Kai Honasan takes her music (and the ukulele) center stage

“I told myself, let’s think of the most convenient instrument to bring around...and I thought about the ukulele,” said Kai Honasan.

Her new album, In Your Face and Other Songs About Other Faces (2014), was the result of years of songwriting and performing with the four-stringed Hawaiian instrument. Her earliest song from that record, “Go,” was the second song she ever wrote on that instrument.

“I actually wrote it on the keyboard and I transferred it [to] the uke and it sounded more fun,” she told GMA News Online, “because on the keyboard it sounded more mean.” But one touch that listeners always catch is the kazoo, which she chose because it sounded quite annoying.

Honasan is a music education graduate from the University of the Philippines College of Music. “I [started] as a classical pianist when I was four,” she said, “and then tuloy-tuloy hanggang college. It was only in UP Music that I discovered the [ukulele].” She bought her instrument off eBay for P500 in 2010.

Her songwriting, though, really started in high school, when she was in a band. “We were covering all the OPM chick-fronted acts like Imago, Barbie [Almalbis], Kitchie [Nadal], and Session Road,” she recalls, “and we’d try our hand at one or two songs. But it wasn’t really until college that I started writing my own songs.”

In college, she met someone who eventually became her collaborator, arranger, and keyboardist. “I met Kai back in Ateneo, when we were in first year, and we were blockmates,” said Denise Santos, who also plays with the fusion-jazz band Hidden Nikki. She and Honasan met at freshman orientation, where they discovered both were in bands in their respective schools. (They did play together in a band for one night.)

The two kept in touch even after Honasan transferred schools, and their first musical collaboration was a film score. Santos first arranged “This City” for Honasan after that. “She’s my go-to girl,” she says of Santos, “I can’t imagine making anything without her.”

Many of her songs are somewhat autobiographical. “It’s a policy for me to write only what I know,” Honasan said. One of my favorite songs on the record, “This City,” was written, for instance, while she joined the Berklee Songwriting Camp in Spain. “I was surrounded by all these different cultures,” she said, “and I wrote it the day before I was about to leave for Manila, so it’s sort of a goodbye song, a love letter to all the friends I made there.”



Honasan is also an alumna of the Elements songwriting camp in Dumaguete, and she and fellow Elements campers Rizza Cabrera and Anj Florendo also play together as the Fridays. “It gives you perspective,” she said of the experience, “and it gives you enough motivation to make something out of yourself as a musician in any form…it makes you want it more.”

It is worth noting that it was Almalbis, whose songs she covered in high school (and who is Honasan’s sister-in-law) who first gave her a shot at performing in a gig. “[She] heard me composing ‘Go’ and then she asked me if I could play for her [production] in Route, just a couple of songs,” she said, “I remember that night because I invited five friends, and then thirty came over!” The support she got that night in early 2011 inspired her to continue playing live ever since. And her family, which is definitely musically inclined, has been supportive. “The cool thing is, they let me do my own thing,” she said, adding that they would tell her to “think of your own thing and we’ll just drop in whenever we can.”

Honasan’s other collaborators on In Your Face were impressed by what she achieved. Sancho Sanchez, one of her producers, told us, “it was fun and inspiring to work with her.” He added, “Her writing, her songs, and her perspective are really very, very fresh.” Santos concurs, saying that it was quite a fulfilling experience of long-ago dreams: “I couldn’t imagine, remembering us talking about this four years ago.”

But until last March 21, when her album was launched at the Collective in Makati, Honasan admitted that “it still hasn’t sunk in.” She admitted though that she was quite excited to sign people’s copies, even buying a new Sharpie for the occasion.

What’s next for Kai? “I’m going to start promoting [this record], because this is the best possible version of my songs,” she said. But she added, when asked further, “Musically, I have no idea…but that’s the cool thing about it, I really can’t tell. It’s going to be exciting to see where this takes me.” Hopefully, those who encounter Kai through her songs about other faces will join her on that musical ride. — BM, GMA News

Kai Honasan’s new album In Your Face and Other Songs About Other Faces is available at Crazy Katsu branches and at her gigs. A digital version will be available soon.