“here, listen to this,” he said. “it’s a new song i made. it’s been such a long time since i last made one. tell me what you think.”

we were parked at st. kilda, at the ungodly hour of one or so in the morning. we just came from st. kilda breakwater to see the baby penguins (aka the trespassing story) and it was f*cking freezing! the only thing i wanted to do at that moment was marry his car’s heater.

“sure, let’s hear it.”

with a few quick pressing of the buttons, he played the song on his phone. “it’s not final yet, but, yeah, what do you think so far?”

for somebody who grew up listening to metallica and nirvana, let’s just say it was quite a departure for me to suddenly be giving opinions about some rap music. on top of that, he was the only person i knew who actually made his own music so i never really had previous experience on how to deal with people who make music out of words instead of writing them on a journal. (but i don’t really have a wide circle of friends to begin with so that statistics is pretty much unreliable.)

“it’s cool,” i said as casually as i could, hoping he’d interpret that response as a deep, insightful comment and just leave me alone with his heater.

not wanting to let go of the subject, he continued, “it’s a nice song. i love this song. it’s a special song.” before pulling out of the parking slot.

“yep” was all i managed to say, as i was still in that stage of our friendship where i never really said much anyway.

on the drive home, he took one line from the song and softly sang it:

yeah, you’re my type.

a line he kept repeating over and over and over again.

for a split second i wondered, “is this guy trying to tell me something?”

but just as quickly, i dismissed such assumption. that couldn’t possibly be. i mean, not after i threatened to hit his head with a torch on that same night.

so here we are now. 15 months and 1 music video later…

for the concept of this video, jeff basically wanted to show a glimpse of what life is like for majority of the people living here in the philippines:

the constant daily struggle. the internal and external chaos. the truth.