Maria Teresa “Girl” Valencia has launched her long-gestated first CD, Driftwood Traveling (Filscap, P250).

The eight songs in the CD, launched last Dec. 5, 2005, were deeply influenced by travels to faraway places in the country, with her parents or siblings, or by herself.

A writer and composer, she wrote all the songs in the album.

This is most memorable, especially in her musical accounts of her forays to the remote, ecologically wondrous corners of Palawan, Cebu, Laguna, and Ilocos Sur.

A Communication Arts graduate of Ateneo University, Girl Valencia has been singing professionally since after college. She makes the rounds as a featured singer of major hotels, including Manila Hotel, Intercontinental Hotel, Mandarin Oriental, EDSA Shangri-La, and Richmonde.

She has represented the Philippines in a couple of song competitions in Asia and is reputed to know 300 songs by heart. These include a unique, emotion-filled interpretation of “Imagine,” the late John Lennon’s peace anthem.

She has won prizes in both composing and writing. In 1995 she was awarded the Unesco Peace Prize of Excellence in Hiroshima, Japan, for a song of peace she composed, entitled “Breaking Barriers.” The song commemorated the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima.

On the writing side, she is the winner of the 2004 Manila Critics Circle prize for the best children’s book in English entitled The Christmas Fireflies.

She has also been tapped on television ads as a model-endorser for Nesvita Cereal and Carnation and was lead actress in a drama, El Filibusterismo, and a musical, Pipin.

Her latest creative work, Driftwood Traveling, represents a musical conscience that is singer, writer, and voyager.

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