BP Valenzuela: Telling stories through music

“I think I was in love with music before I picked up an instrument,” says BP Valenzuela, the electronic musician whose work has gotten people abuzz over the last year or so.

“My mom would buy us soundtracks [of such films as] 'Spirited Away', 'The Lion King', all the Disney classics, and my sister gave me a Discman, and I had sleeve books full of CDs,” she adds. We are in conversation next to a high-end coffee machine at her workplace, Satchmi’s store in SM Megamall, where she is a barista. She says, “I translated that love of music into actually making music when I was eleven or twelve.”

In a family whose members were encouraged to pursue different activities, ranging from sports to the visual arts, Valenzuela decided to explore music, receiving a guitar from her sister and figuring out how to play it. “I picked up the basics of music theory from playing the guitar,” she says, “and I was a classical guitarist for a while.” She eventually learned how to play other instruments on her own.

Others, though, did not really help Valenzuela as much. “I’ve been dealing with unpalatable people throughout that made me want to learn stuff on my own,” she says, “because they were uncomfortable about the way they were teaching me.” She admits that her desire to make music was borne out of frustration. For example, she tells of guitar teachers who would treat her quite differently from boys of her age by second-guessing her before she could even say anything. “I was so tired of that…and I would eventually, on the side, pick up stuff on my own,” she recalls. It was an arduous process, she adds, with a lot of trial and error: “If you heard all the stuff I made before I turned 18, they were all so bad.”

Valenzuela admits that she learned a lot about music by listening. “For instance, I got my early electronic templates from Eighties songs,” she says, citing Prince’s "Purple Rain" as her favorite album from that era. From her listening to Nineties music, she picked up how lyrics could be at the same time simple and heartfelt. Her favorite album from that era was Third Eye Blind’s self-titled record from 1997, which produced hits such as “Semi-Charmed Life” and “Jumper.” She notes how composer Stephan Jenkins used economy of language and the limits of a song to tell stories one could easily relate to, citing a less famous song from the record, “Motorcycle Driveby,” as a good example. “My dream is to write a song like that,” she says.

Music as storytelling is what influenced her approach to "Be/EP," her 2014 debut record. “The record is one coherent story,” she says, “and it was about one year, one situation, and how I felt about one person, and how it ended.” Writing songs was her way of telling stuff that she would otherwise keep to herself. “I didn’t expect to put anything out,” she recalls, “My intent was not to make a full record at that time, but when I wrote ‘Building,’ one of the songs in the EP, everything started coming together.”



What she also did not expect was that people would start paying attention to the material. Music websites like Amplify.ph picked up some of her songs, for instance, while she was still a college freshman, and one of her tracks, “All That You Are,” was reviewed by Vandals on The Wall, a local music review site. Her debut record eventually spurred plenty of interest in the independent music community and won her a following and more gigs.

Her new album, "The Neon Hour," launched late last month, is also centered around a story or theme. She wanted to make a full-length record because, she says, “I feel like the album is dying somehow with the singles age, and people don’t pay attention to the way albums are laid out in a way that there’s a certain [arrangement] from start to finish…I like weaving the narratives [together].” Her collaborator on this record is Nick Lazaro, with whom she composed the record’s very catchy but bittersweet carrier single “Pretty Car.” He first messaged her through her Facebook fan page.

Valenzuela’s electronic music songwriting style differs slightly with her acoustic project Half-Lit, which had its big debut performance at a Satchmi event in mid-February. While she says that her approach with electronic music is to work with more intricate and maximal arrangements, her stripped-down work is more minimalist. She emphasizes, though, that the approach remains the same when it comes to letting songs tell stories. This is the kind of talent for songwriting that got her into last year’s Elements Songwriting Camp.

What’s next for BP? She plans to do other projects, including Half-Lit, and to work with other musicians. She was recently signed to the Party Bear label, which includes such acts as Taken by Cars and the Techy Romantics. She also admits that she misses spending time playing video games, something she could not pursue with almost weekly live performances. While she is pursuing her music production degree, which she says helps fill in the gaps in her knowledge, she works at Satchmi, a job which she found through a musician-friend. If there was one thing that I learned from her, it was that making music required some wide listening, just as good writing requires wide reading. It also takes the kind of rigor and passion for the craft which has become this musician’s hallmark. It just so happens that she managed to achieve it at her young age. — BM, GMA News

BP Valenzuela is one of the artists performing at the Wanderland Music & Arts Festival Day Camp next week.

Ren Aguila wrote about the Techy Romantics for GMA News Online. He reviewed the track “Pretty Car” for Vandals on the Wall last year.