ve read this far, you know who you are and know that you are cherished friends and supporters on my ever changing journey. Stay tuned!