Looking back

I've been catching up on Coachella sets over the past two days, having missed the time slots of acts I wanted to watch live on stream. I particularly watched the full sets of Philippine pop group BINI and Justin Bieber. Both have had journeys that started when they were young until they became the powerhouses that they are today. There are many realizations and insights from looking back, ones that could chart the future.

I was particularly drawn to Bieber's method midway, searching for his old songs on YouTube as the audience cheered for what they wanted to hear. He played songs from when he was still a very young boy, along with the mistakes that he made both on and off stage. It was a clear display that not every shimmering star's journey is perfect; there are always highs and lows. Of course, our girl group BINI also shares the same sentiment. We recall how they used to be nobodies in the normal household until one breakthrough song changed how the whole country looked at them. It always pays to wait for perfect timing.

BINI, in many ways, mirrors that arc. Before the chart-topping hits and synchronized perfection, they were trainees --unknown, untested, and easy to overlook. Their rise wasn’t instant. It took time, persistence, and the right moment for one song to break through and shift public attention. What once felt like obscurity became visibility. What once felt like waiting became arrival. Their story reminds us that timing, as much as talent, shapes recognition.

These performances, of course, exist within a larger industry that thrives on nostalgia, spectacle, and emotional recall. Pop concerts are designed to make us look back. They bring us to a different dimension to escape. Beyond the machinery of production, there is something undeniably human in the act of remembering. Music has a way of collapsing time. A single note can return you to who you were years ago.

I found myself thinking about our own journey in Iloilo with the radio drama team. It was far from a Coachella stage, of course. The stage was smaller, and the livestream was more local, but in its own way, it held the same weight. We were navigating unfamiliar ground, working through constraints, negotiating ideas, and, at times, confronting our own limitations. There were moments of doubt, moments where things didn’t land the way we intended. But there were also breakthroughs. These were quiet ones, often unnoticed, that only we could fully understand.

Looking back now, those imperfections feel essential. They were not interruptions to the process; they were the process. Much like the early videos Bieber revisited or the formative years of BINI, our experience in Iloilo becomes more meaningful in retrospect. Perhaps that is the value of looking back. Not to romanticize the past, but to recognize how far we’ve come. Whether on a global stage or in a small production room, growth rarely announces itself in the moment. It reveals itself only when we dare to look again.