There’s a certain transformation that takes place when crafting a debut album.

Assembling songs into a cohesive body of work and shaping a reflection of one’s current artistic identity requires moments of deep introspection, self-reflection, and embracing change. Since Paolo Sandejas released “My Girl” back in 2018, the indie singer-songwriter has gone through numerous changes, released two EPs, and even made the pivotal move to L.A. to take his masters. Yet, amidst all the changes in his life, the title of his debut album remains a constant: the world is so small.

Released last January 10, the world is so small is Sandejas’ eight-track testament to interconnectedness, and an ode to the threads that tie us together. Produced in collaboration with Xergio Ramos, it showcases Sandejas’ most ambitious and experimental work to date.

On this note, Billboard Philippines had a sit-down discussion with Paolo Sandejas on the production of his debut album, and the world he created within it.

Billboard Philippines: Congratulations on the upcoming release of your highly-anticipated debut album, the world is so small! Following your two EPs, Purple Afternoon and BLOOM, this marks your first full-length project. How does it feel knowing that this album is finally about to reach listeners worldwide?

Paolo Sandejas: Oh, it’s really exciting. Like you’ve said, I’ve put out a couple of EPs before, and it’s always been a milestone of mine to put out a full-length album and it’s what I’ve been chasing since I started making music. But until now, I never really had a full idea of what the album would sound like, I was always trying to stray away from, you know, just putting a bunch of songs together and just calling it an album, right? “I have twelve songs, album na ‘yan! (That’s an album!)” So, I just really wanted to craft a story around it and make it really seem like a cohesive project.

So, that’s how the world is so small came to be. I started with two songs, and I was like, “Huh, I think there’s something I can do here,” and it just kinda snowballed from there to the world is so small, the album. So, thank you so much, I’m just really excited for everyone to finally get to listen to it after, like, a year in the making.

Yeah, I’ve seen as well on your socials that you’ve been going back and forth on the details. Going through the final stages, do you feel ready? Do you feel prepared?

You can only be so prepared, right? You can like, tune it to your blue in the face and do all these little things. But, at the end of the day, it’s a project that I’m really proud of and I’m glad that Xergio and I really took the time and went through all the songs, and made sure they all sounded good and made sure they all made sense in the album. And, yeah, I’m sure the project came out as good as it can be. I know that there’s definitely gonna be some things that I’ll look back on in five years like, “Oh, maybe if I spent a little more time on this!” But, you know, that’s the game, and you can’t really get hung up on these things. Just put it out, and start working on the next one, too. I’m excited for that

“manila to LA” was one of the first tracks introduced from this album. Can you share the story behind its creation and production?

It’s a funny story, ’cause I wrote the song maybe back in 2023. I had some really nice chords that I wanted to use, and I was like, “Oh, if only I could use this in a song.” I would just kind of play them over and over again. And then, I visited my girlfriend, (who’s) in L.A. also now, and when I came back home after visiting, I wanted to write this song. All of a sudden it kind of like flowed out of me – that’s a weird way to put it, but that’s just kind of how it felt. It just like kind of bloomed and just came to be. I mean, yeah, I’m really proud of the song. It’s like a snapshot of what it’s like to be in a long distance relationship, with you kind of being desperate at some points, knowing that like, you know, it’s difficult to communicate your feelings. You know that if only you guys were in the same (place) it would kind of sort itself out.

Other than that, I think I might’ve written this down somewhere, but I started with “sirens” and “all the time.” Those are the first two songs in the album. I had this space in between that I wanted to fill up because “sirens” is like, you have a couple that’s happy, and “all the time,” it’s like kind of looking back on a relationship that ended. I kind of wanted to put these songs in the album and, in some way, connect these two songs together. “manila to LA” is in the long distance part of the album where the couple from “sirens” are in a (tough) spot and then, after that, it goes into “all the time,” where things maybe didn’t work out. So, those are the details that I was trying to iron out when I was writing the album which was super cool and really fun for me so I enjoyed it a lot.

When I listened to a couple of the tracks on the upcoming album, I noticed that it was kind of following a love cycle like there’s a relationship that we are seeing pan out. On that note, “manila to LA” feels very raw and vulnerable. What was it like for you to channel such emotion to a song? Is it easy being that transparent?

Actually, it’s always been difficult for me. I think as a writer, you are sometimes told to be more vague, you know, you want to include everyone in the song. But I think it was a quote from John Mayer that I heard — one of my idols, obviously — a while back, he mentioned something like “Instead of trying to channel the whole world into one song, you can instead focus your attention on this one small thing and make it, for some reason, feel like it’s the whole world. I kind of wanted to embody that in this song.

With “manila to LA,” it was definitely a little easier to be vulnerable when I can always fall back on like, “Yeah, it’s my life but also it’s the characters that I wrote in this in this little love story that I kind of put together for the album.” So, it’s loosely based off of my own life experiences. I kind of like injected a lot of my own personal experiences into these characters. But at the end of the day, it’s probably 90% true in a lot of ways, which is nice.

Okay, so it’s part of you, but it also has its own universe.

Absolutely. I think that really helped, in a way, for me to get vulnerable to really kind of imagine myself in like this character’s position, because in a way, I am that character, right? So, it’s kind of meta. Maybe I’m overcomplicating it, but at the end of the day, it was a really fun thing to work on and I had so much fun. I can’t wait to start on the next project but now I’m like, “Oh, what am I gonna do now? Am I gonna do the character thing again or am I gonna do something completely different?” I don’t know, I’m still working on it, but it’s always a fun journey to just write music.

You’ve recently made the move to L.A. to take your masters, right? So, “manila to LA” is basically like a real-time phenomenon for you.

Yeah, very timely!

How has the change in your environment affected your craft?

It’s been really interesting, obviously, I’m out of my comfort zone in a lot of ways. My friends aren’t really around me. I’m making new friends, but like, obviously, my core set of friends are all here (in Manila). Luckily, I’m with one of my best friends and my girlfriend’s also there, so I’m not totally alone. But at the same time, it’s like being exposed to a new environment can be so tricky and sometimes lonely.

But at the same time, you’re exposed to so many new things that you can’t help but be inspired by like different landscapes, different air you’re kind of breathing, and you’re just like, “Huh.” It kind of makes you write a different way, I think. The songs that I’ve written since moving to L.A. sound a little different from what I would write here, and I think that’s thanks in part to being in a new environment. Those new experiences, and also being exposed to new musicians and new – just so many new experiences to write about which is really good for creative people.

How do you think the sound has evolved, if you were to describe it?

I think from Purple Afternoon and like the first songs like “My Girl,” we’ve definitely come a long way from that song. I think when I first started writing music, I think I talked about this also when I released my EP Bloom; it was all after my song “Sorry” went viral because of V. I was kind of thinking about like, “Hmm, what do I want to focus on as a musician? Do I want to chase like a specific genre? Do I want to insert myself and like do the same thing again that went viral?” But I really wanted to instead focus on just doing what comes natural to me.

So, that’s been my recent philosophy since “Different Shade of Blue.” Instead of being like, “Oh, I like this song, but it doesn’t fit within like the genre that I want to pursue, so I’m just gonna scrap it.” Like instead, I’m focusing on that, like, “Hey, I made the song, I like it doesn’t matter if it necessarily fits the genre or vibe.” But I think eventually, the more songs I put out, it will just become its own sound in a way because, siyempre (surely), I’m like the person behind all of the songs. So it’s always gonna hopefully sound like me, which is what I want to pursue musically today. So, that’s kind of the goal. I feel like we’re definitely like kind of tapering out, and we’re making more sense as more songs come out so we’ve come a long way for sure.

Do we see this change and larger effect throughout your album?

In this album? Yeah, I think so. In a lot of ways, there’s still remnants of like maybe past Pao’s, like, you have songs like “just a song” and “roses” which are a little more acoustic and a little more laid back. But then you have songs like “sirens” and “moonlight,” which are definitely more live-focused. I wanted to make these songs sound really fun, and I think they sound great. I’m really excited to play them at the upcoming shows. We got to practice them with the band and they sound great. I think there’s like little bits and pieces of me that are in this album and from Paolo’s that have come before and they just have evolved into this new version of me, which I really like. And I’m glad that the album sounds the way it is because it’s all of those different parts of me put together in a way, so it’s super cool.

Okay, I love that! Excited to see the evolving of the Pao’s.

There are many Pao’s!

The multiverse, if you will!

Exactly.

In your Fun Fact series, you’ve shared a lot about your creative process behind the album and you’ve talk about how you started off with the chords for “manila to LA,” but when you’re typically crafting a song do you start with the melody, the lyrics, or something else?

It depends! I think I try to get inspiration from like a variety of places as much as possible, but generally if I were to like summarize my process, it usually starts with just me like on the guitar or in Logic, just making a beat, and then kind of seeing what naturally I feel like writing about at that moment in time. I think it’s just a very natural way to write. You’re kind of just being playful and just having fun writing music. I think with that, there’s less pressure on yourself to be like, “Oh, I have to finish a song in this amount of time.” It’s more of like, “Oh, let’s see what I write today. If I write something, good! If not, it’s fine.”

You kind of just have to have that, I think, patience with yourself to see what comes out and not force it all the time like, “I have to finish this thing.” It’s (more of) like, “Okay, let’s see what happens.” And this album, in a lot of ways, was a result of that. Kind of just being, giving myself time to be creative whether something comes out or not. It’s just taking the time to just be and just write, which is super cool. So that’s generally the vibe.

It’s like whatever comes out of the moment, so normally does a story take shape?

Oh, yeah definitely. If I were to give an example like for the song, “all the time,” I just kind of had this like kind of beat with the (jams out) and I was like, “This sounds really really fun, and kind of beach-y.” And I really liked it, and I kind of just wrote from there. The song kind of started out very cute. It’s like, “You have me on my knees. Like, I wonder if you think of me,” And I was like, “Okay, this is cute.” But I kind of wanted to change the story a little bit. I was like, “Where is the story going? Where is the song going? Is it just going to be cute the whole way? Or are we going to change it up?” So I decided to change it up. The bridge kind of takes it in a different way. It’s like from, “I wonder if you think of me in a crush-y kind of way, it became more of like I wonder if you still think of me.” Like, looking back on a relationship.

So, that’s something I take into consideration when I’m writing songs. Am I deciding to stick with the conventional narrative of just like, happy-crush kind of love song? Or am I gonna try and figure out the way to make it different? I mean it’s always good, like one of my songwriting teachers in school now, he told me something that you kind of have to “Earn the cheese.” You can’t just be cheesy all the time. You kind of have to earn it at times.

So, I feel like I earn the cheese for “all the time” because of the subversion in the bridge. Those are the types of things I’m thinking about now. And it’s fun, it’s definitely fun to think about that and to try to “earn my cheese” in a way.

That’s something new! That’s something I’ve never really heard of before, “earn your cheese.”

Me neither! Yeah, I was coming into that class, and my teacher would be like, “This line’s a little cheesy, but I think you earned it because of this line, so you can be a little cheesy here.” I feel like a lot of artists are like, “It’s so cheesy, I want to be vague all the time, I want to be artistic.” But, you know, I feel like it’s more fun if you just kind of let yourself just write whatever you want to write sometimes, and not just think about it like I have “High art,” and just take it easy. I think that’s my perspective on things now, five years later after writing songs.

That value rings very true to OPM where it just really comes from within, it’s not really pretentious or anything. We love truthfulness and honesty.

Pretentious is a good thing too, you can be pretentious but like, just don’t put too much pressure on yourself to be something. Just write something, which is true for a lot of OPM artists. It’s so beautiful to see like the way the scene has evolved with all the new artists coming up, just kind of writing and just doing their thing, so it’s really inspiring for me, and it’s great to see.

Moving back to your new album, you’ve talked about how you’re experimenting with new kinds of writing, but I’m also curious with your new production. You’re experimenting with new sounds and genres as seen in tracks like “all the time“ and “sirens,“ what other new innovations or elements can listeners look forward to for the rest of the record?

It’s interesting. I think there are a lot of little things that kind of make the album cohesive, and I think a lot of that has to do with like this fuzzy guitar that I’ve been quite annoying Xergio with to insist on having it in most of the songs. “roses” is kind of like a mellow acoustic track, but you’ll still hear that fuzz guitar in the background, and I think it’s the glue that kind of puts this whole album together.

That’s one little fun fact, I guess, with that song. Then with the title track, “the world is so small,” I think it’s a it’s definitely the most adventurous I’ve been in terms of writing because I narrate the whole story in that song. It follows like running into like a friend of your ex in the grocery store, then running into their mom in a bookstore or something like that, so you follow this narrative to eventually maybe running into that person in a random space.

That’s why it’s called “the world is so small” because you never know when you’re gonna bump into someone that you maybe don’t wanna see. It’s a fun song. It has this whole beat switch halfway through the song, and I’ve never done that before. I think it’s nice because when I write songs too, like when I listen to music, I get inspired by things, and I’m like “I want to kind of incorporate that thing that I liked in this song into my own songwriting.” And I think that’s like the active listening approach that I take when I listen to music. This is one of the ways that it’s came to be and manifested itself in my own writing through that song, and I’m really proud of it. So, I hope people enjoy it too and hopefully it’s not too experimental,
but I think it’s a lot of fun.

As your debut album, what message or story do you hope the world is so small conveys about who you are as an artist?

I think it hopefully conveys to people that I really put an emphasis on honest writing. I think that’s always been something that I’ve held close to myself. At the end of the day, I put a lot of time and effort to craft memorable lyrics and honest lyrics. I put them to like, you know, kind of catchy melodies. I feel like that’s my unique combination that kind of makes me who I am as an artist. I hope listeners appreciate that and take the time to, maybe after a couple of listens, take down the lyrics and kind of digest it because I really put a lot of time into it. I hope listeners feel that honesty and feel that maybe connectedness, connection with me.

With regards to the album and how they feel about it, I hope it just reminds people how interconnected we all are, you know. We come in and out of each other’s lives all the time, so you never know when you’re gonna bump into some people. It’s just a funny thing, the way the world works sometimes. That’s all it is really at the end of the day. It’s chill, and I’m excited for everyone to hear it.