Trisha Denise: A singer-songwriter on the rise

Trisha Denise: A singer-songwriter on the rise | Daily Tribune

Trisha’s songs are hardly performed in sing-along bars and not usually sung in singing contests — “Sunshine,” “Pieces of the Puzzle,” “Totoo,” “Mas Mabuti Pa,” “Bakit Ba?” or “Simula ng Wakas,” the latest carrier song from her new EP album. The same may be said about the songs she wrote for Belle Mariano, Vivoree, Maymay Etrata, Regine Velasquez and Pops Fernandez.

Though Trisha’s songs have catchy prosaic lyrics that have neither rhyme nor rhythm, they seem to have improvisational melodies that are easy to the ears because of her sweet little-girl voice but hard to catch and recall, thus seemingly discouraging music lovers to belt them out in sing-along bars and TV singing contests. Again, make no mistake about it, her songs are well-patronized (viewed and listened to) in the digital outlets.

The singer-songwriter’s full name is Trisha Denise Campañer, 26 going on 27 in September, and it seems to be her own decision to use her two first-names as her career brand. She says that she comes from a musically-inclined family and her parents were once professional singers themselves.

Trisha loves to recall in interviews that she started making up words and melodies when she was just six years old. At 11, Trisha learned to play the guitar. Her guitar-playing skills seem to have prompted her to start joining songwriting competitions when she was just in junior high school. She never won and seems to have never even made it as a finalist.

In 2015, when she was just 17, a song she submitted to a contest was eventually picked up by Star Music and included in Janella Salvador’s debut album. Trisha’s song was titled “Teka Muna, Pag-ibig.” Salvador herself was only 17 at that time.

Patronage of “Teka Muna, Pag-ibig” was slow to build up, but that didn’t stop whetting Trisha’s appetite from writing songs, submitting them to competitions and putting them up on the video-sharing websites.

By the time she turned 20 in 2018 and was taking up a degree in Music Business at Mint College in Metro Manila, she and her parents decided to put out an album for four songs she has written. One of the musical yarns was “Sunshine.”

The album launch was held at D’ Cup Coffee Republic on Pioneer Street in Mandaluyong, with tickets reportedly sold out a few days prior. Among those who attended were ABS-CBN music executive Jonathan Manalo and the Star Music artists Sam Mangubat and Jason Dy, the champion in ABS-CBN’s The Voice.

A few days after the launch, Star Music of ABS-CBN signed her up. Aside from “Sunshine” her debut album had three other songs, including the bonus track “Both Sides,” a collaboration with Dy. She later performed another track, “Mahalaga,” on the Wish Bus of radio station 107.5FM. It garnered more than 87K views and 1,000 likes.

Other songs of Trisha’s became part of the OST (original sound track) of ABS-CBN shows, including those shown abroad only through iWantTFC. Some of her rare optimistic musical effusions even become “anthems” for some advocacies, including women empowerment. But none of her songs in the albums of well-established singers like Fernandez and Velasquez has been used as the title song or carrier single.

Now that she’s almost 27 years old, she keeps gleefully announcing that she has never had a boyfriend and has never had the personal experience of the joys of being loved, in love, and the sorrow and pain of being “ghosted.” It seems easy to believe she loses no time to being in love or recovering from its wreckage.

Trisha Denise is almost unarguably a songwriting machine, if not a song factory. If her songwriting and singing don’t ever change, would she reach the practically revered stature of Cecile Azarcon for whom a 45th anniversary tribute has been slated for 24 to 25 May at The Theater at Solaire? Would Trisha care to be more than a song factory?