Here I Am – Juan Karlos Labajo
Songwriter, Strings Arranger

Following the success of Starlight with Darren Espanto, the A&R manager at MCA Philippines approached me with a new brief, an acoustic guitar ballad written specifically for Juan Karlos Labajo, one of the Philippines’ most promising emerging artists at the time.

I studied his voice and his existing body of work before writing a single word. The approach was instinctive rather than methodical, less a formal research process and more the kind of rapid reading of an artist that comes from years of professional songwriting. What I was listening for was emotional register: the kind of vulnerability his voice could carry convincingly, and the kind of lyric that would feel natural rather than assigned.

The song drew from personal experience. Here I Am is about the ambivalence of someone who believed they were moving on, only to find themselves still present, still needed, still watching, still unable to fully leave. That emotional territory translated into Juan Karlos’s voice in a way that felt inevitable rather than constructed. The song was written and demoed in a single day, with the arrangement concept developed concurrently.

I was not the producer on the final production. But as the process neared completion, I identified something missing, the arrangement needed strings to carry the emotional weight the song required. I voiced that observation to the A&R, arranged the strings myself, and they were incorporated into the final production.

Here I Am appeared on Juan Karlos Labajo’s album JKL, released under MCA Music in 2017. He currently reaches 3.4 million monthly listeners on Spotify.