It could have been the surrounding atmosphere that struck up such a surprise. In the old Filling Station diner along P. Burgos, the manic mishmash of pop memorabilia — Hitchcock movie posters, ceramic ‘50s icon busts, vinyl records fashioned into tissue holders — echoes the palpitating heartbeat of Makati’s itchiest street, where a Mini-Stop coexists with a strip club, and buildings that are drab in daylight flaunt their lurid luminescence at night.
At a corner booth by the window, the woman sitting before me says she’s a regular at the outdoor café of the seedy hotel next door. When she needs to waste a little time, she walks to it from her nearby apartment, and orders an espresso from her usual spot, where she drags on a few cigarettes, and watches the creatures of this cheeky amusement park of a street go by; like the ponytail-sporting hulk of a redneck a few tables from ours, and his pick-up girlfriend about a quarter his size; or the six-foot tranny hooker crossing the street in transparent kitten heels. “It’s like real life is in your face — much better than television,” (the artist formerly known as) Nancy Castiglione says, the irony of such a statement searing as her lips begin to quiver, and her eyes brim over with tears.
Painkiller (Nancy) Jane
“Back to business,” Nancy hesitantly offers after wiping the wet evidence of vulnerability away; her shaky voice revealing how baffled she is at the emotional battering ram brought on by what she deems is simple homesickness. The sudden shift to the task at hand is startling, but then the girl’s always employed the tactic of “in your face” throughout her eight-year career as an intermittent object of infatuation — from the yogurt-lapping close-up that got the public clamoring for Castiglione; to rubbing her syrupy glaze off to become a hallowed magazine cover hottie; to her disco-glittering reinvention after a year of self-exile, dropping the obscure surname for her second name, and unveiling a sensual, seemingly space-borne entity called Nancy Jane.
“The lull (in my career) was my choice. The environment was getting too toxic, and I was no longer the 19-year-old naïve girl who was like, ‘Hey, this is fun! This is cool!’” the now 27-year-old says of the four turbulent years she spent following the commercial cannon she shot to fame from, doing a four-show television tightrope act for GMA before deciding to leap out of the showbiz spin cycle. “Once my contract expired, I wasn’t gonna renew it. Everyone was like, ‘You know what this could do, right?’ and I didn’t care. Yeah, it was nice making a lot of (money) but what was important to me, really, was just making people happy. All I knew was my heart telling me I needed a break from taping, and every aspect of my life being public. During the time I was trying to figure things out, I wanted to go (back to Canada) — but I wasn’t ready to leave yet, and I wasn’t sure why.”
Girl, Musically Intercepted
If, early this year, you’d flipped to your music channel of choice and caught the first few sightings of Nancy Jane, you may have harbored mixed feelings. The video to her first single, Love Song, a sucrose shot in the head with a lil’ android pinup girl doing dusted-sugar dance moves, seemed like Castiglione was deploying a cheap, digi-vocalized shot at reigniting everyone’s attention. Still, the song was like a candy swirl to your ears and even if the lyrics were uber-simplistic and not too many notes required hitting, the girl made you feel good anyway. From what was originally an experiment Nancy’s handlers casually concocted — having the then-floating star record a dance track, playing it for label reps who’d ask whose lusciously enhanced voice was on it, and finally, getting progressive, region-specializing Warner Music to back the newly-minted singer’s self-titled debut — emerged a Moony (or Bonnie Bailey, or whichever serotonin-marinated voice in dance music you prefer) that was more accessible, and a lot easier on the eyes.
“Being Nancy Jane is very brave of me, to be honest, because no one’s ever done this kind of music from the industry I come from. There are still people who are very old school and can’t wrap their minds around electronica, and house locally, but let’s just raise the shelf a little, branch out, and bring it,” she says, distinguishing the 12-track self-titled debut she recorded as the first locally produced album of electro-lux pop music; the sort you’d find girls yelling the words to as they stumble to dance on club couches. “I was very lucky ‘cause (Warner) wasn’t looking at me as an investment but just a project to see what would happen. But Nancy Jane is still a work in progress. I still have to own it, ‘cause there are these little demons on my shoulder that say, ‘You’re the only person in the Philippines doing this and it’s not exactly a masa thing. What if people don’t want you regionally? What if the party scene in Manila doesn’t embrace you?’”
Cha-cha-cha-changes…
The demons can’t seem to get into the club, however, what with the promising reception to Nancy’s synth-backed image overhaul; the ASAP grannies clapping during her recent guest performance, the Makati/Alabang crowd feverishly downloading tracks, and her album’s on-loop play in Canadian pirate stalls coinciding with its launch on iTunes Canada. But more than anything, the NJ “project” has also been “a really big self-discovery thing” for Castiglione. “Nancy Jane would be the person I was before I came (to the Philippines),” she says of how her new vocation represents not just those days she’d sing in theater productions back home or how she’d cope with any overwhelming emotion by belting out tunes ‘til she was exhausted, but how she’d always been carefree before discovering the murky underworld of local entertainment; where colleagues “entertained” after-hours clientele for extra talent fees and where her Canadian congeniality led to her being shoved around by the industry.
“I really don’t miss that ambience. I was pushed into myself when I was in showbiz, oblivious ‘cause I was always working,” she admits of the “social retardation” she gleaned from her star status, only learning the facts of artista life from a succession of equally cattle-branded celebrity boyfriends. “I felt like people weren’t taking me seriously, always thinking I was a pushover. Nancy Jane isn’t like that. She’s someone who’s completely outgoing and doesn’t give a sh*t. If she’s singing onstage, she’s owning the music, owning the crowd, and just feeling sexy from that all-out, good-vibe, house-and-electronica feel.”
In fornicating with the aural heights of dance music and becoming Nancy Jane, she’s a string of heavy beats away from reclaiming who she was and who she wants to be; another solitary, in-your-face transition that’s painful — shed tears and all — but necessary. ‘Cause even as her alter ego prepares to shoot the vid to her Rico Blanco-penned second single Control, punctures the local music scene with a DJ’s needle, or realizes club-remixed fame in Southeast Asia, it’s the real Nancy who’ll discover and anticipate much greater, more important things.
“I gotta remember what I’m trying to get to — close to the person I was before I went through all the sh*t I’ve been through here. If all these experiences come to me, good or bad, I’m just gonna embrace them. If I don’t go regional or whatever, at least I could say I did this,” Nancy says, allowing a stream of smoke to escape her lips as her now-dry eyes stare out at the strange street below. “For me, that’s always been just enough.”