First of all, I’d like to give a shoutout to my friend Carlo Ople for featuring me on his blog. Thanks man, means a lot to me! Now to business, or should I say, music business. I’ve received another project yesterday. This time it’s to compose an original soundtrack for a movie by my director friend Ruelo Luzendo. As if my current projects are letting me sleep right, now comes a new one! Whew!

But mind you, I’m not complaining. Ironically, despite sleep deprivation, I’m actually getting more dreams. Or to put it figuratively, I’m living my dream.

Ever since I embraced my calling to be a professional musician (college days), I’ve always dreamed about living a musician’s life. And that is to live and breathe music with each passing day. Now I’m living that life. A life that I only used to dream about, but now it’s very real.

It didn’t start easy though. Back in highschool, I rebelled against my musical family, thinking that if I pursue musicianship, I might just become a shadow of my amazing grandfather. So I pursued Visual Arts as a major in Philippine High School for the Arts, which lead to enrolling in Landscape Architecture as a freshman at UP Diliman, much to the dismay of my father. But things happened so fast during my freshman year.

My four highschool batchmates and I decided to form a band, and Makiling was born, with me as the violinist. Suddenly, I became more and more involved in music. Not just with my band, but also in songwriting projects , music scoring and various arrangements. Meanwhile, attending my landscape architecture classes were starting to become a tiresome chore. It became clearer each day that it wasn’t the right field for me. In the meantime, my band started it’s professional path with our first payed gig back in January 1997. It was at a book launch.

I became more and more involved with music as the freshman year progressed. Until the day arrived that a big decision was made. I decided to shift to music and leave landscape architecture for good, much to the dismay of my mother (see a pattern?).

My father wanted it, my mother did not (at first). But the best thing here really is that, I made the decision by myself. I wasn’t forced by anyone, not even my folks.

It is one of the best decisions I’ve ever made in my life. I never looked back ever since. Now here I am. Living my dream. A musician, for life.