ASCENDING SESSION ROAD
Baguio Yields A Promising Quartet

Session Road is a mix of apparent incongruities: Guitarist Coy Placido and his brother Tan on bass demonstrate a naive shyness towards the audience, which contrasts drummer Chavi Romawac’s enthusiastic wallops and his sister and vocalist Hannah’s abundant energy. Hannah is 19 but sounds twice her age when she dives into the blues, her rich vocals seemingly out-of-place on her girlish face. The band plays cover songs: Natalie Merchant, the Police, Sheryl Crow, the Doors. But they also display keen songwriting abilities in their original compositions. They rock and roll well enough to rip the house apart, but sometimes do so while self-consciously facing each other rather than the hungry young audience.

They tell me later on about the travails of playing for audiences who anticipate the usual pop band fare: “Aside from Freedom Bar, we’ve also played in Roofdeck, Tipsy’s and Zu during happy hour. There are times na mahirap kunin ang audience kasi iba ang tugtog namin. It’s not very pop, it’s not what they expect.”

But then, it doesn’t take long for an audience to warm up to them once they start churning out the groovy, bluesy tunes and Hannah lets her voice loose. And this is one band that should know something about thawing a crowd. After all, the quartet hail from Baguio, the Philippine capital of cold.

Individually, they decided music was the path each wanted to take. “…Kahit na may isang nagtapos sa Computer Science at isa sa Engineering,” adds Hannah, who took a year of AB English but stopped after quickly getting bored. “Music has always been my dream. I thought, why not try it? This is what I want my work to be: it’s work but it’s fun. And our family supports us. In fact, our dad used to be a folk singer in Baguio and our mother also sang a lot.”

So, three years ago they all moved down to Manila and decided to take a stab at music as vocation and livelihood. Hannah hooked up with a band named Sunflower that played nothing but cover songs, Chavi did some session work for Jun Lopito and the Placido brothers formed their own band. But eventually all their paths led to Session Road.

They’ve now been together for three months and are halfway through the recording of their first album which isn’t under any label yet. They intend to finish it first before shopping it around to the record companies. How then did they get the budget to record? Via their album producer, Grace Nono.

Hannah explains: “Grace is a family friend of ours and she knows I love to sing and I write songs. When she found out I came to Manila to embark on a singing career, she offered to produce our album. She gave us deadlines, but we never got around to meeting them because of my schedules with Sunflower.” So it was only after Sunflower, that Hannah and the newly-formed company decided to finally sit down and make the music for the album.

As we talk, someone plays several rough cuts off the Session Road debut album. I get to hear more of the finely wrought tunes that come across much like the Hungry Young Poets, Color It Red and Cynthia Alexander except that Hannah’s singing voice more closely echoes Grace Nono’s. The songs are bursting with lyrics that lift mundane experiences into poetry, and music that’s accessible but never maudlin. Take this bit from “You Lied”: ‘I love you’ don’t mean a thing/ If it’s written on water/ And played like a cruel joke/ On a broken record. Or this excerpt from “Superstar”: So take a lesson from the strangeness you feel/ And know you’ll never be the same/ And find it in your heart to kneel down and say/ I’m gonna change.

Like most other bands, a lot of their original material is completed while jamming, each member bringing his/her own musical strengths to whatever song outline is offered. Which brings me to a question that never fails to intrigue me: What’s it like having a sibling in the band? Again from Hannah: “It’s actually a lot easier because it’s family. We can say things straight out without any problems.”

Their youthful optimism and exuberance shines through when I ask them what Session Road’s dreams are. “To finish the album. Tumugtog sa sobrang malaking lugar. Sana hindi na kami mag-cover songs. To play all our originals and everyone likes the songs.”

And judging from the quality of their originals, I’d say that’s not a far-fetched dream at all.

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