“One night I was working on another song,” says singer-songwriter Gabriel, “and suddenly the line ‘Madaling araw-arawin ang panliligaw sa iyo’ (Wooing you is easy to do every day) came up. Then I thought that this should be in a different song, so I built up the song from that line. This was one of the songs that wrote itself naturally. I finished it that night.” The result of that sudden flash of inspiration is his new single “Madaling Araw,” which he composed and produced. The single is now out on all music streaming platforms.
“Madaling Araw” is inspired by Gabriel’s own experience of being with his partner, he says. He imagines working late and finding her sleeping a few feet away and offering her hugs and kisses upon her sleeping and waking her up. When asked about what makes this song stand out in a long tradition of love songs, he replies, “’Madaling Araw’ came from my own emotions and experience, it came from a real place. And I think that honesty in expressing yourself in a song is what makes [it] stand out.”
One other inspiration for this song, however, is from one of alternative rock’s classic records. At the end of the 1995 double album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness by the Smashing Pumpkins, a band whose music Gabriel has been revisiting, he discovered the track “By Starlight.” The song’s feel that depicts melancholy as the day ends, he says, was something that he wanted to do in his music, and “Madaling Araw” was the result. (Incidentally, the two halves of Mellon Collie each represent day and night, which makes the mood Gabriel felt more apt.)
Gabriel hopes to include this in an upcoming five-song EP, along with the previously released “Sa ‘Kin Lang Tumingin.” He also hopes to perform his songs live with a band sometime soon. With these musical endeavors in store, listeners will discover someone who writes and sings from an honest place.
ABOUT GABRIEL
A Preacher’s Kid Tries His Hand at Making His Own Music: Gabriel’s Story
There is an acronym that I first encountered in the mid-2000s when I frequented certain online message boards. It was “PK.” It stood for “preacher’s kid.” This came to mind when I came across the story of Gabriel. He is a PK through and through, and he is finding his own voice as a musician and songwriter.
Gabriel was born in Quezon City but spent his childhood in different parts of Metro Manila. His father was a pastor who served congregations throughout the metropolis. In 2010, he and his family moved to Ontario, Canada. He decided to return home in 2016 to pursue music, while his family has been staying abroad to this day. His father currently works in IT and his mother is an accountant, but his family has had a musical story that shaped his life.
Gabriel’s parents were part of the Christian music industry in the 1990s and early 2000s, and they were members of a band called Lampara. Apart from being a pastor, his father also produced music for several Christian artists and churches. In the meantime, Gabriel was growing up to be a creative child, but when he was not drawing or doing arts and crafts, he would spend time with his yo-yo and his Game Boy (favorite game: Pokemon). And he took time to daydream, sometimes.
It was when Gabriel was a freshman in high school that he discovered the joy of making music. He decided to learn how to play the guitar as a joke, he says. Then he took it seriously, learning to play music by local bands at the time, including Mayonnaise, Callalily, and Hale. One day, while watching TV, he heard Shamrock’s “Alipin” for the first time. “I knew I had to learn it, it was more advanced than what I knew,” he says, “I remember spending the summer trying to play it by ear because I did not know how to read tabs. I still can’t.” Apart from honing his skills through secular music, he played the guitar and other instruments in church bands, something which he says really helped him grow as a musician.
However, even if music was part of Gabriel’s life, he was equally keen on the visual arts, particularly the making of comics. He wanted to be a comic book artist, and he loved making multiple copies of his comics for his classmates and churchmates. He now sees, however, that he should have just scanned a copy and printed out the rest. His equally strong interest in the field almost got him into some of the best art schools in the country, but his family moved to Canada before he could do that.
Gabriel’s first produced song was called “Ice Candy,” which his father helped make. He says that it was part of a friendly rivalry with his childhood best friend. The friend joined a band in college and ended up recording a song, which he made Gabriel listen to. Gabriel decided to respond by composing and recording his own tune! The experience of writing and recording that song left a huge impression on him that he ended up recording his first EP, Lucidream.
While in Canada, Gabriel continued pursuing music in a very productive way, making several EPs and albums. When he was 18, he formed a band called Lucy Diamond, and they rehearsed at their drummer’s office. One day, he met a Filipino producer in Toronto who got the band their first gig, playing a Hard Rock Café in the city. “We were well received,” he recalls. As with a good number of his generation’s musicians who learned how to produce music in their bedrooms, however, he didn’t know how to get his music out there and he had to learn how to do things by himself. And when his first hit, “Panaginip Lang,” received attention, he decided to come back to the Philippines in 2016 to pursue a musical career in earnest. While writing music for other performers, he formed his own band and managed to gain recognition for his work as a pop composer.
In 2021, Gabriel signed with MCA Music. He says that many of the musicians who inspired him are connected to the MCA family too. What he discovered by joining the label was that they really encouraged him to pursue his artistic passions. “I never felt like I’ve been forced to make music I don’t like,” he says, adding that the label was helpful in nurturing and developing his musical ideas. In an answer that evokes the title of his first hit, he says that his music feels like waking up from a dream and discovering something about oneself.
Gabriel’s current musical influences are very much from the rock world. He cites very influential bands from the Sixties and Seventies such as The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and Queen. Nick Cave gets a mention, as does David Bowie. More contemporary acts include the Smashing Pumpkins (lead singer Billy Corgan, he says, is a musical perfectionist), My Chemical Romance, and Marilyn Manson (whose concepts are always on point, he notes). He introduced us to a Danish band called Mew, an alternative rock ensemble that started in the same era as the Smashing Pumpkins and still performs to this day.
We asked Gabriel about his hopes for the future, and he responded, “I hope to keep making music for as long as I can and possibly help shape the musical landscape. [I also want to] inspire aspiring artists to keep soulful music alive and well.”