|
By Angelo Cantera Reporter
Additional photos provided byBuensalido and AssosiatePublic
Relations
When she entered the room, internationally acclaimed Filipino
singer, Charice Pempengco, had the bearing of a veteran disguised in
the clothes of a little girl. Her steps were loosely measured, her
arms swung modestly by her side and her face bore the countenance of
someone who no longer needs to prove her worth. But in the narrow
hall that led to her private room, as cameras began flashing from
every corner, one could not miss a fleeting look of awe the took
over her face; a quick reminder that she is still just a 16-year-old
girl.
“Do I still look young?” she said during her
interview with The Manila Times. “I already look old.” Even as
she joked, she possessed a distinct degree of maturity—laughing in
such a collected manner. And the dauntless modulation of her voice
is a testament to her calm confidence. “But I do like what a lot
of people say,” she added. “Young but with a big voice! Natutuwa
naman ako dun.”
Of course, since her meteoric rise back in 2007,
being hailed as a vocal powerhouse is merely a pat on the back
compared with the inspiring monikers she received over the years.
After gaining international fame when one of her earlier admirers
posted her performance videos on YouTube, she has been labeled as an
“Internet sensation.” After crossing oceans to captivate the
likes of TV personality Ellen DeGeneres, she has been called “a
phenomenon.” And after she appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show,
after she made such an impact that Winfrey herself was compelled to
call legendary producer David Foster, Pempengco was dubbed as “the
most talented girl in the world.” The later, however, is a title
she casually refuted with sophistication.
“I’m not really that good, said Pempengco
who smiled as though she was offering an apology. “I’m a singer
and I know how to sing. People say that I’m good. But I’m not a
professional singer like Regine Velasquez or Celine Dion. I just
love to perform. I just love to sing.”
An early beginning
Pempengco was born on May 10, 1992, in the city
of Cabuyao, Laguna. At the age of 3, she was shrugged out of
innocence when her father, enraged and seemingly inconsolable,
attacked her mother, Raquel. According to Pempengco, as reported by
the website of The Oprah Winfrey Show, she watched her father
beating and choking her mother. When the argument escalated, he then
grabbed a shotgun and threatened their lives.
“My dad was about to shoot my mom,” she said
“and I couldn’t do anything.”
Fortunately, their neighbors heard the commotion
and were able to break down the door giving Pempengco, her brother,
Carl, and her mother a chance to escape.
“We left my dad,” she stated on the website.
“And after that, I never saw him again. And I don’t want to see
him.”
But the arduous trials of her childhood did not
stop there as financial problems followed Pempengco and her family.
As reported by The National in an article entitled “Voice of the
Future,” her mother could remember times when she had to feed
Pempengco and her brother noodles three times a day before she found
work.
A silver lining, however, appeared for their
family when, at the age of four, Pempengco’s mother discovered her
daughter’s gift for the very first time. “She thought the radio
[was] playing,” Pempengco shared on the Oprah website. “She went
to the living room, and she saw me singing and she was, like, ‘Oh,
my gosh. She’s singing.”
The first time Pempengco decided to enter
competitions, her mother was already working for 16 hours a day, six
days a week at a garment factory. After years of financial woes,
Pempengco had to help out her family by signing up for more than 80
competitions which included the likes of town fiestas and several
vocal contests on TV. Eventually, she was able to use her contest
winnings to help her mother pay for an apartment.
“I’m just singing for my mom now,” she
stated on the Oprah website, “I didn’t help her before. That’s
why I want to help her now.”
Even then, with those simple words, she already
possessed the maturity that shrouds her tender age; an iron padding
that would ultimately allow her to weather events that came after.
The wildcard
In 2005, at the age of 12, Pempengco joined an
ABS-CBN talent show called Little Big Star. While she was eliminated
at the early going, she was brought back as a wildcard contender and
she was able to work her way to become a finalist. But regardless of
her penchant for being a consistent top scorer, she only finished in
third place with eventual ABS-CBN talent, Sam Concepcion taking the
win.
After minor appearances on the local TV shows
and commercials, she fell back into obscurity for a couple of years
with a hard earned lesson that she carries up to this day.
“When I lost at The Little Big Star, that’s
when I felt that I still need to persevere if I am to get what I
want. The problem with some people is that when they want something,
they want it now. They immediately want to be on top. But in
reality, they have to go through a lot of things to get there. They
have to be patient enough to try and try until they succeed,” she
says.
And two years appeared enough of a waiting
period for Pempengco when an avid fan, Dave Duenas, under the name
FalseVoice, started posting her videos on YouTube.
According to an interview by Phil Bolsta in
bolstablog.wordpress.com, Duenas got the idea to post Pempengco’s
video in 2006 when he noticed a video in YouTube’s “Most
Viewed” section. The video was the America’s Got Talent audition
of an 11-year-old singer named Bianca Ryan.
“I didn’t plan to upload Charice’s videos
on YouTube,” Duenas told Bolsta. “It’s just that I saw Bianca
Ryan’s video after she had just won America’s Got Talent. I
was fairly new to YouTube back then and I told myself, I’d like to
post an amazing video that would generate a lot of hits . . .
Charice’s name popped into my head because I got goose bumps
all over my body when I first saw her singing on TV. So in August
2006 I posted a video of her singing I Will Always Love You from
Little Big Star.”
The video, however, was not an overnight
sensation. Duenas had to invest a measure of effort to build
awareness of it.
“I remember posting comments to every video
that I viewed, telling people to go check out Charice’s video,”
Duenas told Bolsta. “It took some time, but eventually the video
generated a lot of hits.”
But even after garnering a millions views, it
wasn’t initially enough to re-open the doors for Pempengco’s
career. Given her youth and the power of her voice, her talents came
under intense scrutiny with a number of YouTube users claiming that
she is lip-syncing. Such suspicions however were negated when Duenas
posted more videos including an a capella rendition of “And I Am
Telling You I’m Not Going.”
Eventually, the videos attracted the attention
of Ellen DeGeneres’ producers which ended up with her performing
live in December 2007. This was followed by an appearance on Oprah
as part of the show’s “World’s Most Talented Kids” series
which ultimately allowed her not just to slip back into the lime
light, but to burst into it at a global scale.
“I first started to feel that I’m really
getting to live my dream when I was invited to Korea,” she shared
with The Times. A slight sparkle drew out the youth from her
softened eyes. “As it went on, I felt it even more. Of course,
there have been a lot of highlights. But right now, I have to say
that the one that tops all those highlights is the time when I got
to sing on stage with Celine Dion.”
Pempengco recalled how she anxiously entered the
Madison Square Garden. The raucous of thousands screaming for
someone, she remembered, were enough to belittle anyone. But she was
completely disarmed when she found out that they were screaming for
her, and it was her face that was shown on the big screen.
“Mga foreigners sila!” she told The Times.
“Those were my first thoughts. They were foreigners and they were
cheering for me. And I was introduced as a Filipina. That really
made me happy.”
Besides Dion, Pempengco also got the opportunity
to sing with Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli, who gave her another
title by dubbing her as a “flush force of nature.” She also got
to perform with current hit makers like the Jonas Brothers, Josh
Groban, and former American Idol runner-up Katherine McPhee. More
importantly, her performance back in 2008 at David Foster’s
tribute concert, Hitman: David Foster and Friends at the Mandalay
Bay Resort and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada, bought over 10,000
people to their feet leading Foster to proclaim that “a star is
born.”
On to a bigger stage
Now on the process of making her first
international album, Pempengco has been taken under Foster’s wing.
When asked what it was like to be working with the renowned
“star-maker,” she simply grinned as if once again hearing the
name of a very close friend.
“David Foster . . . is Daddy,” she said.
“We kid around a lot. He asked me what I thought about him and I
told him that he’s like a father to me.”
Foster who is known for producing a number of
records for stars like Madonna, Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson,
Celine Dion, Barbara Streisand and Cher is currently producing
Pempengco’s first international album. He has also taken the role
of a mentor and a father figure.
“He is really nice and he’s a
perfectionist,” Pempengco told The Times. “He wants my
performances to be flawless. He wants my recordings to be great. The
only thing that he doesn’t oversee is my fashion sense. That’s
his girlfriend’s department. He is also quite funny so whenever I
do recordings with him I never get stressed.”
But as young as she may be, Pempengco is not
content on merely being a passenger of her trail-blazing career. She
is slowly but surely taking the wheel. And for her upcoming album,
she revealed her plans of shifting from a balladeer to something
more current.
“The first single that I recorded,
Fingerprint, falls more along the lines of R&B,” she told The
Times. “It was written by Robbie Nevil who was behind Jordin
Spark’s One Step at a Time and The Pussycat Dolls’ When I Grow
Up. I hope that it becomes a hit. Personally, I think that it’s
catchy and, lyrically, it’s for everyone.”
It also voices out Pempengco’s desire to break
free from the typecasting that is slowly taking over her persona as
an artist.
“For the album,” she told The Times, “I
don’t want to have another Whitney Houston song. I don’t want
people to hear my voice and say, ‘oh she’s the girl who sings
Whitney Houston songs.’ I want them to know me for songs that are
actually mine. I want to have my own identity as a performer.”
And as she said it with a serene sternness
commendable for someone her age, one can tell that this “flush
force of nature” will not be stopped from achieving her goals. It
is true that at 16, she is too young for a lot of things. But as
Pempengco found out the hard way, she is not too young to face life
and everything that goes with it. And as she has proven from her
time and time again, she is not too young to weather through them
even with a voice that people thought was too big for someone her
age.
|
