Janine Teñoso finds herself in silence
Janine Teñoso spent most of her youth plagued with questions.
Why does she dwell in the past? Why does she feel distant from people? How can something so fleeting feel like forever? And why does she find herself always saying yes when what she really means is no?
At some point, the singer realized that perhaps the reason she couldn’t find the answers was because her voice kept fading into others. To be a songwriter is to bare one’s self. But how was she to do that if she had yet to really meet herself?
And so, at 23, she decided to move out of her childhood home.
“It’s hard when you’re in your early 20s, and there are people who still influence your decisions. It kind of shapes you into a yes-man. So I asked my mom if I can try living alone, because I felt like I needed that as a musician,” she tells Lifestyle Inquirer. “As a songwriter, you have to figure out yourself—and that’s what it takes, having your own space and time.”
Room to feel and write
Her hunch was right. It was in her solitude that the pieces began to fall into place. She is the way she is now, she surmised, because “of factors that happened to me when I was a kid.” There were “emotions and trauma” that were left unaddressed and lingered until young adulthood.
She internalized all those, pondered every question that hounded her, and ultimately, distilled them into written words and melodies. Her latest EP, “Apat na Buwan,” is the unraveling of the knots of her childhood. The record spawned songs like “Sandig,” “Palihim,” and her biggest solo original hit, “Hulaan”—together, the soundtrack of her “awakening.”
“Why do I react a certain way to love? Why was it so tough for me to move on from someone even if we had been talking only for four months? Feeling ko parang forever ko na siya!” she says with a laugh. “All those things I talked about in the EP because I wasn’t able to process those before.”
Now, at 26, Teñoso feels more at peace with her past. Once in a while, she still “defaults to the scared kid I once was.” But at the very least, she now stands more firmly in what she wants and no longer second-guesses her feelings.
“Now I know which things to say yes or no to, especially if I feel like something no longer makes me happy. Back then, if you tell me something, I just nod and say, ‘Ah, okay po,’” she recalls. “But when you’ve invested time and space to know yourself, you become more open…you don’t worry too much about what others have to say.”
All the while, Teñoso’s self-discovery and musical evolution moved on parallel tracks—albeit in opposite directions. As she grew braver and more confident, her singing, curiously enough, became softer.
Once a kontesera—honed by torch ballads that demanded vocal calisthenics—she can still belt out high notes with the best of them if she must. But alone in her bedroom, where many of her songs are born, instinct dictates that she reins in her power. “Singing in my bedroom feels very intimate. Why should I be loud?” she says.
That’s not to say, though, that she has completely done away with belting. There will always be a place for vocal bombast in pop singing, or within a song if the moment calls for it.
For most parts of “Hulaan,” for example, she alternates between breathy folk-pop crooning and tippy-tappy falsetto. But in the final 20 seconds, as the instrumentation swells and the vocal layers stack up, Teñoso switches gears and stays with the crescendo, which culminates—not with fireworks, but with an emotional release. In any case, it pays to have the lung power that she could summon at will.
Her latest single, “Pikit Mata,” builds up in a similar fashion. While more conventionally pop-sounding, it also starts out like a musical conversation, before Teñoso raises the volume near the end without going all out—just enough to express the shift in emotional tension.
Not a contest anymore
She doesn’t structure songs around high notes—the high notes serve the story of the song. “That’s my intention. There has to be a reason you’re singing loudly,” says Teñoso, who also attributed the tempering of her once contest-calibrated style to her diminishing competitive edge.
Sometimes, it’s good to be reminded that she no longer needs to enter vocal duels to help her family financially. “I’ve also outgrown the idea that hitting high notes is the only standard of good singing,” she points out.
If there’s something she’s thankful for about her biritera past, it’s her battle-tested showmanship and confidence. This will serve her well once she takes the stage for her first major solo show, “Janine,” this September 6 at the New Frontier Theater. It’s daunting, she admits, but she knows that if all else fails, she can always count on her voice.
“It’s a challenge. But I know my vocals will always be there to save me,” she says.
With nerves, also comes excitement. After a slew of originals, hit covers (“‘Di Na Muli”), and collaborations (“Pelikula” with Arthur Nery, “Tingin” with Cup of Joe)—which have earned her more than 598 million cumulative streams and 6.3 million monthly listeners on Spotify—Teñoso is finally stepping into the spotlight all on her own.
“The thing I’m looking forward to the most is connecting with people,” she says. “I’m very passionate about that.”
It’s a dream come true, and it couldn’t have happened at a better time in her life. Does she think she has already found her own voice? Now this is a question she already knows the answer to. “I would say yes,” she says. “But with every song I write and song I sing, I grow as an artist and as a person. I know there’s so much more out there and I’m opening myself up to change.”
