The Sunday Music Drop is a weekly radio series hosted by the KQED weekend news team. In each segment, we feature a song from a local musician or band with an upcoming show and hear about what inspires their music.
Hayward’s Ian Santillano is a Filipino-American alternative singer and songwriter who mixes R&B, Americana, and soaring and soulful guitar lines into his music. He enjoys neo-soul, folk and country music and was influenced by his parents, who frequently sang karaoke throughout his life.
His song “Explanations” was written and recorded in the house he shares with his mother. Though he plays in bands, Santillano sings all the parts and plays all the instruments in this song. The song idea started from Stevie Wonder’s “I Just Called to Say I Love You.” Santillano says his constant feeling of introspection inspired his song.
“I really love this track because most of the song is just the lead vocal,” he says. “The second verse has this crazy harmony [with] crunchy tracking. It’s tracked in this way that it’s almost like there are all four individual voices instead of a barbershop quartet where it’s a bunch of voices trying to be one voice together.”
While Santillano grew up in the Bay Area, he says his upbringing and private school made him feel disconnected from the region.