Yeng Constantino wrote the melody of her “Ikaw” on a plane, crying in her seat, during a flight that lasted less than two hours.
She told Tatler in 2024 that the experience felt magical, that the song arrived in her head almost fully formed while she sat thinking about the man she was about to marry. She landed and played it for him right away. In a 2015 GMA Radio interview she called it a gift from God rather than something she could take credit for. A few months later it was on an album called “All About Love.”
Before “Ikaw,” Yeng Constantino was known for pop rock, for walking on stage with a guitar and singing uptempo tracks. A love ballad was not what anyone expected from her, and by her own admission, she did not know she could write one.
She almost never got the platform to try. Before Pinoy Dream Academy, she auditioned for Star In A Million and StarStruck and was turned down by both. PDA was her third shot at a reality singing competition, and she was seventeen when she won the title of Grand Star Dreamer in December 2006.
Six months later she headlined her first major concert at the Aliw Theater in Manila. Her debut album, Salamat, went multi-platinum. Eight years of guitars and pop rock passed before a love song changed how the country heard her.
The other “Ikaw,” the one George Canseco wrote the words to, came from a different partnership. Louie Ocampo, who composed the melody, had gotten his start when his song “Ewan” placed second at the Metro Manila Popular Music Festival in 1979. Two years later he left for Boston to study film scoring at Berklee College of Music.
Back in Manila he built a long collaboration with Martin Nievera that produced “You Are My Song” and “Tell Me,” and the De La Salle University alumni association gave him its Lasallian Achievement Award in 2019 for his contribution to Philippine music.
In February 2023 he celebrated forty-five years in the industry with a two-night concert called “Composer Ka Lang” at The Theater at Solaire. When Ocampo sat down with Canseco for “Ikaw” in the early nineties, he was bringing Berklee training to a lyricist who had been winning awards since 1970.
Canseco had been shaping the sound of Filipino cinema for decades by that point. At the 1970 Awit Awards, his “True Love Came Too Late” won Song of the Year, and he took both the Best Composer and Best Lyricist categories that same night. His “Ngayon at Kailanman,” written in 1977 and sung by Basil Valdez, has never left the OPM rotation.
Canseco wrote about twenty songs for Valdez over the years. In 1981, Imelda Marcos commissioned him to write “Ako Ay Pilipino” for Ferdinand Marcos’s second inauguration, and Kuh Ledesma recorded it. He served as president of the Filipino Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. By the time “Ikaw” came along in 1993, his melodies had been part of Filipino cinema for over two decades.
The 1993 movie that carried the song was Ariel Rivera’s first film opposite Sharon Cuneta. Rivera reportedly had admired Cuneta since before he became a singer, and the film gave him the role of a composer falling for her doctor. The movie faded from theaters, but the title song kept circulating through radio and then through wedding receptions, following the path Canseco’s ballads always took.
The reception hall was changing in those years too. The same-day edit, a short film of the morning preparations and the ceremony edited and screened at the dinner reception, is now a fixture of Filipino weddings. The videographer Jason Magbanua is widely credited as the person who popularized the format in the Philippines.
In the early days, laptops could not handle video editing, so Magbanua took VHS tapes home, cut the footage on a desktop computer, and brought the finished film back in time for dinner. That improvisation became an industry. Most videographers now build the SDE into their standard packages, and a typical one runs three to six minutes, scored to a love song the couple picked months before the wedding.
Both songs named “Ikaw” ended up in that space. The Archdiocese of Lipa’s written guidelines ban secular love songs inside the church, including instrumental versions. Once the bishops sent personal vows and love songs to the reception, the reception became the real emotional ceremony. The SDE plays, the couple enters to a song they chose, and later they dance to another. No priest approves the playlist.
In February 2024, the older “Ikaw” came back through a Viva Films romance. The studio had announced the project in July 2023 as “Forgetting Canseco” but changed the name before the release to reach younger viewers who no longer knew who Canseco was. Inside the film, Julia Barretto sang a new arrangement of the Canseco song with Cup of Joe, a band that had started as a group of classmates at Saint Louis University Laboratory High School in Baguio, formed in November 2018.
They signed with Viva Records a year later and climbed fast. By October 2025, Cup of Joe had won Song of the Year and Album of the Year at the inaugural Filipino Music Awards. Billboard Philippines named them the country’s biggest band of 2025. The film placed a thirty-year-old Canseco ballad in their hands for an audience that had heard it at family receptions their whole lives without ever knowing who composed it.
The casting drew its own conversation. The age gap between Aga Muhlach and Julia Barretto sparked public criticism before the film even opened, and Barretto made a public appeal asking audiences to give it a chance. The talk around the pairing ran louder than the reviews for a while, but the Canseco songs inside the film kept doing what his music has done since the 1970s.
In June 2026, a tribute concert at the Newport Performing Arts Theater gathered performers around Canseco’s catalogue. “Ngayon at Kailanman: The Music of George Canseco” brought Basil Valdez and Kuh Ledesma back to his songs alongside younger voices like JONA and Mark Bautista, twenty-one years after his death. The concert took its name from the ballad Valdez first recorded in 1977.
Yeng came back to her own “Ikaw” in October 2024 with a remastered version for the tenth anniversary. In the Tatler interview she said she rarely shows her sadness. Before she met Yan, she had been afraid that love might never come for her, and writing the song on that plane surprised her because it revealed a side of herself she had kept hidden.
Ten years later, singing it felt to her like renewing her vows. She also released a new song that year called “Kung Uulitin.” Her label called it the official follow-up to “Ikaw,” a love letter to the same man, this time written by someone with a decade of marriage behind her instead of a bride at the start of it all.
In reception halls across the country, both songs called “Ikaw” are still playing, sometimes at weddings where the guests are too young to remember either one being new. The couple dancing to one of them probably has no idea the other exists.
If you had to pick one “Ikaw” for your own night, which one would it be, and what made that choice yours?
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