“I realized that no matter how much you prepare for pain, you’re never really prepared for it,” singer-songwriter Moira told the crowd at the recent 1MX London Music Festival in Silverworks Island. Though clad in black, she was far from mourning; instead, onstage, she was celebrating her music, artistry, and above all, hope. It was drizzling, but the people jamming along with her didn’t mind—her voice and presence were like a ray of sunshine.

Backstage, a couple went to have their photo taken with Moira until the fangirling turned into a life-changing moment. Mentioning Moira’s song, “Dito Ka Lang,” in his love-filled speech, the man proposed to his girlfriend, and Moira began to sing the said song for the two.

This is just proof of how Moira’s songs have inspired countless love stories, cementing the power and influence she holds as an artist.

Sure, life isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. But that also means the weather won’t always be gloomy. And despite the storms she has had to weather, Moira is in a much better place now. Speaking to her after the controversies she faced recently, she tells us, “I am good. I have never been better in terms of growth… In the messiest, most chaotic moments of our lives, there are still treasures that come out of it. I’m kind of just waiting to see how I can grow from this… In the last few months, I feel like I have allowed myself to feel the anger and certain emotions that I had never allowed myself to feel. But then now that I have done it, I’m done with it. I feel like I’ve reached my calm. I feel like I’ve reached my calm where I know already that I wasn’t being buried but was being planted. I’m just waiting for what is about to bloom out of this season.”

For singer-songwriter Moira dela Torre, one thing’s for sure. She tripped over many a time, moving back and forth but still managing to sustain injuries even if she knows the trail like the back of her hand.

Living a dream is untimely when your home is ransacked by a storm so big it leaves you doubting life in the guise of a second chance. But through it all, one can survive and make it through.

Moira rises again and builds her fortress anew.

On Moira: Knit top by Trinie Siasat and accessories by Spaceskullpixie Photography by Shaira Luna

Claiming her self-confidence

“I think this year, it just changed.” What a joy to behold and say such a line after a long brush with pain and all its persistent side effects. “I don’t know if it was me starting to appreciate myself more; I don’t know if it was me starting to see that ‘hey, I’m not so bad after all,’” Moira shares in our exclusive one-on-one interview. “I’m okay. I can do it. I can get up on stage and actually enjoy what I’m doing and not just do it because I have to.”

Now that is a boss move. A new beginning is making Moira her centerfold—her cover even. She slices through the sweet pages of this promising chapter, ready for a comeback she only once deserved.

For starters, Moira was a doubter. She used to be unknowing of the power that she possesses, hardly aware that she was history in the making—but she made it. It’s now cheers to the 15 years that she was able to yield in a cutthroat niche. She is marking her 10-year milestone since her The Voice stint, breezing through the borders of the world with her first world tour, and racking up records both locally and beyond.

She is the first Filipina to stage a concert at the 16,000-seater Canada Life Center in Winnipeg, mind you, and still the most-streamed Filipina artist on Spotify. A force to be reckoned with, in other words.

“There was something about this past year that just changed and I thought the change was going to look different but it was actually a change that wasn’t so bad,” she opens up, raking in her bits of glorious moments. She gives in to my question, dethroning the quietude that I was expecting from her throughout our entire sit-down interview. “It was the first time that I performed on stage and I just lose myself,” Moira unpacks.

It’s a given—she has an unwavering talent for birthing tracks, her voice an angelic device. Her anthems are a vessel of aching truths, anguish, and the hopes of a smitten heart. At 29, she may have topped more charts in her lifetime than the years in her life combined, but she has always been the reserved type. “I’ve always been shy, even now. I’ve always been an introvert and I think my confidence never really came out until this tour,” Moira reveals.

“I just wanted my songs to be on the radio; I didn’t want to be a performer,” she furthers, pressing that her features are limited to a recorded performance. “I started on YouTube. I started with cover songs and I started just with me in front of a camera and I loved it because there wasn’t anybody else in the room,” says the singer-songwriter, harking back to her history of being a wallflower at times.

“I remember when I used to do bar gigs,” Moira tells us, “I always didn’t want to do spiels. I always just wanted to guest in between my friends’ sets because I didn’t want to go after them and I never felt good enough to go after any of my friends.” Moira continues, twirling her rings in different directions, her chuckles taking a rest. “In all my years performing, I would get up on stage and I’m just, ‘Am I doing it well?’”

Moira’s gaze would rarely meet mine. Sometimes, she would sip from her tumbler. At times, I would have to rope her in to get her eyes to alight mine. I suppose this is her version of shyness in front of strangers—face pointing downward.

Although, it pleases me to know that she is keeping pace with my questions. Pressing need not be done, as she is the one to dish out what I want to hear now. Her honesty is slowly taking up space in this atmosphere—no passersby, no crumbly chit-chats, calm and composed, her almost-stutters and sudden pauses turning into powerful speeches.

She gets lost in her distant past, as I pay serious attention. “I punish myself after every performance and then I’ll dread the next performance because I feel like I won’t do well enough,” she says.

In January, when Moira announced the exact tour dates of “Moira Tour 2023,” her fans took delight in the fact that it is her first ever tour—with legs extending to the Middle East, USA, and Canada. Little did they know, however, that the tour is what kept her dreaming for love, too—the kind that topples you but brings the balance back all the same. Moira is all for it.

She speeds up, speaking of her world tour and wondering in between how she and her band got to where they are. “During the whole tour, I just found myself wanting to do it more and do it again and again and not caring, really, about how other people would possibly judge me.” Great. It’s the new Moira taking over. Her tone? Next-level.

“I think overall, the entire tour so far has been amazing. I have met such incredible people. I have experienced such incredible and almost such magical things,” Moira persists, gushing with pride over the opportune moments that she was able to collect and add to her core memory—from witnessing the Northern Lights in the most unlikely place, seeing a polar bear up close, having a sold-out show, to making history.

“That’s when I realized—a lot of times, we want to know what the next step is and what the future holds. But sometimes, just knowing that God is with us is enough and knowing that we have a God to trust is to know that He will exceed all expectations,” Moira adds. “But I think the best, most amazing thing I’ve experienced so far on tour was discovering myself more.”

On Moira: Knit top by Trinie Siasat and accessories by Spaceskullpixie

The “hugot” hitmaker

With almost 5 million active monthly listeners and more or less 10 million followers on Spotify and high-flying hits like “Tagpuan,” “Paubaya,” and “Ikaw at Ako” under her belt, Moira is undoubtedly making an impact as a musician. Her heartbreak tunes heeded the people’s collective pain, and in turn, she was tagged as the “Hugot Queen” of today’s time. When asked what she feels about the moniker, she made it simple and straightforward:

“Labels are just labels,” Moira shrugs it off. “It was never my goal to be ‘Hugot Queen’ so I’m not very affected by it. I just want to write. I just want to express. I just want to make music.” Moira stays true to her inner compass. Growing up with Taylor Swift and Brooke Fraser’s creations, she was inspired to toss out songs that hum to the singer’s desires, well wishes, and dreams.

“I don’t want to lie to you and say ‘I don’t want to be a successful artist.’ I do. I want to succeed in what I do. I want to give my family a good life, [with] this being my bread and butter.” No joke. Nobody wants to fail. Winning is always attractive—be it in the body of a successful chart-crushing singer or in the frame of an independent female who can provide her family with an up-to-par life.

After a series of restrained smiles and aloofness, Moira leads the conversation. “If they label you something, then you can either be limited to it or you can choose to show them that ‘okay, you can see me this way, but I can also do this,’” she chimes in. “It doesn’t have to limit you if you don’t give it power. I don’t want to say that it limits me because that tagline has also given me so much of my platform.”

Beneath the labels, breakup headlines, hit songs, personal struggles, and self-redemption spree, Moira has always been appreciative of the blessings. “People have come to know me because of that line. They kind of know what to expect when it comes to my music but also, it’s not always ‘hugot.’ It looks like it is but really, it’s just [that] my albums are basically one whole message that says ‘if it’s painful now, it won’t always be.’”

And speaking of albums, Moira tells us that her soon-to-be-released album feels like a diary to her at this point instead of a project that she has been trying to round off. “I’m not even trying to finish the album; it’s finishing on its own,” she states. “I love it because it feels like an album that wants to come out. It feels like an album that is just growing with me and I am very proud of it.”

In fact, Moira is ecstatic that there is a new addition to her work-in-progress, which was conceived after a strange dream. “My dream was I was on a track-and-field [marathon] and there were so many people on a track. It felt like a festival, but it felt like a race. I felt bad and I couldn’t run,” she narrates, saying that there is this certain weight that holds her down. “I saw that the person next to me almost had no weight on hers, but I didn’t notice that the other leg had so much weight on it.”

“Everyone had different weights—on their arm, necks. A lot of times, we like comparing weight, [but] everyone’s carrying their own weight, carrying their own baggage, trying to run a race, trying to get by, trying to get through. I have gotten so fixated on my own weight [that] I forgot that people were going through the same thing also,” she realized, her words like a ringing sound.

“At one point, I have had such a hard time showing up because I didn’t have myself together, but it’s so much important to show up imperfect than to be absent because you’re too busy trying to be perfect,” Moira adds.

Her song “Hilom,” an official soundtrack for the teleserye Unbreak My Heart, also came to light. According to Moira, she was inspired by the whole synopsis of the series and the lesson that the show wants to convey—“you cannot love while you’re broken.”

Not long past, there were claims surrounding her credibility as an artist, but this woman of faith never wavered. “I don’t feel the need to prove myself to anyone anymore,” she says. “I had found such a new love for my job that I wanted to hold back on anything personal. I just wanted to be private.”

In her most empowered era

With three studio albums now, Moira is again setting a tireless record of being a riveting Filipino music flamethrower through her newest tracks “Ikaw at Sila” and “EME,” which gave us early access to her upcoming album.

Each brainchild of Moira has that gripping effect that we are all familiar with, and an album in the works is making us even more worked up. “The whole album is kind of my most vulnerable album yet. I feel like there are emotions that we all kind of want to say but we don’t know how to and that’s basically what I want to say through this album.” That is what I’m talking about.

The appeal that we perceive in the heartfelt pieces that Moira cooks up for us lies in the charm of authenticity. Vulnerable apiece, her songs sometimes reflect what we cannot risk saying. They trumpet our suppressed emotions, known or well-kept even.

Moira’s way of wording her deep-seated disappointments, failures, and heartaches also heats up in the form of a song. Theorizers sometimes even float the idea that it is the immense fire that her estranged relationships have caused her. Real or pass-around, her perspective had a significant shift that allowed superfluous opportunities to come her way. She says, “To be honest with you, I still feel a little jaded but it’s a mix, actually. I feel jaded and I feel hopeful.”

“It’s hard to trust but at the same time, I’m excited. I have questions but at the same time, it grew my empathy,” Moira ponders. Consoling oneself is a superficial activity when the damage runs deep and the cut is mightier than the comfort you feel.

In Moira’s case, however, she is far from the trickles of blood that once tarnished her self-love and self-esteem. She outgrew the energy that used to question her uniqueness, shrink her, or smash her to pieces. “I feel like I’ve been set free and I’ve been allowed to love myself more and see that for so many years, I’ve kind of felt like I was shrinking myself. I didn’t appreciate myself,” she admits, pining for her once-happy and optimistic self.

On Moira: Magenta mesh dress by Just Bonita

She dared slay the devils, though. “But in the last year,” she talks again after a sip from her glassware and blasts off, “I have felt so empowered and this has been the most empowered I’ve felt since 2016... Something shifted. And you know, I’m not pointing blame. I know that everything happens for a reason. I know that there are seasons to everything and I know that God works all together for good. I know that.”

What briefly follows is a centrifugal force. I smell the fragrance of standing up from the rubble, building and rehabilitating from the debris. “I think it’s just in this season right now [that] I have found a new appreciation for myself again,” she says. “I have found that I’m not so bad after all.”

Today, Moira thinks that she has finally graduated to a life of inner calm and quiet, as her once-warring brain and heart are now aligned. “I think this season of my life—I always kind of pictured it differently years ago,” she muses. “By the time I entered the spring era, I talked about spring not being a walk in the park, [but it] being an uncomfortable thing.”

“Growth is uncomfortable and messy sometimes. I remember how during the last hardest season of my life, that was the loneliest time of my life then,” she shares, noting that while she was uncertain as to where God would lead her and what she would have to do next, the light at the end of the tunnel is slowly illuminating the way for her.

Moira then harked back to the time when she was still living in Makati with her aunt and uncle. She recalled waking up to the noises of the construction beside their home, and it drove her insane. “It was deafening at one point. We were right night next to it,” she recalls.

She had to put up with the loud uproar for months until one day when she rode the wrong jeepney, unloaded it at the wrong stop, and passed by the very spot where the building was being erected. “The moment I passed it, I saw how deep it was and it just amazed me how all that noise—all that chaos—was actually leading up to something. It is not for nothing,” she says.

Now, while Moira claims that the digging was hard, she is happy that she was able to live through the pain to bloom out of her most difficult seasons. “That meant so much to me,” she ponders. “It was actually going to be the foundation of something great, and that something was what I held onto.”

Moira’s metamorphosis

In between her bouts of mental stress and “messed-up hormones”—as Moira would put it—her history of diseases and recurring disorders were also taking a toll on the artist’s well-being. She wondered if her bulimia, hypothyroidism, hormonal imbalance, and even infertility is only in her head. “[At the] beginning of April, I had so many sicknesses that I had been trying to treat for two years that in two months from April, I was cleared from all of it,” Moira opens up, as she recently made headlines for her jaw-dropping weight loss of 60 lbs.

“It just made me feel like, ‘Whoa! What was that?’ Was that all just manifesting physically? Was that all just mental? I was infertile for three years and all of a sudden, I was fertile; I was battling hypothyroidism and then all of a sudden, I was cleared from that; I was battling estrogen dominance and all of a sudden, I was cleared from that, [too],” she enumerates, walking us through the experience that pushed her to a new perspective.

“Was it stress? I don’t know. All I know right now is that I’m exactly where God wants me to be and I have never felt so free and so loved and so passionate in what I do. I never felt so much joy in my heart—not just joy because I’m in a good situation but I experience joy even when I’m in situations I don’t like,” she pauses, mulling over the past and bouncing back with a smile and a striking reassurance. “That’s when you know it’s real—when the situations aren’t controlling you.”

A second shot at life and at love

“I just felt very lonely in the last few years. I’m not taking away the good parts, you know. There were great parts, and I wasn’t surrounded by bad people,” Moira starts off. She’s still covered up in a calm demeanor, like a layer of dense material that I find a mystery. “Everyone makes mistakes,” she derives from the experience, embracing both the good and the bad that came out of her circumstances.

“There were things that I calculated in my head because I wanted to save so many things. I didn’t want to just give up on things that quickly, but when I realized the weight—the gravity—I didn’t want to lie to myself anymore,” she explains. “It wasn’t anymore a question between forgiveness or not. It was a question of ‘am I willing to waste myself again’ [or] ‘is it worth it?’”

“I realized that there was so much more—so much more that I knew that I wanted,” Moira reflects. “I realized that loving yourself isn’t a selfish thing, and setting boundaries isn’t a selfish thing. A lot of times, when we’re fearful, we just say ‘yes’ because we’re afraid to be alone or we’re afraid to be abandoned or we’re afraid that the same thing would happen again.” Right there and then, it became clearer why Moira resonates with many; her words and lyrics hit home.

The whirlwind romance, the pain, the rejections, her miscalculations, and fate’s mishaps—all are fragments that are meant to fill a bigger picture. “I learned that I don’t have to shrink myself or water down my dreams. I can get off the train. I can still head towards what I prayed for.”

Moira is also setting her own pace at the moment. Never again will she deem the word “selfish” as the bad kind of selfish. “I’m at a point where I’m actually thankful for the worst part of my life. Now, I’m actually finding myself rather thankful for the hardest moments of my life yet, because it has given me the chance to grow and approach love better.”

As she is now in the right headspace, the singer-songwriter has learned to grow her empathy, too. Her love for people extends to her passion and her job, and it got even deeper as she learned to value herself more. “I never really learned to do that. [I] never really learned to love myself and to value myself enough to set boundaries for myself and to be selfish for myself,” she admits. “I always felt like setting boundaries was a selfish thing, [but] setting boundaries allows you to be more selfless.”

Moira sings a line from her new song, and I think it’s bound to top playlists across multiple platforms. I was moved. “I don’t know who you are yet, but at least let me hope for you; I wonder what I’ll see in those eyes, I wonder what it feels without lies? Will it all be different in time or will I try looking for the pieces again? I wonder if the pain never ends, but I’m going to do this for me; Maybe then, I’ll be worthy.”

She doesn’t hide the fact that she feels jaded at times, making it hard for her to trust again. But she knows she has to keep moving forward for her own sake. “I didn’t want anything from my past to further steal from me, and I didn’t want it to even steal the wonder from me,” she realizes.

Moira’s support system

Life and love is a constant tug-of-war, and while on the other end of the rope lie those who push you to your limits, behind your back is a troop of support ready to catch you when you fall. “I have a few close friends who have been with me in the last ten years—who have never failed to grow with me,” Moira gently shifts the conversation. When asked who she usually listens to for guidance when everybody else has their own versions of truth, she replies, “I grew up a pastor’s kid but I have been in and out of church, so it’s not really church but my relationship with God. It’s God and family.”

Moira’s tender nature is matched by the people who surround her, too. She considers her band as one of her best friends for life, even though most of them are already in a relationship or are busy with their own families. “I trust them with everything. They know my deepest thoughts, [and] I’m not afraid to tell them when I messed up. I ask them; I open up to them,” she shares, mentioning along the way that recently, Vice Ganda, a friend and fellow The Voice host, gave her sound advice as well.

“It took me a while to understand that I don’t have to listen to all the voices,” Moira begins. “Just because they’re loud doesn’t mean they’re true. Most of the time, it’s just noise.” This piece of wisdom came in handy in the nick of time. As Moira was learning how to speak her truth without hesitation, she also learned how to adjust the volume of the noise around her. Sometimes even, she can already turn them on mute.

“That’s stuck with me so much... When you’re in a place where there’s never an intent to cover anything up, or to hurt anyone, or to step on anyone, there’s no need for that extra effort. I think that’s what I’ve been learning—how to deal with things peacefully,” Moira enthuses.

As for the loyal supporters who continue to back her up, Moira tells us that she is lucky to have them through thick and thin. She dedicates a message to her fans, “It’s really just ‘thank you.’ Thank you for loving me through all these seasons and being with me, growing with me, walking with me—through all my phases, through all my seasons. It’s one thing to stick with someone when times are good, but it’s a whole other thing when there are storms. I’m just so thankful and so grateful that you guys are still there. I’ll always be the lucky one.”

Moira may think she is lucky, but without the hard work she put in, the recipe for success is incomplete. Perhaps, without her realizing it, her fans are the lucky ones, because they have her timeless songs to turn to through every season of their lives.

Photography by Shaira Luna

Sittings editors: Geolette Esguerra, Grace Libero-Cruz, and Red Dimaandal

Creative direction by Randz Manucom

Art direction by Raff Colmenar

Makeup by Theresa Padin

Hairstyling by Brent Sales

Fashion styling by Ica Villanueva, assisted by Francis Torres

Videographer: CJ Reyes

Photography assistant: Albert Calaguas

Shot on location at Sefriya Farm & Vintage Orchard

Vintage car rental: Don Robert’s Bridal Cars

Special thanks to Cornerstone, Mac Merla, CJ Cabungcal, and Ron Bernabe