Thoughts and Notions brings the best Christmas gift

LA Music Review | Art, stories and advice


Upbeat and truly empowering!

Rating: 5 out of 5.

Hi Thoughts and Notions, welcome to LA Music Review! Tell us a little bit about you and your music.

Thoughts And Notions is a songwriting duo from Cagayan de Oro that aims to write songs to help uplift wounded souls.

In our latest comeback, we have decided to focus on songwriting. For this song, we tapped a host of talented and legendary artists from Cagayan de Oro, namely Tirada, a Glam Rock Band, Elvis Rock Cabillar, lead vocalist of the band Bloodflowers, a PMPC Star Awards Nominee, Wile Lile, Legendary All-Around Musician from CDO, and AJ Alburo, an up-and-coming bass guitar prodigy.

So basically, this is our Christmas Present not only to our fellow Kagayanons, but to the whole world as well. As we showcase the talents of CDO Musicians. We are so passionate about the promotion of CDO’s local music scene and we saw it fitting to end the year by coming up with a sweet collaboration project with CDO based artists.

Start streaming “What Real Christmas Means to Me” here:

Rating: 5 out of 5.

Congrats on the release! What was your inspiration when you were writing this project?

The main inspiration was about to remember the real meaning of Christmas.

Released in November 16, 2022. As the years went by, Christmas has turned into a more commercial affair than to truly celebrate the birth of our Savior Jesus Christ. I basically asked my kids what Christmas means to them, and I was shocked that they seem to remember less about Jesus and more on the material things that they usually look forward to.

It doesn’t help that when you go to commercial spaces, you see less and less of the newborn Jesus on a manger and more images of Santa Claus and Christmas Trees. So from there, I was inspired to write this song. Use it as a teaching moment to my kids and to an extent, to a larger audience as well.

What is your vision for this song?

Our overall vision of the song is to try to put Jesus Christ front and center again as we celebrate the Christmas Season.

It saddens us that we seemed to be going farther away from the true spirit of Christmas and worry more about the commercial and material aspects of the season.

So, we are hoping that this song would at least help call the attention back to Jesus. To just remember to thank him and thank God for His gift of salvation thru his son, who lived among us.

What is your favorite part of the song?

Apart from the lyrics, I think the instrumental solo part that Wile Lile inserted
towards the end of the song was our favorite part.

The instrumental piece sounded so intense, like a call to action. It’s like we are called to take part in a revolution to stand up and not only remember Jesus, but to help spread the word of his memory in this Christmas Season as well.

It is also Wile Lile in his best element. I’ve known him since we were still in High-School, and it made me remember a younger Wile Lile who was heavily influenced by Progressive Rock bands like Dream Theater. And of course, the fact that this is a collaborative project with lots of talented CDO Musicians. This is like an all-star cast. A dream project if you will.

Anything else we should know about it? Future releases? 

For this year, this is probably the last song that we will be releasing. But we have 3 more songs in the pipeline for release in the first quarter of next year. So more music to come not only from us, but with other artists that we will be working with as well.

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