Interview: Dani Saldo Releases 'lost & found' and Shares Her Love for Writing, Healing Journey, and Future in Music
Living in Guelph, a few minutes from Toronto, pop singer-songwriter and disability and mental health activist Dani Saldo released her new single “lost & found” on January 20. This new single was written when Saldo was struggling, as she has undergone many life-changing experiences over the pandemic, including a car accident that led her to have post-concussion syndrome.
Through her emotional and melancholic single, she expressed her feelings by taking listeners along her healing journey. Saldo emphasized that this new song is what she is most proud of from her released discography. It shows off her beautiful vocal arrangement with harmonies she recorded by herself. HALSUG had the opportunity to learn about Saldo’s new single, music, and future aspirations during a video call.
“You're hoping that when your lost thing goes missing, you can find it in the lost and found, but for me, that would be like if I could find the version of myself that is either able-bodied or happier. And if there was a place I could go to feel found again, I would do almost anything to get there and to feel at home and myself again.”
Photo Courtesy of Dani Saldo
When you think of a lost and found, it’s where one goes to find what they’ve lost. For Saldo, it’s finding herself, but realizing that she won’t be able to find that same person — before all of what she has experienced.
“I think part of it is also just kind of like, what would you do when the thing you lose is something that you can't find and then you just kind of sit in that discomfort,” she said. “I think “lost & found” is kind of like me, sitting in the discomfort of ‘this freakin sucks.’ And that's okay.”
After being in a car accident during the pandemic, Saldo struggled with a disability (post-concussion syndrome), making her way of life and what she wanted to do more difficult. “It was kind of like a chain reaction of, this change happened to me and then it began to affect so many of my friendships, so many of my relationships,” the singer-songwriter explained.
“I had to say no to so many things. I just was so disconnected from everything and everyone and especially myself. I kind of just felt so lost and I was just struggling really heavily with grief and disability grief, which is kind of the feeling of, ‘I want to do this thing. I want to do this thing so badly. But I am not able to because of my limits, at my limits.’ And it just made me feel like I'm, you know, toys in the lost and found […] if you ever lose things at school, you're hoping that when your lost thing goes missing, you can find it in the lost and found, but for me, that would be if I could find the version of myself that is either able-bodied or happier. And if there was a place I could go to feel found again, I would do almost anything to get there and to feel at home and myself again.”
Photo Courtesy of Dani Saldo
Not only is “lost & found” about Saldo’s healing journey, but she also touches on hiding her true and most vulnerable self in the lyrics, “But I don’t have the strength for // hiding…” Saldo said that she finds herself burnt out and always hiding a version of herself from everyone because she feels like she has to be much more put together than others.
Admitting that might just be imposter syndrome but expressing that, “being someone with a disability, and also being a woman of color, queer women of color, all of those fun things, I often feel like I have to work at least five times as hard as somebody who may be Caucasian growing up here because of all of those things. The little things and privileges add up so quickly, and it makes me feel like I have to hide the true vulnerable version of myself, [and] that I can't be that vulnerable all the time because it just doesn't feel safe to be. And so I go through periods of time where I just feel like I'm just tired of hiding. I wish I could just be [myself] instead of having to I feel like [performing] being somebody who's able-bodied and make myself more palatable to both people and people in the industry […] Which I'm trying to but there's always a level of having to hide to be safe. You know?” She finds it tiring and no longer has the strength to hide her true self.
In another lyric of “lost & found,” Saldo says, "So much that I've left unsaid and // I don't know where to go” resembling the words in the title of her first EP, everything i didn’t say, released back in September 2023. There are times when she wishes people would come to understand her identity and characteristics without her having to explicitly say anything (or explain) and then times when she literally can’t speak up. The time when Saldo feels there are things she has left unsaid is when she talks about why she makes music.
The reason she makes music is because “writing music makes me feel less alone for myself. I get to make songs that I wish existed come to life. And I feel like if I am feeling this one hyper-specific feeling, there has to be somebody else who is feeling that.” The things that she has left unsaid are about the experiences of hurt that comes from the “disabled experience,” being a queer woman, and a person of color.
“And there's just so many things that I wish people could read between the lines about me so that I could, I guess, be more free and stuff like that.”
But mostly, the times when Saldo quite literally leaves things unsaid, which she describes in “lost & found,” were about her experiences with dissociative amnesia. She explained that whenever she goes into episodes of it, she can't communicate.
“I literally cannot say anything and I need people to pick up on those small cries for help before I literally lose myself in dissociative amnesia, which is sometimes I get so stressed out that I don't remember who I am. I don't remember where I am. I don't remember who anyone is, and I'm just sitting like in Get Out. I wish somebody could see that I'm struggling without having to fully say it.”
In writing “lost & found,” Saldo hopes that her listeners can relate to these vulnerable and honest experiences and feel seen through her poetic lyricism. She has undergone life-changing experiences, traveled across the country, and made friendships/relationships told through her music. Growing up in her hometown of Guelph, which has shaped so much of her, she paints a picture as it “looks like the start of a John Green novel. It really looks like the city where it's just, you fall in love and it always has the best sunsets.”
She mentioned she has sound-color synesthesia where she can “hear colors.” “Seeing the way that Guelph looks I think is the way my music also sounds. It's kind of just like I'm always just making a love letter to my hometown.” She shared that being Filipino, she’s immersed in the culture and very close to her roots. “I just feel like it's a very important part of my identity. I can speak Tagalog and I go home to the Philippines, not often as much since the pandemic. I just feel so close to my roots, and I’m always proud of it. And our, the stereotype of like, Filipinos sing, it lives on in me.”
Growing up, she would go to church with her family where she learned and started singing in the church choir and worship team. “I'm Filipino. So in the Philippines, we love our singers and we love our Jesus, [laughs],” Saldo said.
As a songwriter, the moment she realized she enjoyed writing began in third grade when her teacher taught poetry and told her she might really like this and to try it out, and that it can help process feelings. She is very thankful for her third grade teacher who not only opened up the possibilities to express her emotions and experiences through songwriting and music but also taught her about harmonies and more. She started songwriting and picked up a guitar because during high school she adored artists like One Direction, Halsey, and 5 Seconds of Summer. She wanted to be like them, “cool like them,” and she felt, “Oh my God, these guys are just like me.”
Besides making music, Saldo creates writing camps for TV and film and organizes rights for music licensing companies which obligates her to travel to Los Angeles, New York, and Montreal. Saldo got to experience different sides of New York and LA.
She described New York as having a lot more of an “alt-rocky” vibe and California as warm with really good food. She felt at home in New York as she noticed its similarity to Toronto. Growing up in Guelph, traveling to all these places, and having the cultural background that she has, they’ve all influenced her in many ways of her lyricism.
everything i didn’t say was the first EP Saldo released as a collection of her relationship experience of falling in love, not knowing how to tell that person, being afraid to fall in love, and coming to terms with that she’s ready to vulnerably confess her feelings to that loved one. During the EP making, Saldo underwent an intense breakup, ending her engagement with someone she believed would be her forever love. She thought she would never be able to love anyone else again, but later on, she unexpectedly fell in love once more.
While falling in love again, the relationship that she expresses in her EP helped her see that she was capable of being in love and that she’s going to be okay after her heart had been broken. Saldo was able to take listeners through the stages of her love and encapsulate those feelings in her EP with dreamy beats and sweet melodies.
“There's a saying, from I think RuPaul's DragRace. ‘If you can't love yourself, how in the hell are you gonna love somebody else?’ And I hate that saying so much. I just think it's not true to loving yourself. Because when I was in a place where I felt the most unlovable, I learned how to love myself through other people loving me and through their example. And because of their example, I was able to find little versions of them that turned into pieces of everyone I've ever loved, embedded in myself. And because of those, because of that love, I am who I am.”
While creating the EP, she made so many friends and memories as she performed at different places. Saldo said her life would be so different without everything I didn’t say because when she started writing those songs, she was also writing songs for TV and film — she said it was a dream that she had.
But towards the end of writing them, Saldo was featured in Anna Kendrick’s movie Alice Darling with the song “All I Need,” which premiered at the 2022 Toronto Film Festival, and co-wrote Jillian May’s debut single, “Could We Be Happy” that was played during Season 9 of MTV’s Teen Mom OG & Episode 2 of Season 2 of Netflix’s Love Is Blind. As she created and chose the songs for her first EP, she grew as an artist with more opportunities and relationships.
“I want my nine to five to be music.” Saldo wants to be financially stable and fund her cost of living through music. She’s written many songs over the years and said that she can’t release them all as one person because there are just too many.
“I honestly just want to write regularly, […] but I think writing is my first love. I'm the happiest when I'm creating. So I just want to do that more.” She said she’s never opposed to writing songs and creating soundtracks for TV and film. “A lot of my music tends to sound like John Green coming-of-age novels. So it would be really cool if I could create a custom soundtrack or album for a movie or something.”
Going through her experiences, Saldo had said she had a hard time because no one ever prepared her for these types of experiences; she felt alone, especially as a musician. “I feel like when you're going through a breakup, you can listen to so many artists and feel so comforted by that music, but when you go through a breakup with yourself, it's like, where the frick do I find that,” Saldo said.
Not having someone to guide her through these experiences, she gave her advice on what she hopes people who are going through similar experiences can receive and what helped her through it all.
The first was to have basic needs met and a good therapist, and if they can get a free one, that’s even better as sometimes with insurance and money, people aren’t able to receive the help they need. She explained how individuals who go through mental health and have disabilities can be neglected by the government and there is a never-ending cycle that leads to no needs being met.
Saldo talked about media that reflects Asian representation and the disabled experience hoping individuals can have their experiences reflected in media because besides the fact that she had therapy and medical help, what really got her through her healing journey was seeing disability portrayed through superheroes and Marvel.
Loving superheroes and Marvel, she said, “I think with superheroes, it tells the same story of ‘oh, suddenly, something's happened to me, an accident, a spider bite. And now I have to figure out how to deal with this new version of myself that has this disability, or spider powers, and my journey to accept and integrate that new aspect of myself into friends and my community.’ And I think it's just so, it's just really comforting to see. So I hope that people going through similar things can find themselves in different pieces of media or different groups and movies and stuff like that.”
Seeing yourself represented accurately and creatively is inspiring, comforting, and makes individuals feel they belong in this world. “It's also dope to see more Asian representation in the media that's been so sick […] I feel like being Asian, Asian people often try to assimilate and not cause trouble [...] There's a show called Beef and Blue Eye Samurai which encapsulates both Asian anger and grief and female rage the best I've ever seen. And so, always looking for cool new media to find myself in that'll give my brain a hug, it has been so important.”
everything I didn't say was her appetizer to what she has in store for fans. After the release of Saldo’s new single, she wants to build off of the themes of heartbreak and translate them into self-exploration, grief within yourself, disability, ableism, and mental health. With 2024 just starting, she wants to release more music and bring more light to more nuanced conversations of intersectionality.
“Because I think a lot of the time, media can be very black and white, both literally and textually. Having some more intersectional voices and intersectional identities can impact your life and your healing journey. Also, I think [that is] so important to talk about and [is] something that I will actively be doing.”
What did you think of Saldo’s emotional new single “lost & found”? Let us know by leaving a comment below or reaching out to us on Instagram or X (Twitter).
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Artist Facts
Birthday: April 21, 1999
Nationality: Filipino
Zodiac Sign: Taurus
MBTI: INFP
Favorite Foods: Mango
Favorite Drinks: Boba
Favorite Movies: Everything Everywhere All at Once
Day or Night?: Night
Song you’re most proud of: “lost and found”
Edited by Alliya Garcia