My series started with a song that lost.
The short version
In 1978 Freddie Aguilar, twenty-five years old, took “Anak” to the first Metropop song festival in Manila. It didn’t win. The grand prize went to Ryan Cayabyab’s “Kay Ganda ng Ating Musika.” The next morning Freddie’s song was on the radio anyway, and within a few years it was the best-selling record a Filipino artist had ever made. He had left home at eighteen, against his father’s wish that he become a lawyer, and about five years later he wrote the song as an apology, in his parents’ voice instead of his own. The episode tells that story, and why the song hurts more today, in a country where millions of parents work abroad.
The father
When Freddie showed his father the lyrics, the old man read them and cried, and the two of them made peace. The episode stops there. What came next is that his father died not long afterward.
Japan heard it first
Outside the Philippines, Japan got there before anyone. In July 1978 the NHK evening news program News Center 9:00 ran a report on the song’s success in the Philippines. Viewers asked for it so often that NHK broadcast the segment again, which a Japanese write-up describes as unusual. Two Japanese singers, Tokiko Kato and Jiro Sugita, recorded their own versions that same year. In Japanese the title became Musuko, which means son.
One Japanese collector believes more original “Anak” records survive in Japan today than in the Philippines, going by how many turn up on Japanese auction sites.
Then everywhere else
In 1979 alone, Hong Kong got versions by Alan Tam, Kenny Bee and Louie Castro. Lee Yong-bok sang it in Korean that year, and the Malaysian group Carefree recorded it too. In 1981 the Thai band Carabao put their own version on their debut album. Over the years the song collected around a hundred cover versions.
Europe followed. In 1980 “Anak” reached number two in the Dutch Top 40 and number seven in Flanders. In West Germany Michael Holm sang it as “Kind,” and the Kelly Family turned the melody into “Alle Kinder brauchen Freunde.” The German side is in the episode.
The film
In 2000 the song gave its title to a movie. “Anak,” directed by Rory Quintos and written by Ricky Lee with Moira Lang, stars Vilma Santos as Josie, a domestic helper in Hong Kong who works abroad to keep her family together. Claudine Barretto plays her daughter, Carla. In the 1978 song, the child leaves home. In the 2000 film, the one who leaves is the mother.
The ending is the scene people remember. Josie walks through the Sunday crowd of Filipino workers in Central, Hong Kong, reading a handwritten letter from home. They shot it on a real Sunday, in the middle of the real crowd. When people recognized Vilma, the director used a crane and a megaphone to ask everyone to cooperate, and in the end Vilma went up the crane herself to make the same request. In 2024 she named the confrontation with her daughter as one of the scenes she remembers most. It ends in a long speech about a mother’s exhaustion, and she filmed it in one continuous take with two cameras.
Freddie
Freddie Aguilar died on May 27, 2025, at the Philippine Heart Center in Quezon City. He was seventy-two. Later in life he had become a Muslim and taken the name Abdul Farid, and he was buried the same afternoon at the Manila Islamic Cemetery, following Islamic custom. The obituaries all led with “Anak.”
In 2025, the same year Freddie died, the English musician Jacob Collier sang it at his concert in Manila.
Both seats
In the episode I say that you first hear “Anak” from the child’s seat, and that once you’ve lived long enough, it reaches you from the parent’s side as well. The song has had nearly fifty years to find people in both seats.
Tell me in the comments which seat you heard it from first, the child’s or the parent’s, and which song your family plays when someone leaves home.
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