I grew up in a very musically inclined family. My dad was part of the John Van Desteen Choir of the Manila Cathedral and my mother is the queen of the karaoke machine. When I was in primary school and still living in Tacloban City, I was put in violin lessons by my parents. At first I absolutely hated having to go to lessons after school. I was a rowdy kid needless to say. Eventually my siblings and I completed our first module and were ready for a recital. We performed in front of a huge crowd inside the sports complex of Holy Infant College. That was my first taste of performing in front of a crowd (unless you count the nursery skits haha!).

 

Let's just say I became quite addicted to the excitement of performing in front of a crowd because of how much I loved to join sing and act.

 

After my family moved to Manila in 2007, I had to stop taking violin lessons. Around this time, YouTube was becoming quite a popular platform and it also became my learning tool for guitar! I self-taught myself how to strum and place chords with my fingers. The first song I played wasn't even on a guitar, it was an acoustic bass! I learned the basic chords for Everlong by The FooFighters. I couldn't play the whole song but it was so exciting for me to know that I could do these little things. I was still in primary school at this time so the most I could really do was sing and play the guitar below subpar haha! But it was fun and my friends supported my passion to learn more.

 

By the time I hit high school, my eldest brother Isagani was becoming a prodigy in all things music. He wrote his batch graduation song, continued violin lessons, and was even studying music production and theory. He also started a band called Farewell Fair Weather and I began to crave the same kind of excitement his band created during the 2010s. So in my own high school, I met Cyrille! We started a cover band for rock and metal bands like Metallica. Our first performance was during our high school Halloween party where we covered Enter Sandman by Metallica. I knew I wanted to continue being in a band even if my high school band didn't last too long.

 

Forming Area Five By sophomore year in high school in 2014, I was "bandless" but best friends and I had already been talking about starting an actual band. It was established that while I can play the guitar and some other instruments, I wasn't skilled enough to play full blown songs. However my band mates did like my voice, so we settled with me being the vocalist since I also really enjoyed writing lyrics, ( I was an emotional boi haha poems and all). We already played for our families during new years twice in the last 2 years with a full band set up. We were also already making our own originals. So when we heard about a battle of the bands audition happening in Assumption Antipolo, we knew it was the perfect opportunity for us to show them our original songs for the first time. We played one original and one cover, namely For You and She's a Genius by Jet. After that one performance, I knew... I knew I wanted to keep this up.