Ruby Ibarra: From Tacloban to Tiny Desk to Forgotten Island
Ruby Ibarra: From Tacloban to Tiny Desk to Forgotten Island
Ruby Ibarra raps in English, Tagalog, and Waray, won NPR’s Tiny Desk Contest with a song about a mythic serpent, and now shares “Salbahe Ako” with Carl Angelo on the Forgotten Island soundtrack. Here is the record, and why it matters this October.
When the closing credits of Forgotten Island rolled, one name made me sit up. A song came on, and I leaned over to my bunso, Chesca, and told her that was Ruby Ibarra. Then I asked whether she knew what salbahe meant. She didn’t. I told her it means naughty, which is true, and which I have been turning over ever since, because I am no longer sure it is the whole answer.
I also told her the track samples “Apache.” That one is personal. “Apache” has been a favorite of mine since the Sugarhill Gang and my Springstowne Jr. High School days in Vallejo, so hearing that breakbeat’s lineage run through a Filipino American rapper’s song in a DreamWorks movie felt like a loop closing. This profile tries to do right by both threads: who Ruby Ibarra is, and why a Filipino American kid from the East Bay has her name on that soundtrack.
Ruby Ibarra’s family brought one piece of music with them from the Philippines to California: a cassette of Francis Magalona’s 1990 album Yo!, which she says made her a fan of hip-hop. Decades later, SB19’s cover of a Francis M. song sits on the same Forgotten Island soundtrack as her own track. One cassette, one thread, thirty-six years.
Salbahe sal-BAH-heh
Meaning: Naughty, mischievous.
It is the word aimed at a kid who will not sit still, and it is the title of Carl Angelo and Ruby Ibarra’s Forgotten Island track. As I hear the song, the word stops being a scolding and becomes a declaration: unapologetic, fierce, hard to ignore. That is my reading, not a verse-by-verse translation.
Who Ruby Ibarra Is
Ruby Anne Ibarra was born on February 25, 1988, in Tacloban, Leyte. She moved with her family to the United States at age 4 and grew up a first-generation immigrant in the Bay Area, raised in San Lorenzo. She raps in English alongside Tagalog and Bisaya, and in Waray, the language her family spoke at home even after they crossed the Pacific.
She is a rapper, music producer, songwriter, spoken-word artist, and director; she directed the video for “US.” She attended UC Davis and performed with a spoken-word collective called SickSpits. For years she also worked as a research scientist at a Bay Area biotech firm, and she knows what it is to be a woman in a field ruled by men, in the lab and in hip-hop.
That second point matters for the rest of this piece. Ibarra is not a novelty act who happens to speak a second language. She is a working scientist who turned into a full-time artist on her own timeline, and who has spent a decade refusing to treat her Filipino languages as seasoning.
A Cassette From the Motherland
The origin story is almost too tidy. When the family left Tacloban they brought one piece of music: a cassette of Francis Magalona’s 1990 album Yo!. It played in the house regularly, and it made her a fan of Francis M. and of hip-hop in one stroke. She went on to praise his early talk about colorism and about uniting communities, in the song “Mga Kababayan Ko.”
The rest of her early diet was E-40 and Hieroglyphics from the Bay, Lauryn Hill, and the late Francis Magalona. Then comes the loop that makes October 2026 feel earned: SB19 covers a Francis Magalona song on the Forgotten Island soundtrack, under that same “Mga Kababayan Ko” title in some coverage. A kid who learned hip-hop from one cassette in an East Bay household now shares an album with a P-pop group paying that artist back.
Language as Instrument, Not Decoration
She is blunt about how she handles language. She makes a point of rapping in Tagalog, Bisaya, and Waray, and she has explained why in a line worth keeping: “Our languages are basically like acapella beatbox to me.” Her point is that the sounds are percussive, and that Philippine languages belong in hip-hop and deserve to be celebrated there.
She is also honest about the cost of not having been handed the language. She has described a childhood spent wondering whether she was Filipino enough or American enough, feeling short of both. Writing music, and later taking Asian American studies and Filipino American history courses in college, is how she worked through that. If you are a second- or third-generation reader who understands more Tagalog than you speak, that arc will sound familiar, and it is the argument we make at length in Language Is Identity: the language is not a test you fail, it is a door you walk through.
Circa91: The Women Are the Point
Her debut album, Circa91, came out on Beatrock Music on October 3, 2017; she had begun rapping professionally the year before. It is an album about identity, brown skin, survival, and mother and motherland, and it makes a structural choice: she made it a conscious decision to fill the record with predominantly women’s voices, because hip-hop is male-dominated, Filipino culture is patriarchal, and women’s stories tend to get pushed to the margins.
The guest list backs that up. Her collaborators include fellow Filipina American rappers Rocky Rivera, Klassy, and Faith Santilla, and the video for “US,” which she directed, features more than 150 Filipinas in traditional clothing from across the islands. She wanted to show that Filipinas are not one-dimensional and that no single voice can speak for all of them.
There is a family thread too. Her mother, educated in the Philippines, came to the United States in her early thirties and found her college degree dismissed. Stories like that, Ibarra says, are why she keeps going, because people are still underrepresented and misrepresented. That sentence is the clearest statement of purpose in everything I read for this profile.
From the Lab to the Stage
In 2021 she stepped away from her career as a research scientist to pursue music full-time. In 2023, with fellow artist Ouida, she co-founded Bolo Music Group, a Bay Area indie collective, and she received a Vilcek Foundation award for Creative Promise. Her songs have appeared on Fox’s The Cleaning Lady, where she also guest-starred in a March 2024 episode, and on the NBA 2K23 and NBA 2K24 soundtracks.
The stage record is documented too: the Smithsonian Folklife Festival on the National Mall on June 29, 2019, the Getty on February 15, 2020, and the Ford in Los Angeles on August 29, 2021. The timeline below pulls the dated milestones together.
| Year | Milestone |
|---|---|
| 2012 | Releases the mixtape Lost in Translation, hosted by DJ Kay Slay |
| 2015 | Signs with Beatrock Music |
| 2017 | Releases debut album Circa91 on Beatrock Music, October 3 |
| 2018 | Appears in a national MasterCard campaign alongside SZA and other breakout artists |
| 2019 | Performs at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival on the National Mall, June 29; enters NPR’s Tiny Desk Contest with an ode to her immigrant mother |
| 2020 | Performs at the Getty, February 15 |
| 2021 | Leaves her research-scientist career to pursue music full-time; performs at the Ford in Los Angeles, August 29 |
| 2023 | Receives a Vilcek Foundation Creative Promise award; co-founds Bolo Music Group with Ouida |
| 2024 | Releases “Bakunawa,” the song and video that anchor her next album |
| 2025 | Wins NPR’s Tiny Desk Contest with “Bakunawa,” announced May 13 |
| 2026 | “Salbahe Ako,” with Carl Angelo, released September 18 on the Forgotten Island soundtrack |
Bakunawa and the Tiny Desk
On May 13, 2025, Ibarra was named the winner of NPR’s Tiny Desk Contest with “Bakunawa,” a song inspired by the dragon-like serpent of Philippine mythology. She sees the creature and its banishment as a metaphor for how Filipino history, art, and culture get shunned and cast aside by the mainstream. “I just wanted to flip that story,” she said, and this time she wanted to embody the Bakunawa itself.
The track features Ouida, Han Han, and June Millington, the guitarist from the pioneering all-female rock band Fanny, and each guest taps her own inner mythological creature. It is also a long game: Ibarra first entered the Tiny Desk Contest in 2019 with an ode to her immigrant mother, and won six years later. She headlined NPR’s Tiny Desk Contest on the Road tour in 2025.
Why Her Name Is in the Forgotten Island Credits
Forgotten Island is DreamWorks Animation’s Philippine-mythology adventure, written and directed by Joel Crawford and Januel Mercado. It follows best friends Jo and Raissa, voiced by H.E.R. and Liza Soberano, who are about to head down separate paths when a portal drops them on a mythic island. Lea Salonga voices the Manananggal. It opened in Philippine cinemas on September 23 and in U.S. theaters on September 25, 2026. We reviewed it from the Bay Area in Forgotten Island Hit Me in the Feels, and we wrote about H.E.R. and Vallejo in our piece on her mom, her dad, and that house.
The soundtrack was built on purpose. Universal Pictures’ senior vice president of film music, Angela Leus, a Filipino American, set out to learn about “every Filipino music creator out there” and reached out across the Philippines and the United States. The result is a 37-track album from Back Lot Music, released digitally September 18, 2026, with BINI, SB19, H.E.R., Liza Soberano, KATSEYE’s Sophia Laforteza, Lea Salonga, composer Nathan Matthew David, and Ibarra with Carl Angelo.
“Salbahe Ako” is track 10. The official credits list Antonio Cuna, Ruby Ibarra, Jerry Lordan, and Carl Angelo Viray as writers, Sweater Beats as producer, and Carl Angelo and Ruby Ibarra as performers. I do not have an interview in which either artist explains the song’s meaning or why they chose their sample, and I am not going to guess at one.
Carl Angelo and Ruby Ibarra perform “Salbahe Ako” live on the Wish USA Bus. The performance kicks off Filipino American History Month with a “Wishclusive” set. Lyrics are not reproduced here; press play to hear the verses as they were performed.
A Breakbeat With a Long Memory
Here is the lineage. Jerry Lordan wrote “Apache” after watching a 1954 western of the same name. Bert Weedon recorded it first, in early 1960. The Shadows’ version, released that July, topped the UK chart for five weeks. Jørgen Ingmann’s cover reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1961. Then, in 1973, the Incredible Bongo Band added a bongo introduction and a long percussion break, played by Jim Gordon, that has been called hip-hop’s national anthem and has been sampled in countless tracks since the 1980s, including by Afrika Bambaataa.
The Sugarhill Gang covered the Bongo Band arrangement on its 1981 album 8th Wonder; that version charted in 1982, reaching No. 13 on the R&B chart. That is the record that followed me through Springstowne Jr. High. It is also worth saying plainly what the 1960 original did: the recording used a Chinese drum to supply an atmosphere of stereotypically Native American music. A tune with that origin became a cornerstone of early hip-hop, and now two Filipino rappers flip it for a Philippine-mythology film.
Two sources disagree about which recording is sampled, and I could not reconcile them. Back Lot Music’s credits state that “Salbahe Ako” contains a sample of “Apache” by Soulquasar, courtesy of Primary Wave Music, and credit Jerry Lordan as a co-writer. WhoSampled’s page for the track lists the Incredible Bongo Band’s 1973 “Apache.” The label’s credit governs for rights purposes; I am reporting both and will update this note if the artists or the label clarify.
What Salbahe Means to Me
Literally, salbahe is naughty, mischievous, bad. That is what I told Chesca at the end of the credits, and it is how the word has always worked in Filipino households: the scolding for the kid who won’t listen. But as I hear the song, Ibarra and Carl Angelo take that word and put it on their own chests. It reads to me as a declaration of confidence, not an apology: we are fierce, we take up space, do not underestimate us.
I want to be careful here. This is my understanding of the song’s attitude and its title, formed from listening, not a translation of the verses, and I have not yet transcribed them. What I can say from the reporting is the frame around it. Ibarra has spent a decade insisting that Filipino languages and Filipina voices belong at the center, and she says so in her own words. A Philippine-mythology film from a major studio, built on music from artists across the diaspora, is the biggest stage that argument has had. A word like salbahe, claimed rather than dodged, fits it.
If you want the vocabulary of the song, our Learn Filipino lane takes songs apart one word at a time at learn filipino. We will do the same with this one.
Why It Matters This October
October is Filipino American History Month, and the question we keep asking is who builds it. We took that on in Who Built Filipino American History Month?, and Ruby Ibarra is one answer in the present tense: a Tacloban-born, East Bay-raised scientist who turned a cassette, a family language, and a mother’s dismissed degree into a body of work with a place on a major studio’s Filipino soundtrack.
It is also what I try to convey to my kids, and on this site: that Filipino identity is fierce, joyful, and worthy of the biggest stages. I told my bunso that salbahe meant naughty. I should have told her the rest. Now I have.
- Back Lot Music — Forgotten Island (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack), official release page and credits, September 18, 2026
- KQED — “The Bay Area’s Own Ruby Ibarra Is the Winner of NPR’s Tiny Desk Contest,” Pendarvis Harshaw, May 13, 2025
- Rappler — “The rise and resonance of Ruby Ibarra” (publication date not displayed on the page as retrieved)
- Rolling Stone Philippines — “‘Forgotten Island’ Has A Stacked Filipino Music All-Star Soundtrack,” Elijah Pareño, June 25, 2026
- Wikipedia — “Ruby Ibarra” (birth date, education, SickSpits, and dated milestones; its footnotes include NPR, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, the Getty, the Ford, and the Vilcek Foundation)
- Wikipedia — “Apache (instrumental)”
- WhoSampled — “Salbahe Ako” by Carl Angelo and Ruby Ibarra, samples listing
- Film Music Reporter — “Forgotten Island soundtrack album details,” September 15, 2026
- Mega Asia — “The Full Track List for Forgotten Island’s Soundtrack Is As Exciting As You Think It Is”
- Wish USA Bus / YouTube — CARL ANGELO & RUBY IBARRA performs “Salbahe Ako” LIVE on the Wish USA Bus
- Ruby Ibarra — Official website
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J.F. (Jonjo) left the Philippines at age nine, spending a lifetime bridging the gap between his Marikina roots and his Chicago/Vallejo upbringing. A proud Hogan Spartan from East Vallejo and resident of LA/SF, he founded PinoyBuilt not just as a digital archive, but as a cultural compass for his three children to navigate their heritage, language, and identity with Pinoy Pride.
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