Marilag

“Marilag” is originally a Dionela song. For this one, the brief was a different approach to the track — so I took it somewhere new.

This arrangement was made for Pix!e, the six-member Filipina P-pop girl group Daniel first worked with on their 2023 debut “Iced Coffee.”

I went for a 2017, summer feel-good energy — the kind of bright, easy, sun-soaked sound from that era — because I felt it sat beautifully against Dionela’s writing and gave the song a fresh way to breathe. That era had a very particular warmth to it, and leaning into it let the melody feel light and unhurried rather than heavy.

I reworked the arrangement around that nostalgic summer-pop feel — feel-good chords and an easy groove — reshaping the instrumentation while keeping the heart of the original intact.

In practice that meant bright, major-leaning chords, a relaxed tempo, and light, airy instrumentation that leaves space around the vocal. The idea was never to cover up the original — it was to reframe it, so the writing still lands the way it always did, just in a warmer, sunnier setting.