MANILA, Philippines – Ely Buendia has fielded the same questions since his 20s. What inspired you to write this and that? How do you think people will respond to such and such? Who is this record for? He’s a man with a knack for caustic phraseology, but he would rather respond in unambiguous declaratives, in numbers and figures.
For instance, one is the number of months it took him to write Method Adaptor (five, however, is the number of years the melody for “Bulaklak sa Buwan” has been germinating).
Two is the number of songs in it — buoyant focus single “Kandarapa” and vitriolic rocker “Deadbeat Creeper” — that were recorded at Abbey Road, where he touched the piano John Lennon played in “A Day in the Life” and ate cold sandwiches in the same cafeteria Pink Floyd or Radiohead probably took breaks.
Sixty thousand (rounded down) is the number of followers he has on Spotify: a number he glanced at one day and realized how underrepresented his solo byline is.
No, he doesn’t lose sleep over these things, but that number speaks volumes of Ely Buendia’s peculiar position in Pinoy pop culture: an unrelenting band man — perhaps the best-known local frontman of the past three decades — but, ironically, a beginner in the solo-artist game.
“Well, I guess you could say I’m all banded out,” he chuckles during an online listening party for Method Adaptor. He says this because, while he’s spent much of his career creating for bands, his real estate as a solo performer has fallen by the wayside. “Please don’t judge me if I want to take credit for myself this time,” he says with no lilt in his signature drawl.
Two is also the number of songs the public has already heard in advance: “Bulaklak sa Buwan” and “Tagpi-Tagping Piraso,” both with earworm-inducing choruses, and neither a love song. In these and other songs, really, there’s no sentimentality, no extraneous gimmickry, no overzealous production. There’s just life, and all manner of “raging against the dying of the light.”
Needless to say, Method Adaptor proves Buendia is still a man who knows his way around a tune and can navigate hackneyed phrases, such that — when he’s through with them — they’ll ring both true and new. Not every experienced practitioner has this advantage, not at his age or any other.
Fifty-four is, incidentally, how old Buendia is (as of All Souls’ Day), but it’s a number he’d rather you shun while consuming his new material. After all, he says, “We’re all just trying to survive, and make it from day to day, and I hope they can see that.”
That said, however, his self-awareness that this isn’t “a young man’s album” doesn’t come with apology. “I’m not putting music out there so I can be relevant to the new generation, but I do hope that they’ll find something that we can share in terms of experiencing the world right now.”
The specter of comparison always looms in discussions of Buendia’s post-Eraserheads output. It’s an old game people play, but it’s a game that no longer holds water.
In Method Adaptor, what long-time listeners will hear is a man taking stock of the different idioms he’s inadvertently developed over his storied career: garage riffage with a sing-song bent (“Tamang Hinala,” “Sige”); dissonances with an unexpected luminosity (“Esprit de Corpse”); sublime, almost spiritual melancholia (“Faithful Song,” “Chance Passenger”); propulsive rhythms countered by a reverence for melody (“Tagpi-Tagping Piraso,” “Kandarapa”).
At this stage in his career, one can say Buendia is further honing his chops by homing in on his best tendencies. “The stakes for me have never been this high, since, I think, the recording of Ultraelectromagneticpop! It’s like a make-or-break thing,” he confesses.
Luckily, this solo output isn’t solitary behind the curtains. While Buendia wrote, sang, and played guitar and bass on most of everything, he’s also enlisted the help of frequent collaborators like touring drummer Pat Sarabia, keyboardist Ryan Goan, and guitarist Jerome Velasco — who played alongside Buendia in The Mongols and Pupil, and who also co-produced the record with Audry Dionisio (“with a little help from Erwin Romulo,” says an advance release from Offshore Music and Sony Music).
“I think the most important thing for me was rapport with the musicians, [and] I have that in spades with the ones who played on the album. It also helps that they’re damn good at what they do,” Ely shares.
Method Adaptor, finally, is more than a pun on method actors (Marlon Brando is an Ely favorite) and their hyper-involved, ritual-reliant process. “I wanted the music to be raw and real, and the only way I could do that was to dig deep inside of me and channel whatever was there that was dormant and asleep and wake it up.”
Wanted Bedspacer (2000) was a document of some playful solo noodling preceding a last Eraserheads album (20001’s Carbon Stereoxide) and eventual breakup, but it was hardly his official record, Ely says. “I didn’t really think about marketing it; it wasn’t promoted, and I didn’t want to.”
This time, 24 years later, is different. There isn’t just high confidence in the writing and performances, but also in the collection being representative of “[his] talents as a songwriter, singer, [and] musician.”
At an age when his more prescient peers — the ones who went down the solo road earlier — would be scraping the bottom of the barrel for musical ideas that resonate, Ely’s just beginning. “Everything has changed, but also everything hasn’t changed. You still have to go out there,” he says, audibly thrilled.
With the kind of stature he’s enjoyed forever, that proposition is simultaneously weird and thrilling. But having these songs in tow? He won’t have to rely on past laurels. – Rappler.com
