Profile of actor-musician Minco Fabregas, August 1996

Writing music, becoming whole

by Lakambini Sitoy

(Profile of actor-musician Minco Fabregas, which appeared in The Evening Paper, 14 August 1996. Photos by Willie Avila)

WHILE the father dances and sings onstage, trying to connect with his inner child, the son quietly writes music and makes plans for the band he will head someday.

The father is comedian Jaime Fabregas, currently starring in the Manila premiere of All I need to know I learned in kindergarten. The son is 23-year old Minco Fabregas, drummer for the band Color It Red and a budding poet and songwriter.

The band Fabregas is in the process of founding, is called Sourmash; so far there’s just him and the bassist, a Filipino from Seattle. But the dearth of people hasn't deterred him at all. He's written lyrics and music enough for a whole album; folded up in a chair on the terrace of his home in Forbes Park, he talks about this project with the confidence of an artist who’s blessed with both energy and youth, not to mention some pretty good connections.

”It will be kind of like a bare bones band,” he says. ”I would be playing rhythm guitar, and on vocals; there’d be drums too. And maybe over that we could add something like violin, or a flute; it would be very melodical.”

Fabregas admires Sting, U2 and the Grateful Dead to a great extent, and his music has been pretty much influenced by these acts. He's been playing the drums for nine years, and guitar for three years or so; he was with a band in New York, where he spent high school, and played drums with the Breed, a local band, before joining the high-profile Color it Red.

Lyric-wise, the songs are about God on the one hand and love on the other, a rather odd combination, an attempt to reconcile spirituality with the erotic and idealistic facets of man-woman relations.

The pain of loss and of being lost, searching for wisdom, shoring up one’s inner resources -- these are themes that recur throughout the lyrics, which are simply poems at this stage.

In lines like ”And in the forest…/ Where the moon dances wild with her stars/ You hang your coat and tend to your wounds/... And we think of the kingdom and you think of the throne/ In every Kingdom there must be a throne,” Fabregas seems to be coming to terms with the archetypal male role, which must be played with aplomb although you’re cut and bleeding.

And in a poem entitled Till the morning, he advises himself, ”A winter’s chill/ Is a soldier's gun... As bombs explode/ The forest groans with discontent/ But still you stand/The boy must learn/ To be a man.”

Fabregas says five months in the Finnish Army (into which he was drafted a couple of years ago) helped mold this part of his consciousness. He served in the mortar brigade and in the dead of winter, minus 30 below, he ”ran into some crazy moments.”

”I’ve always been against the idea of having a gun. But after spending five months of learning to shoot a gun you kind of get pretty efficient with it. In that whole camp in the middle of the woods there, everybody in military fatigues, and fake bullets and stuff, and in the tents, it seemed pretty real. I never came that close to that feeling before, that animalistic feeling of being actually ready to kill.”

Fabregas holds Finnish citizenship, but he is Filipino by birth, and now, here in the country which he left at age 13, a country which he always considered home, he is still trying to connect. He pinpoints language as a major stumbling block: ”Maybe if I could really express myself fully in Tagalog, that would be the link.”

In fact, he did try to strengthen the figurative umbilical cord in another way. Fabregas has the kind of angelic good looks that are a passport to show biz success; consequently, he essayed a few minor roles in some local TV shows, following the path of his father, but backed off when ”they turned out to be really embarrassing and uncomfortable situations”.

With music, you don’t really have to pretend much. It’s all really honest. And with show business, it's like, you know, our different world. And I thought it was really insane.”  …