The Elliott Smith Profile Picture That Changed Everything: How Catsonik’s “Pretend” Became Reality
A commercial shoot, a set break interview, and one Instagram photo that sparked musical alchemy
Fuck serendipity. This is cosmic intervention.
Picture this: We’re on set shooting a promo for Rico Blanco’s Canada Tour. Our lead talent for one segment? This Filipino-Canadian artist who goes by Catsonik. During a quick break between takes, our director Frazier and I decide to dig deeper into who this girl really is. Turns out she’s been sitting on a goldmine of unconventional indie tracks, armed with a guitar she tunes to configurations that would make your music theory professor weep.
“I don’t even know the name of the chords of my song,” Catsonik admits without a hint of apology. “I just press whatever and just tune whatever. And if it sounds good, it sounds good.”
This is the artist who just dropped “Pretend,” produced by Mikey Amistoso. If you know Philippine music, you know Mikey: frontman and bassist of indie rock band Ciudad, multi-instrumentalist and backup vocalist for The Itchyworms, and the mind behind solo project Hannah+Gabi. But how did these two end up in the same studio? That’s where things get weird.
The Break That Broke Everything Open
Crystal prefers Cat (“it sounds cute”), and she wasn’t supposed to be giving us her life story that day. She was there to help promote Rico Blanco’s tour. But something about her energy made us probe deeper. Fresh off releasing “Burden,” a scorching takedown of a guy who “didn’t know how to really make plans,” she was radiating that specific frequency of an artist on the verge.
Her story unfolds in reverse. From 5,000 YouTube subscribers backward to Filipino high school jam sessions, then further back to church praise and worship where her pastor grandfather played guitar. “When you grow up in a church, music is a big, big thing,” she explains. After moving to Canada at 13, alone with just a guitar, she became an artist who learned to make her own rules because no one was around to teach her the conventional ones.
Her typical guitar tuning? Try DGDF#BD. Good luck finding that in any tutorial.
The Most Important Profile Picture in Indie Music
Here’s where destiny gets drunk and starts making decisions. As our impromptu interview winds down, our Director, Frazier and I throw out a lifeline: “We might know someone who perfectly could help you.” We pulled up Mikey Amistoso’s Instagram.
Amistoso isn’t just some random producer we are name-dropping. This is a guy who’s shaped the Philippine indie sound across multiple projects. He can jump from Ciudad’s atmospheric indie rock to The Itchyworms’ Classic Alternative Rock experimentation to his intimate Hannah+Gabi work without breaking a sweat.
But it’s not his resume that makes Catsonik’s eyes go wide. It’s his profile picture.
“Elliott Smith,” she breathes, recognizing the reference immediately.
Earlier in our conversation, when asked who she’d open for if she could choose anyone, alive or dead, she didn’t hesitate: “Honestly, Elliott Smith. Oh my gosh. I love Elliott Smith, guys. His songs are so simple. It’s just acoustic guitar… It sounds like him singing in the park and it’s so beautiful. Such beautiful melodies. Fucking amazing.”
That profile picture wasn’t just a photo. It was a bat signal, a secret handshake, a musical DNA test that came back as a perfect match.
When Algorithms Can’t Compete with Chaos
In an industry obsessed with strategic collaborations and A&R data mining, the connection between Catsonik and Amistoso is beautifully analog. No Spotify algorithm could have predicted this. No industry matchmaker would have seen it coming. It took a commercial shoot for a completely different artist, a curious film crew, and one musician recognizing another musician’s spiritual north star in a tiny circular Instagram photo.
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“Pretend” emerged from this chaos. It captures everything Catsonik has been building toward in her bedroom laboratory of weird tunings and raw emotion. It’s the sound of an artist who writes songs about wanting to be loved (“I just really love loving someone. And also I just love being loved”) but wraps them in sonic experiments that refuse to play nice with conventional pop structures.
With Amistoso’s production, her DIY aesthetic doesn’t get polished away. It gets amplified. The man who understands both the maximalism of The Itchyworms and the intimacy of Hannah+Gabi knows how to preserve what makes an artist dangerous while making sure people actually hear it.
The Anti-Algorithm Revolution
Catsonik represents something increasingly rare: an artist whose path to recognition can’t be replicated, strategized, or taught in a masterclass. She gatekeeps her tunings (when people ask on her stories what tuning she’s using, she replies “oh, I don’t know, secret”). She writes from pure emotional spillage. She only started releasing music because YouTube comments wore down her resistance.
“I kept on writing more songs, and it just got to a point where, what am I doing? I should just, honestly, I should just do it.”
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Her influences create a sonic Venn diagram that shouldn’t exist. Paramore’s energy (“I wanna write a song that kind of gives Decode vibes”), Elliott Smith’s simplicity, OPM legends like Kitchie Nadal (“I love her so much”), Rico Blanco, Imago, and The Itchyworms. She wants to create “nostalgic feelings from the early 2000s and from the 90s” while everyone else is chasing TikTok algorithms.
Speaking of Paramore, when asked about her dream collaboration, she goes full fangirl: “I love Hayley Williams, guys. Yeah, no one can replicate her.” Then adds with characteristic honesty: “I’m not gay, but I would kiss her.”
The Sound of Not Giving a Fuck
“Pretend” doesn’t sound like it’s pretending to be anything other than what it is. The product of an artist who tunes her guitar to impossible configurations, a producer who gets the reference, and a moment of recognition that no amount of music industry machinery could have manufactured.
Catsonik has more ammunition ready. “How It Ends,” a three-chord depression anthem she calls “so depressing, which I fucking love,” is currently tangled in copyright issues because other artists started sampling her unreleased YouTube posts without permission. There’s another track coming in November that she says gives “Imago vibes.” The plan is to release every two months, “in God’s will,” building toward an EP or album.
But plans, as she notes, are “bound to fail.” So instead: “Fuck it, bro. I’m just gonna release a lot of music, man.”
The Real Magic Trick
The story of “Pretend” isn’t just about serendipity. It’s about what happens when the universe’s chaos theory collides with artists who are actually ready for it. Catsonik spent nine years preparing for a moment she didn’t know was coming. Amistoso built a career that made him the perfect producer for an artist he hadn’t met yet. And somehow, a commercial shoot for Rico Blanco became the unlikely venue for musical destiny to unfold.
Look, you can read about serendipity all day. You can analyze how a Rico Blanco tour promo became the unlikely birthing ground for indie magic. You can philosophize about Elliott Smith profile pictures and cosmic intervention.
Or you can just listen to “Pretend.”
Because all this backstory, all this chance-encounter bullshit, means nothing if the song doesn’t deliver. Good news: it fucking does.
Three minutes and change of Catsonik’s unconventional guitar tunings colliding with Amistoso’s production. The sound of two artists who found each other by accident and made something entirely on purpose.
Stop reading. Start listening. “Pretend” is streaming now.
Find Catsonik (C-A-T-S-O-N-I-K) everywhere that matters. “Pretend,” produced by Mikey Amistoso, is streaming now. Proof that sometimes the best connections happen when you’re not even looking for them.
Credits: Crystal Villena (Music and lyrics), Mikey Amistoso (Guitar and Production), Ethan Daniluk (Guitar).
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