Rey Valera wrote some of his most famous melodies sitting among headstones in a Bulacan cemetery, because it was the quietest place a broke young man could find.
Before he was a songwriter with over a thousand songs to his name, he was Reynaldo Valera Guardiano, a kid from Meycauayan sent to live with relatives after a broken home. He did household chores to earn his keep. The cemetery near the house became his escape, and eventually his workspace. “The cemetery was my studio,” he told interviewers years later. By his own estimate, he came from “below zero.” Nearly half his biggest songs were composed in that graveyard, among them “Maging Sino Ka Man” and “Naaalala Ka.”
He spent about seven years playing in a band called the Electric Hair Band before going solo in 1977. His first single, “Ako si Superman,” was a song he’d originally written for Rico J. Puno. He brought it to the Vicor Records office on Raon Street in Manila hoping to sell it, and Vicor bought the song and hired him as an in-house songwriter and producer.
One of his first assignments came from Tito Sotto, a Vicor executive and Sharon Cuneta’s uncle. Sotto wanted a song aimed at radio disc jockeys and suggested the title: “Mr. DJ.” Valera found the job tricky. Cuneta was young, too young for a love song and, as he later recalled, a bit too old for a nursery rhyme.
He has said he worked out the melody riding a jeepney through the rain on his way back to Bulacan. The finished track gave Cuneta her first Gold Record and her first nickname, “DJ’s Pet,” which became the title of her debut album.
“Kahit Maputi Na Ang Buhok Ko” was on that same debut album in 1978, alongside the single that launched Cuneta’s career. Their working relationship didn’t end with one album. Over the following years Valera kept writing for her, and in 1991 she recorded a full collection of his compositions called Sharon Sings Valera. It went triple Platinum. By that point she had been recording his songs for thirteen years.
Among all those songs in Valera’s catalog, “Walang Kapalit” carries a story most listeners never expected. In a 2021 interview, Valera revealed that the ballad was inspired by the love of a gay man who couldn’t be with the person he wanted. He had written it for his close friend, the comedian Ike Lozada.
Millions of Filipinos sang it as a straightforward love song for decades, and in 2003 it became the title of a film starring Sharon Cuneta. The queer story at its center had been there the whole time. Valera once said he wrote for ordinary people, and he meant all of them.
Lozada died in 1995, but his presence runs through the 2023 biopic that carries the title of Valera’s most recognized song. Valera told reporters the film was made partly to fulfill a promise to Lozada. In the movie, actor Ricky Revero plays Lozada, and the friendship between the two men anchors the story alongside the music. Director Joven Tan structured the film with Valera narrating his own life. It opened as one of eight entries in the 2023 Summer Metro Manila Film Festival.
RK Bagatsing, who plays the young Valera, was not the producers’ first choice. He took the role because it scared him. To prepare, he watched concert footage and interviews on YouTube, studying Valera’s mannerisms from a distance. He never met Valera during filming, deliberately avoiding a face-to-face meeting so the pressure wouldn’t throw off his performance.
The two sat in the same room for the first time at a private screening in early March 2023, and Bagatsing later said he was too nervous to enjoy watching his own work. Valera praised his maturity as an actor. One detail Bagatsing has mentioned in interviews: the hardest part of playing Rey Valera was the wig.
Valera’s career had a stretch that most fans don’t know about. In 1983, an impostor began using his name to commit crimes, and the situation grew serious enough that Valera had to issue public statements in newspapers. In 1984, at what many considered the peak of his hit-making years, he walked away from show business to be with his family.
He stayed away for several years. When he came back in the late 1980s, he moved into film scoring and music direction, bringing his rock background from the Electric Hair Band days into action movie soundtracks. His song “Sa Gitna ng Buhay Ko” later won Best Song at the 2004 Metro Manila Film Festival.
By 2002 he had formed a concert group called the Greatest Hitmakers with Rico J. Puno and Hajji Alejandro. Nonoy Zuñiga and Marco Sison joined the following year. They toured together for years, five voices from the era Valera had helped build, playing to audiences who had grown up singing those same songs at home.
In 2003 the National Press Club gave Valera a Lifetime Achievement award for music, and the Philippine Association of Recording Industries followed with another in 2005. He was inducted into Bulacan’s Walk of Fame in 2006.
Noel Cabangon’s 2009 recording of “Kahit Maputi Na Ang Buhok Ko” landed on Byahe, an album of Manila Sound-era covers released on Universal Records. The record featured duets with Aia of Imago and Chito Miranda of Parokya ni Edgar. It went double Platinum and won Album of the Year at the 2010 Awit Awards.
Cabangon had started playing guitar at ten years old on an instrument borrowed from a neighbor, formed the folk trio Buklod in 1987, and spent years in small folk houses and underground bars before Byahe brought him to a wider audience.
The album’s title means “journey,” and two sequels followed: Tuloy Ang Byahe in 2012 and Byahe Pa Rin in 2017. In 2024, at sixty, Cabangon completed a Bachelor of Music in Popular Music at the Philippine Women’s University, finishing the degree decades after he first picked up that borrowed guitar.
Valera has written over a thousand songs. The biopic could have taken its name from any of them, but the filmmakers chose the love song about growing old, the one whose question gets heavier every year instead of fading.
Is there a song you came back to years later and found it was saying something completely different, because your own life had caught up to the words?
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