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Behind the song: Sana Maulit Muli

SANA MAULIT Muli is one of Gary Valenciano's best-loved songs. It never fails to reduce people to tears whenever Gary sings it live. A lot of people know it backwards and forwards. But how well do they really know the song?

The story behind it. “[For example], not many people know that it was originally an English song,” he reveals. “I wrote it after Julie Vega passed away. I was moved by the reaction of the late Fernando Poe, Jr. to Julie's death, and so the song was born.”

It was originally titled Why'd You Close Your Eyes—a far cry from its current title. So how did it come to be the tug-at-your-heartstrings Filipino-language ballad we know today?

According to Gary, in 1989, Universal Records, his record label, came to him and asked him to come up with a Tagalog ballad. At the time, Gary wasn’t that well-versed in writing songs in Filipino, so his wife Angeli offered to help translate it into Tagalog. Gary obliged and left the lyrics and music with Angeli. Little did he know that she had begun to write her own lyrics to the music of Why’d You Close Your Eyes.

“It was all [my wife] Angeli's doing. “I didn’t know that she’d been doing it in her own time,” reveals Gary.

Sana Maulit Muli became one of his biggest hits in the 1980's. These days, the song is poised to tug at the heartstrings of a new generation, thanks to its inclusion on the Gerald Anderson-Kim Chiu teleserye soundtrack.

“I'm ecstatic that [the teleserye] Sana Maulit Muli has given me an opportunity to reach out to a younger generation with my music,” he says.