"Never Be"
Releases August 11
“Never Be” is a haunting coming of age song about discovering oneself as a queer woman within the expectations of a traditional Filipino family.
Built around shadowy, New Orleans inspired jazz production, the song moves with the atmosphere of a dimly lit room after midnight. A mournful clarinet weaves through the arrangement, answering Monica’s haunting vocals and deepening the song’s sense of longing, secrecy, and emotional tension.
At its center, “Never Be” explores the distance between the person a family expects a daughter to become and the person she knows herself to be. It is a song about cultural loyalty, fear, desire, and the painful realization that becoming whole may require letting go of the life others imagined for you.
Both intimate and cinematic, “Never Be” introduces an artist unafraid to sit inside contradiction. The song does not reject family or tradition; instead, it asks what happens when love, identity, and inheritance cannot easily occupy the same space.
After years spent helping other musicians discover and shape their sound, Monica Rabino is leaping forward with a record of her own.
A Filipino American singer-songwriter, producer, traveler, and mystic, she creates music drawn from a life lived between places, traditions, and identities. Her story stretches from Florida and the islands of the Philippines to Denver, where she spent many years immersed in the city’s local poetry and independent arts communities. Along the way, she worked behind the scenes with artists and musicians in Denver and across the country, developing the instincts and technical experience that now shape her self produced debut album.
Her music carries the intimacy of poetry and the confidence of someone who has spent years listening closely, not only to music, but to people. She writes about family, belonging, desire, faith, cultural inheritance, and the difficult work of becoming fully oneself.
Deeply connected to the LGBTQ+ community, Monica Rabino approaches her work with compassion, honesty, and an understanding of what it means to create a home for people who have not always felt welcome elsewhere. Her life with her wife, a choir director, has further surrounded her with music rooted in voice, community, and shared expression.
Rather than presenting herself as a newcomer, Monica Rabino arrives as an artist whose voice has been forming for decades. Her forthcoming album brings together her experience as a producer, her instincts as a songwriter, and the emotional depth of a woman finally giving her own stories the attention she has long given to others.
Musical styles deeply rooted in folk traditions of singer songwriter acoustic guitar ballads and piano driven melodies. She comes from a background diverse in musical techniques. She’s worked with hip hop artists, riot girl bands, and protest choirs.
This is not a reinvention. It is a revealing. This is the sound of an artist stepping out from behind the console and claiming the center of her own work.
