There are some songs that take years to write, and there are some songs that take mere minutes. This wasn’t one of them.
Silong is a song I gave up on many times because it wouldn’t lend me an ending, it is also the only original song in my upcoming album that I did not predominantly write the lyrics for, instead I focused on the melody and being involved in instrumentation ideas with my bandmates.
I first sat and jammed with Kim Lopez (keyboardist) humming a tune as he played random chords, and it was instant, on the very first try a simple melody sputtered from my lips and that was it, in its raw form, the melody was final, unaltered. Soon after I found myself threading through the lyrics… and that is where I had my many tangles. I first wrote the song in english, it was entitled “Once” but somehow the melody wasn’t sitting in the same mind-space because it was reminiscent of classic OPM melodies from the 70s… so somehow it was asking for Tagalog lyrics. I asked my mom to give a quick listen and she agreed, it did need Tagalog lyrics. I wrote 5 drafts of Tagalog lyrics and was unhappy with all of them. I reached out to a few songwriters for a writing collaboration, and none of the meetings happened. I decided it was time to bury the song.
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