She has performed in London, Barcelona, Dubai, Doha, Shanghai, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Maldives, U.S.A., Malaysia, and Vietnam. But now that everything is at a standstill due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Nicole Asensio, who has caught the eyes of a few Grammy award winning producers abroad and signed with Warner Music Group, is coming out with “Silong” on Aug. 28.
In a statement sent to Bulletin Entertainment, Nicole said the song took awhile to finish.
“There are some songs that take years to write, and there are some songs that take mere minutes. This wasn’t one of them,” she said.
Apparently, the artist gave up on finishing the song “because it wouldn’t lend me an ending.” Her working title for it for the longest time was “Once” until it and other unfinished songs got buried when his father passed away.
“One early summer afternoon I was cleaning up my old hard drive and found 49 (yes 49, I don’t know why 49 and not 50) unfinished songs and poems all works in progress, half written, half forsaken,” she said. “This one happened to be on the top of the list. I decided to give it another shot.”
That time, though, Nicole decided not to take the lead on the lyrics. Instead, the task went to a friend she never worked with before, Itchie Montilla, ex-member of the Philippine Madrigal Singers.
“I sent him a melody and he sent back a draft of his lyrics,” Nicole recalled. “I edited them a bit and then called my trusted band barkada to come over to continue working on the song .”
In doing the song then, she felt that “the energy was pure” and that “there was a lightness that I hadn’t felt in years.”
“We had the arrangement, and quickly set a schedule to record… no plans to release, just record for fun,” Nicole said.
She asked help from seasoned producer and performer Moy Ortiz with her singing “because truthfully I was at a point where I lost all confidence, and he stuck it out with me till the nth take.”
“Silong” would have been released early this year if not for the COVID-19 pandemic.
Once again, Nicole thought the song just wasn’t meant to be.
“I thought, ‘That’s that, I’ll stay quiet,’” she said. “To pass the time, I wrote other songs in isolation, did 20 quarantine music videos for online releases, collaborated with 10 other artists to keep sane did about 12 fundraiser shows….but this song was just sitting there, mixed and mastered and bugging me still.”
So, soon, “Silong” comes.
“Here I am, giving it a shot, without expectations,” she said. “Sometimes we can’t just play God and call out what’s meant to be and what isn’t… because our plans have worldly limitations… and who knows there may be a better plan that awaits if we choose to faith over fear.”