Roqué Marcelo Music Retrospective
Part 3: Arriving at the Piano When I Needed It Most
“I don’t want to take lessons anymore.”
What immediately followed was the look of disappointment on my Mom’s face when I uttered those words. She seemed to enjoy dropping me off at the little music school on the island every week. I was a young boy at the time, and I wanted to take on other, more adventurous pursuits. Unbeknownst to me, a seed was already planted. I knew at the time that, for some unknown reason, I could remember everything I played and seemed to have a knack for rhythm and melody. I shrugged it off thinking that it was no big deal.
I wound up taking more lessons while I was in middle school. It helped that my Dad had his own band and left a keyboard plugged up inside our living room. Out of sheer boredom, I would sit at it once in a while and make up melodies.
Later on, as a young adult, I arrived at the piano at a time in my life when I was being crushed under so much heaviness. I was finding my way as a queer person and getting heartbroken and disappointed at every turn. With my application for a green card in complete and endless limbo, any ambitions I had to improve my life were null and void.
Through my job at the time, I had access to a piano in the sanctuary of a Lutheran church where I lived in Charlotte, North Carolina. I gravitated to that big cavernous space and played piano to my heart’s content whenever possible. Growing up, my favorite thing to do when I was young was to lounge on a beach and sit with the ocean. The endless bluish-green hues of the water, the rhythm of the crashing waves, and the salty breezes drifting in always comforted me. In that landlocked city and my depressed and lonesome state, the piano became my ocean. This accommodating and unyielding friend gave sound and space to the emotional dissonance I was hearing.
Sitting at that piano in the old church was when I arrived as a performing musician, and I never left.
For this segment of this month’s retrospective, I want to highlight five songs that exemplify who I am as songwriter and pianist.
Villain
This is one of the first songs I ever wrote. On paper, it does not make sense (at least not to me). Its DNA is lined with chords that probably should not be strung together, but in my ear, it felt right when I built it. Simply put, the song is an ode to every man I tried to date who was dishonest with me. I wrote this song to vent my frustrations at not having found someone to love, despite all my futile attempts.
At the time, I knew very little about music theory, and embarrassingly, I could not even name the chords I was using. This entire song was built on instinct and what sounded good to my ear. Have a listen. It is mind-boggling to me that I ever came up with this.
Pale Sunshine
At heart, I am a hopeless romantic. Pale Sunshine is a song about unrequited love. The man I wrote it for does not know that this song exists. Its arrangement conveys luminosity and my love for classical music as piano and cello dance together in this bittersweet revery. Since I did not know how to arrange music notes on paper (and still mostly do not), I hummed the cello melody to the cellist we hired to play for this track. Luckily, she was also trained in jazz and was able to figure out what was coming out of my Asian mouth.
Fear
It is astonishing when someone important in your life who is traditionally supposed to love and protect you is actually a person who invokes fear, shame, and dread. This was certainly the case in my early life. I had a recurring nightmare to prove it. I felt compelled to write this song.
The Boy in the Room
This song was written as a self-portrait. Looking back, it certainly is a snapshot of the lost and lonely young man I used to be. There is not much I can say about this song, only that it speaks, quite poetically, for itself.
The Gardener
The person who encouraged me as a child to play piano is the same person for whom this song was written. Anyone who knows my Mom understands that she is a force of nature—sweet and charming but with nerves of steel. These days, she gets up at 5:00 a.m. every morning to work in her garden. This exemplifies everything about her that I have always known as a parent. She cultivates and nourishes richness without fail. She is a model for how I live my life, and I honor her daily by doing so.
There is no formally recorded version of this song at this point, but there is this live recording I made as a gift to my Mom for Mother’s Day back in 2020. Please have a listen and enjoy the views from her garden.
I have more songs in my repertoire that I will be sharing with the world. Most of them have yet to be formally recorded. I have about three albums worth of original music that I want to release somehow with enough resources and funding someday (and numerous little stems that are works in progress).
The songs featured in this issue reflect my musical beginnings, but the future embodies more adventurous rhythms, textures, and progressions. I have new music coming out in October, and I am happy to finally get something out of hiding and into the world.
People ask me all the time how I would describe my music. I would say melodic and experimental. You never know what you are actually going to get.
I leave you with this piece of music that surprised even myself when I came up with it. Who knows what the future holds . . .
This past week, I spent the better part of an afternoon meandering through the creek that runs in front of our house. I rolled up my pants and walked or sat down here and there. On average, its water level at different sections rises to various points below my knees. One can easily walk in the water for quite some way for a long time. Most of it is shaded by canopies of trees, and the water is always cool to the touch. More than anything, our creek is beautiful. The sound of the gently flowing water and the greenery everywhere is calming, grounding, and pleasant. I do not visit our creek enough. I will be enjoying it more from now on.
All Music and Photos by Roqué Marcelo