DELEON can feel music – in his body and in his soul. And with that ability becomes an innate understanding of not only how music should sound, but how it should feel and how music can make one feel that way. Using that knowledge to his advantage, DELEON’s first single ‘SOOTHE’ out today, MAY 7th, taps into an uncanny ability to make one feel as DELEON tells “the story of how difficult it is to be a mother of an immigrant kid.”
To DELEON, music always communicated in the way it physically made him feel – ever since he was a young child in the Philippines. It surrounded him – his father played guitar, his father’s siblings dabbled with instruments of his own, his mother sang… but DELEON didn’t actually start finding his own ability to communicate within music until he was 22.
So, when reality came to a screeching halt during COVID, DELEON taught himself how to make beats and write and produce songs. And, through DELEON’s newfound ability to communicate did he start to grasp and understand his “distant” relationship with his “cultural identity,” and how to convey that to others.
It isn’t difficult to imagine that someone who relocated “thousands of kilometres away” from their home country at the age of 7 would struggle to feel that connection with their culture – it’s only natural. Yet, DELEON’s journey through music helped aid in his realisations and visualisations of “the difficulties his mom would have had settling into the country.” And thus, the creation of ‘SOOTHE.’
‘SOOTHE’ is DELEON’s way of “connecting with the understanding of the difficulties,” his mom would have had in allowing DELEON to be himself, “knowing it truly is quite difficult to be culturally complete as a Filipino in a country where you are surrounded by non-Filipinos.” Not only does he grasp what his mother went through, but he articulates the true struggle of immigrating with two children to a country “that they don’t know, that they don’t understand,” and the desire to shield them from “this list of things that you are afraid of them having to go through because you had to go through it.”
DELEON knows why his mother coddled him and protected him from the world. And because of that, he understands the pain his mother faced when accepting that he had to spread his wings – “But, in doing so, you know that is the only way they can be their true self.”
And so, as DELEON spread his wings, and flew straight into the word of sound.