Editors’ Note: Published with permission by the editors and publishers of the book Burabod: Original Bikol Music, The Community of Bikol Artists through Doods M. Santos and Jaime Jesus U. Borlagdan, 2021. The artist Mei Teves was featured in this book under the chapter, Burabod Musika Songwriting Camp. She was the only female of twelve fellows chosen to participate in this camp which was held on February 20-27, 2020.
Christelle Mae Teves Arcilla, known by her artist’s name, Mei Teves, is a 22-yr old singer-songwriter from Catanduanes. At a young age, she knew that she loved art, and loved creating it. A self-confessed “weird” kid growing up, she kept everything to herself and spent almost all of her time alone, doing whatever came to mind: drawing, taking photos and videos, writing short stories and short songs. Mei did not know how to sing back then. She just learned to sing from watching Disney films, Dora: The Explorer, and other similar series made for kids. She discovered that there are other ways of expressing oneself, and that one is through singing one’s thoughts.
Mei first learned how to play a musical instrument on her grandfather’s old mini keyboard. From Grade 4 to 6, she attended the Dr. Guillermo A. Reyes Adventist School (DGARAS) where she learned the basics of playing the flute recorder, angklung, guitar, and piano. She also sang alto in both her elementary school choir and the Catanduanes National High School Chorale. She started writing songs about love and being in love in high school, because she believed that songs were the most popular kind of songs. Her writing prompts changed in her senior year of high school and in college, when Mei felt that she had hit rock bottom. Nevertheless, she continued writing poems and songs. Art became her relief and shelter. She drew from these emotional troubles and thereby deepened her craft.
Her first completed song was written in Filipino, “Nakakapagod Na,” (Exhausted) followed by “Pakialam” (Care) and “Shhh.”
In November and December 2018, while in Manila for her on- the-job training, Mei did her first open mic performance at Filscap’s Songwriter’s Night X. This was where she sang her song “Nakakapagod Na” for the first time in front of an audience. She also attended two more open mics at Jess & Pat’s Maginhawa. However, she stopped sharing her songs for a while because she felt no one was listening to them. She thought that maybe her song topics were not the usual topics tackled by other songwriters.
Mei continued to be afraid of showing her soul through the songs she created. That was until she met Joey Vargas, alumnus of The Philippine Madrigal Singers, during the 2019 Tuntun Balagon Festival in Catanduanes. Adem Nalu Rubio, a poet from SurTe Catanduanes, asked her to perform in an open mic session one afternoon, and her performance caught the attention of Joey Vargas. He asked her to perform her songs again during the closing ceremony of the festival. Joey helped her realize that she was and is an artist.
When the Himig Handog Songwriting Competition of ABS-CBN posted that they were accepting entries from aspiring songwriters, Mei took this chance and revisited an old love song entitled “Wala Lang.” She was sad that it was not chosen. Undaunted, she tried her luck again when Alab at Sinag Pilipinas, an art collective based in Metro Manila, announced a songwriting competition. Migs Dato, former Datu of Alab at Sinag Pilipinas and now an O/C Records Artist, messaged her that she got in the Semi-finals of the Indie x Indie Songwriting Competition. “Nakakapagod Na” was her entry song and Mei finished Second Place. She became a part of Alab at Sinag Pilipinas, started busking at Intramuros in June 2019, and joined their gigs. She also participated in battles with other songwriters during one of their impromptu songwriting battle nights in BILOG, the busking community led by Martin Riggs of O/C Records, at the Conspiracy Garden Café. Back in Catanduanes, Mei introduced busking to fellow Catandunganon poets and songwriters: Adem Rubio, Kap Alexander Fernandez, Francis Jhan Rojas, Genesis Efondo, and Nonong Icaranom. Together, they organized a busking session on July 27, 2019 at Café De Au, where songwriters, musicians, and poets of the island were encouraged to showcase their pieces.
Her achievements in 2020 were a slot in another songwriting competition, the Wishcovery Originals, and a fellowship in the Burabod Musika songwriting camp. Her song entitled “Shhh” took her to the monthly finals of Wishcovery. For the monthly finals, she sang “Something Happened Today.” Mei didn’t earn a spot in the grand finals but was happy that she had carried herself and her art well. For Burabod Musika, she wrote her first Bikol song, “Anino sa Baba” (A Shadow Below). She uploaded her second song, “Habo Ko Ning Aga” (No to Tomorrow).
In March 2020, Mei sang a duet with Alab at Sinag Pilipinas singer- songwriter Fred Engay of his heart rending Bikol song “Mauli” (I Will Go Home). This song can be interpreted as ‘not only a love song’ in the time of a pandemic. It is available on Spotify and YouTube.
About writing Bikol songs, Mei has this to say:
I have written songs in English and in Tagalog, but I’m not very good at writing Bikol songs. My attendance at the Burabod Musika camp in February 2020 was an eye-opener. I realized that writing songs in Bikol is important because it is a way of returning to one’s roots. Where one comes from, that’s where your roots are, and you should be proud of those roots. I think that it is very important to know one’s own roots because they are a huge part of one’s person. That’s why we’re like this now; we have become alienated from our roots.
But I believe that I have so much more to learn about songwriting in Bikol. In fact, I’m embarrassed about my lack of facility in the language, especially before the writers on my island who write in Bikol. It’s difficult for me to write Bikol lyrics in particular. There are several variants of the language in Catanduanes, and I had many classmates from different places, so my Bikol is a hodgepodge of the variants as well as the Bikol Central of the mainland. I need to listen to Bikol music more and read more Bikol poetry to be able to write better Bikol lyrics.
I aspire to break barriers. That’s the role of music, to connect souls. No matter how different languages are, people connect through art and music.
Early this year Mei released her first EP entitled /’hidn/ with track list featuring: “Wala Lang”, “You”, “Hindi Mo Alam”, “Pangalan”, “Senpai, Notice Me”. In her Facebook page, she wrote about her new direction:
After years of doing open mics, competitions, and uploading demos of my original songs online (and deleting them because I suffer from severe imposter syndrome), I decided it was time to record studio versions of my songs, but I wasn’t sure where to begin or what to release first. So I gave it a lot of thought. That’s when I decided to go back and revisit the songs I wrote as a teenager.
I cringed a lot when I came across my attempts at writing love songs. I also thought that everyone would find these songs corny and dislike this side of me because they knew me as someone who tackled heavier topics. But I realized that I don’t want to ignore my younger years or the songs I wrote during that time as they are a part of who I am. I also want to share my journey as a songwriter and show people that I’m more than just a sad lyric machine. I thought about it for months before deciding to begin there.