Teri de Sario: Music makes all the difference

Teri de Sario loves music so much it hurts. It hurts when fellow singers turn music into a product – putting form over substance, gloss over good, old-fashioned melody.

"It’s not good because it’s denigrating," De Sario laments. You could almost hear the anger in her voice.

It’s this anger that made her quit what she loved most in 1986 and concentrate on being wife, mother and teacher to amateur singers who just wanted to express themselves through song.

She didn’t feel she was on top of the world. In fact, this period in her life brought her fits of depression. But it was at this point when De Sario rediscovered music and rekindled her love for it.

The composer in her blossomed. And the voice behind hits like Fallin’, It Takes a Man and a Woman, Yes, I’m Ready and Ain’t Nothing Gonna Keep Me From You poured her feelings on reams and reams of music sheets.

The songs were long, autobiographical as they are – bursting with stories about her life.

"That’s why I didn’t record a single one of them," she explains. "They’re not for commercial purposes."

This doesn’t apply to her other songs, though. Many of those who grew up in the ‘70s and ‘80s get that a-ha feeling when they hear the first few strains of Fallin’, which some of our singers, like Lea Salonga (in the play They’re Playing Our Song) and Regine Velasquez have interpreted.

De Sario sees Fallin’ as more than just another love song.

"It’s all about trusting, losing yourself after experiencing pain. It’s universal," she relates.

The letting-go feeling the song gives you is cathartic. It makes you feel that yes, it’s okay to let your guard down and expose yourself to the joys and pains of love. You are healed in the process. And you emerge a better person because of it.

That’s the best part, says De Sario. The most important thing about music, she declares, is its power to transform.

The rest – the fame that goes with a hit song – is just incidental.

De Sario’s song Yes, I’m Ready, for instance, went to No. 2 in the US charts. People still remember it after all these years, the way they recall the gentle It Takes a Man and a Woman.

And De Sario feels twice blessed.

"I’m grateful for everything happening in my life," De Sario can’t help but gush. "I feel free about doing my work."

She has come full circle, returning to singing with all the passion and joy she can muster. De Sario is not keeping this passion to herself. She shares it, not only with her audience, but with wide-eyed students who she believes can build communities through music.

"You experience life together when you’re singing. You don’t fight when you sing together," De Sario points out.

She and her husband are staying put in the Philippines and won’t head straight home to the US after she performs for the first time with Joe Pizzulo in Back2Basics at Araneta Center on Nov. 19. De Sario will visit Waldorf schools in the country as part of her mission to promote music in schools.

She will not have a hard time pushing her singing-is-fun dictum across the country. She will surely find kindred spirits wherever she goes. This is why, 20 years after she first performed at the Araneta Coliseum for the first time, Teri de Sario jumped at the chance to renew her ties with Filipinos – her musical soulmates.

It’s a reunion that is long overdue.