Ang Kalatas Volume V November 2014 Issue | Page 10

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EDITORIAL & OPINION

THE MESSAGE. BRINGING INTO FOCUS FILIPINO PRESENCE IN AUSTRALIA
www.kalatas.com.au | Volume 5 Number 2 | November 2014

HUMMING IN MY UNIVERSE

The song never remains the same

I

JESS DIAZ
DANNY
DINGLE
ALLAN
ESPINOSA
JIM PAREDES
GIL MARVEL
TABUCANON

am doing a new solo album, which will include
new stuff I’ve written and
some songs I wrote and
recorded with the APO
many decades ago. It’s a strange feeling revisiting our old songs and dressing them up with new
treatments and arrangements.
Raw musical creations, even
if they seem bare and incomplete, are bona fide living things.
As such, they should be given the
proper attention, understanding,
care and treatment so that they
can blossom into what they can
become. I therefore toss a song
around in my head for a while,
play it on guitar over and over,
before I can begin to find the best
approach and interpretation and
start recording it.
But what about the old
songs? In our youth, we were perhaps much too excited to write
and share our songs with our fans,
or too inexperienced, so we made
decisions quickly and recorded
them without much thought. Today, decades later, I listen to them
and I see how they could be improved, reinterpreted, rearranged
and re-delivered. Or maybe it’s
just that everything really seems
less than perfect in hindsight.
I am redoing three songs in
English that I wrote many years
ago. As with many songs in English I wrote in the past, I now
sense some triteness and vagueness in the lyrics. I am more el-

oquent in Pilipino now when it
comes to songwriting, so I chose
to rewrite two of them in Pilipino.
In doing so, I felt new life
breathing into the songs as if they
had reincarnated into whole new
works. It also helped that they
were reworked, musically.
Revisiting anything — a
place, a piece of work, an experience, or even old relationships
— can bring out a lot of feelings.
Whether what you revisit was a
happy experience or not, you are
bound to learn something about
yourself and about life.
In my case, going back to
something I have already left behind or even outgrown, gives
me an idea of how much I have
grown and moved on. I also see
how much of me has hardly
changed.
When I revisit an old neighborhood, memories of my youth
come rushing back. Once, my
siblings and I went to visit the
house we grew up in which is
now owned by another family.
We rang the doorbell and asked if
we could go inside the house. The
present owners, who were aware
that we were the builders and first
owners of the property, readily
obliged.
A tsunami of memories hit all
of us. I could recall specific feelings I had as a young boy when
I entered the different rooms, the
kitchen, the garden, and the little
corners where I used to play and

hide stuff. It all came back and it
was real.
But after a while, when I got
my bearings back and returned to
the present, I realized how much
smaller the house actually is,
compared to how I experienced it
when I was a boy.
Some people I know who, by
complete chance, have run into
their old girlfriends again, told me
how surprised they were at how
much they could still connect as
they did when they were still together and in love. Often, the feeling was mutual. But after some
conversation, the feeling began
to vanish when they realized that
what they actually missed was
their youth and how simple life
was then.
A woman once told me that
she just had to see her old flame of
many years past one last time before she accepted her current boyfriend’s marriage proposal. Some
may say that she was courting
temptation, but to rephrase something I heard in an episode of Sex
in the City, the past is like an anchor you must cut loose from so
you can move on and become
who you can be.
Some memories are meant to
fade away. But some places, experiences and memories can be
revisited and given a fresh meaning altogether. As adults, we can
experience them again, but with
the wisdom, experience and compassion of mature grownups.

I once attended a workshop
called “Reparenting the Child
Within,” which helps participants
work out their childhood traumas
and issues by revisiting them.
But you may ask, why should
we even revisit old traumas?
Shouldn’t we just leave them in
the past and move on?
Some traumas we experience as children continue to hurt
us, even as grownups. When we
went through them as kids, they
may have been too painful to understand then and so we never
gave them any names, much less
processed them. We merely hid
them by burying them inside us,
hoping we would never have to
deal with them ever again.
But when the painful emotions we experienced are not processed, they keep coming back
and hurting us and the people we
love. The RCW workshop guides
you as you revisit the feelings and
emotions you felt as a child, and
learn to teach the adult in you to
process them and finally let them
go. It is a very powerful experience. You feel your pain being re-

leased and you can finally move
on.
In the case of songs I have
written, I have learned to know
when I should give them new interpretations or just leave them
alone as we recorded them then.
If a song was a big hit and still
continues to connect to my audience even after many decades,
more often than not, I leave it as
it is.
Paul McCartney once explained that he never changes the
arrangements of the songs he recorded in the past when he sings
them in concert. He said people
want to hear them in their original form just as they remember them, and it gets them to sing
along more.
I hold a slightly different
view. I like to rearrange some of
my songs sometimes to hopefully
delight and surprise my audience
and, yes, myself. I want to take
the songs, the audience and myself to a new fresh place.
I have continued to grow
through the years, and I want my
songs to grow with me as well.

JIM PAREDES
is a multifaceted creative. He sings,
composes, writes articles and books, teaches
at the Ateneo De Manila University, designs
and facilitates various types of workshops.
He is also a writer of books, a widely read
columnist for the Sunday Life section of Philippine Star, and a
well-known photographer.