Hyperfocus #9: I went to the same school as Kitchie Nadal
Twenty years ago Kitchie Nadal helped lead a female renaissance in Filipino alternative. At the same time, she went to the same school as me. It was a matter of time before an encounter happened...
For better or worse, I had fashioned myself as a photographer. Not a very good one, but then, I didn’t fashion myself as an artistic photographer. All I did was sneak out my parents’ five-megapixel point-and-click and shoot things going on around me. This usually meant photos of my classmates doing weird things in between classes, or sometimes during classes.
I did this a lot during my freshman year at the De La Salle University. Sorry—my frosh year. It’s a term the university adopted, and I’m not sure what the origin story is. Anyway, there wasn’t a lot of time to do this. There were only ten-minute breaks between classes and, if we had back-to-back ones, we spent most of that time going from one classroom to the next.
Not always, though. One term there was a rough two-hour gap between classes, so I found myself waiting at the empty classroom around thirty minutes before my next class. That Friday one of my classmates—Jana, who always seemed to know a lot of things—went up to me.
“Do you have your camera, Niko?” she said.
I nodded.
“Come with me,” she said. “Let’s go have a photo taken with Kitchie Nadal.”
This was nineteen years ago. Kitchie was, at that point, one of the biggest names in Philippine music. She had just released her self-titled debut album in 2004, but she was already a familiar voice to some, having just left Mojofly to pursue a solo career.
Her first solo single, “Huwag Na Huwag Mong Sasabihin”, was everywhere. It was quite exciting to me, personally. This was the time when Pinoy alternative was having one of its comeback cycles, after a few years of novelty songs and an interregnum of middle-of-the-road ballads from the likes of Christian Bautista and Nina1. Now, you have a female singer-songwriter, with a rockier lean but not with the exact Alanis Morrisette vibe, becoming ubiquitous. The song has lift, but it is, at its core, something that Filipinos have always wanted: a song about love and heartbreak. Twenty years on, it has not aged. It still packs a punch.
I wouldn’t say I was that in love—I think I always had the tendency to act a little nonchalant, because nobody likes the OA me—but I loved it enough to want the album. I actually asked my mom to buy it for me. As a Christmas gift, mind you. It was my first ever album.
Kitchie’s self-titled debut remains as strong as it did all those years ago—and that isn’t an assessment made with rose-tinted glasses. I mean, I can. I played this album non-stop. It felt like I knew the whole record like the back of my hand. Despite the mass appeal of its lead single it was quite personal, with a handful of tracks invoking her faith. I always thought tracks like those would always stick out—I never was a fan of praise music—but she manages to avoid that fate, with “You’re Worthy” plausibly being about something more secular, for example.
But focusing on that is doing the album injustice. Despite the relatively harder moments—the carrier single, but more particularly the final two tracks, “Bulong” and “Fire”—there’s a very ethereal nature to Kitchie’s music. The production manages to float like, err, fairy dust, underneath that hard-to-describe voice of hers. It’s striking, it’s strong, but it’s also delicate. In hindsight, I think I enjoyed her debut a lot because of how ephemeral it felt, how you are transported to a particular space when you listen to it—and somehow, all these years later, it somehow stays with you.
Kitchie’s popularity paved the way for a contingent of female performers and female-led bands that were just an ubiquitous at the time, although it’s a disservice to say that they all came in her wake. Another artist who was often paired with Kitchie is Barbie Almalbis2, and they all share the same band family tree. Okay, stick with me: she made her debut in 1996 as the vocalist of the Hungry Young Poets, which produced only one album before going their separate ways two years later. That band’s bassist, Ricci Gurango, would eventually form Mojofly, with Kitchie as a vocalist. As for Barbie, she and fellow HYP bandmate Franklin Benitez would regroup into Barbie’s Cradle, which also had a string of successes (including “Tabing Ilog”, which became the theme to the wildly popular teen drama of the same name that very much evokes Dawson’s Creek in vibe) before she went solo.
Come to think of it, that female-led renaissance had always been bubbling under, mostly as part of bands that college students just before me were already enjoying. I’m thinking of Moonstar88, whose most enduring hits came at the turn of the century: “Torete” from their 2000 debut Popcorn, and “Sulat” from 2002’s Press to Play. With original vocalist Acel Bisa3, the band delivered simple but striking compositions that, again, appealed to the romantic and the heartbroken.
Another band emerging at the same time was Imago, which came together in 1997 and initially began with a more worldly vibe. But a bunch of personnel changes4 led to a more conventional pop-rock sound in 2004’s Take 2, which captured the wider imagination through songs like “Akap” and “Anino”. Personally, though, my favorite from the band was the following album, 2006’s Blush, which contains one of my all-time favorite songs, “Sundo”5—which apparently is also about faith more than love. And then there’s me telling then vocalist Aia de Leon, in a surprisingly straightforward manner, that she was my “crush for the day” when the band performed at DLSU. But I digress.
Finally, there’s Session Road, a band from Baguio City6 and who also pretty much followed the same trajectory as Imago, starting with a more diverse sound—the city, perched atop the Cordillera mountains, always had a closer affinity for indigenous music as well as reggae—before shifting to a headstrong pop-rock sound in the middle of the noughties. Their 2004 record gave us the punchy “Suntok sa Buwan” and the never-ending heartbreaker that is “Leaving You”.
So, yes, it was an exciting time, and as a 16-year-old with not the strongest sense of self, it was easy to put these musicians in some sort of pedestal. (Well, except for the time I said what I said to Aia. I guess I really do have a thing for women with large eyes.7) These musicians, these ladies, doing so well, providing us the soundtracks to long study sessions and, at least in my case, longer bus rides, never mind that they were unfortunately lumped together by some media outlets as part of an “acoustic” wave in Pinoy alternative, which only works if you think of them as girls with guitars that don’t have any edge to their music.8 And one of them is studying in the same university as me?
So there I was, the guy with the digital camera, and some of my other classmates, being dragged by Jana out of our classroom. Let me illustrate this. We were at the Miguel building, where all of the liberal arts students were. There’s a short bridgeway connecting it to the Joseph building, where all of the science students were. It was a familiar passage for psychology students, who were technically liberal arts students but whose labs were at Joseph.
It was there where we were going to watch to have photos with Kitchie.
I am not sure how it all happened. Jana is a force of nature, and she could sweet talk anyone into doing things—she was that charismatic. Or maybe it’s because this has happened to Kitchie many times before, students from lower batches asking for a photograph with her. It all happened so fast, but suddenly, there I was, taking photos of Kitchie with Jana, and then another classmate, and then another classmate.9 And then I was handing my camera to Jana, and she was taking a photo of me and Kitchie, and I distinctly remember her saying we had to be quick because she was rushing to her next class. I mean, the breaks were only ten minutes in between. And just like that, it was all over.
But it’s not like I saw Kitchie often in my three years in La Salle. I only other time I did was a year later, when—I think!—she was coming out of her thesis defense, which for some reason was held in the classrooms of the communications department, at the second floor of the Miguel building. I remember sitting on the floor in front of the then faculty office, and seeing her walk in front of me, in business attire, as you were supposed to do during thesis defense.
It’s funny. I’m thinking back now and I don’t think I’ve ever seen her perform live. I just have those two instances, and that copy of Kitchie Nadal which I played relatively constantly, at least when I still had a CD player. In the years since, she released an EP, 2007’s Drama Queen, and an album, 2008’s Love Letter, both of which managed to sound even more ethereal—but since I didn’t have copies of those, they weren’t as lodged in my head as her debut10. I was already working then, but somehow I managed to keep touch with her work because of another friend, Sam, who I met during my radio geekery days and somehow continued being my friend many years later, despite a decade-long invitation to lunch that never really surfaced. She is a really big Kitchie fan, having watched her in concert multiple times and even had the same photo-with-her moment as me.
And then, she faded away. I think she got married, moved to Spain. She pretty much slowed down after the release of her 2014 record Malaya, an album that I admittedly have yet to listen to. She would reappear a few times—there is a video of her performing “Huwag Na Huwag Mong Sasabihin” in Spanish that, you know, just works—but not often. And then it was announced that she would be returning to the Philippines for a concert marking her 20th anniversary as a solo artist, and I knew I had to write this essay… or at least move it up from its original November schedule, as this was supposed to tie in to her debut album’s 20th birthday.
I was watching her performance on It’s Showtime earlier this week, and I thought two things. One, she still looks really cute. I really do have a thing for big eyes, eh? And two, I bet Sam’s watching that concert. I would be surprised if she isn’t.
Ah, the days when you constantly heard Christian’s “The Way You Look At Me” and Nina’s “Jealous” every couple of hours or so on the radio.
Much later in my lore, I would have the chance to talk to Barbie, when—during my old music blog days—I found myself in the same event as her. It was also a very crowded room, and I was terribly overwhelmed, so I did not get to say hi.
Acel left the band in 2004 to pursue a solo career, and I will confess that her debut solo record completely passed me by. I think it’s because Moonstar88 just wasn’t exactly my era, but something I associated with my older cousins. (It also doesn’t help that her solo work is under three different names on streaming services.) Anyway, Maysh Baay would take over as the band’s vocalist and they would have one more big hit in 2007, with “Migraine”.
One of Imago’s original members is Zach Lucero, a constant presence in the Philippine alternative scene across decades. That reminded me of when I was somehow invited to an Up Dharma Down performance that doubled as a PR push for Singapore tourism (and how I scored my first ever interview as a so-called music blogger). I brought the ex along, and she was very much visibly smitten by Zach’s looks. She did not want a photo taken with him.
I will die on this hill. “Sundo” is perfect as it is. It’s a song no one should attempt to cover. Moira dela Torre did not need to do a cover, but I suppose a contractual obligation is a contractual obligation…
Baguio was built when the Americans occupied the Philippines, and was designed as the “summer capital” because it had a much cooler—and thus more palatable to the colonizers—climate than Manila. The city was designed and planned by Daniel Burnham, before he would work on his iconic Plan of Chicago—the city’s major park is still named after him. But I digress. Session Road is the name of the city’s major thoroughfare, and was named after the fact that the Philippine Commission held their summer sessions at the now-demolished Baden-Powell Inn at the end of the street.
There are exceptions, of course. Just ask my biggest crush back in college… if you could find her. Kellybites Nights listeners would know… maybe.
That’s apart from the other “acoustic” wave in Philippine music around the same time, when artists like Paolo Santos and Nyoy Volante were also popular—although they were more adjacent to Nina than Kitchie. And while I’m at it, where does Sitti, the leader of the country’s short-live fling with bossa nova, fall?
This isn’t a brag, but as I looked at the photos I took, I find it funny how one of those classmates is now one of the biggest wedding photographers in the Philippines.
I think, in a way, Love Letter suffered from having its lead single, “Highway”, battered to death on radio because Caltex co-opted it for an ad campaign and had that song play every hour on pop stations. Funnily, it was a song that is much more Christian in its lyrics than most. All that said, “In A Big Way” is one of my favorite Kitchie Nadal tracks ever.