Once upon a time, among the vast pastures of Pangasinan, Bella Poarch learned how to sing.
There is exactly one public library in the coastal municipality of San Fabian. Bella Poarch would know: it’s the same one she used to visit over a decade and a half ago, as a young girl making pit stops on her way home from school. It was there, in the modest, nondescript building along Caballero Avenue, that she borrowed her first book.
“Hansel and Gretel,” she recalls with a smile. The internet personality and musician is in her home province for the first time in 14 years, and she brims with joy at having spotted the library en route to her Vogue shoot. “I would always go there to read,” she continues. “One of the books I didn’t want to give back was the Brothers Grimm book of darker fairytales. It was such an amazing book and it inspired my imagination as a child.” In the end, the only reason she returned it was to claim her school ID, which she surrendered to the librarian like any other reader did. She laughs, musing, “It was crazy when we passed by.”
If the 12-year-old bookworm could see herself now, she’d probably be incredulous. For one, she’s dressed in a trailing Richard Quinn frock with violet flowers emblazoned all over. It’s the 21st look of the English designer’s Fall/Winter 2025 collection, which is ironic considering Bella wears it one sweltering May morning, on a field in Pangasinan beneath the peak summer sun.
Like her, we’re standing by as photographer Mark Nicdao and his team adjust the lighting and framing for our first layout of the day. (A comically lengthy cable wire, on which his camera is tethered, leads to a desktop monitor plugged in a small rundown shed that contains the only power outlet in the vicinity.) The Vogue team is at the ready with umbrellas, fans, and water bottles, but Bella doesn’t reach for any of them nor complain about the heat. Even with nearly waist-length hair blanketing her back and black opera gloves skintight against her arms, she maintains a cool composure while regaling us with more childhood memories. In a moment of quiet, she observes the landscape around her and identifies a small shrub, its branches of slim pointed leaves yet to bear fruit.
“That’s a mango tree,” she says.
Of course she would know. She used to plant them herself.
Born in 1997, Bella was raised on a farm with three cows, 10 goats, 20 cats, 20 dogs, and countless chickens. But those are all just rough estimates. She recites a couple of their names: a favorite cat named Wall-E, a goat named Norma, a rooster named Elvis and another named Presley, and cows named Lucy, Josie, and Baby Leila. By age eight, she was helping goats give birth. “At that time, my parents didn’t really have money to get a vet, so I would always just try to figure out if my animals were sick, and I always tried to take care of them. When I was younger, I wanted to be a singer and a veterinarian. I was like, ‘Well, if singing wouldn’t work in the future, then I’ll be a veterinarian.'”
Before they know her as a singer-songwriter, many may know Bella primarily for her viral TikToks. In August 2020, she uploaded a 10-second video bobbing her head to Millie B’s “M to the B,” her cherubic face shifting from one expression to the next. She didn’t expect it to blow up, let alone rack up 879.5 million views and lead her to becoming the fourth most followed figure on the platform with 93.3 million followers to date.
On the surface, it’s convenient to categorize her as a TikToker who decided to pivot to music on a whim. In a 2021 interview with British Vogue, Bella admitted, “It’s not in my favor that I started out as an ‘influencer’ and people think I’m just starting to make music when actually, I’ve been doing it my whole life.”
Attempt to trace her passion for the craft and you’ll land in the Philippines, long before she moved to America. It was among Pangasinan’s pastures that her sonic love affair bloomed.
“The very first song I learned was ‘Reflection’ from the movie Mulan,” she reveals. “I found out later on that Lea Salonga sang it, and it honestly made me so inspired.” Their neighbors frequently had their radio on blast, blaring everything from Filipino love songs to global pop hits like Lady Gaga’s. Such were the medleys that soundtracked a routine of household chores, of cutting grass or watering mahogany and mango trees. “I loved music. I feel like my family wasn’t really into that. But you know, living in the Philippines, you can’t stay away from music. It’s everywhere.”
Once, while on farm duty with her older brother Bryner, she mindlessly broke out into “Reflection” before he interrupted her. “You know how to sing,” he declared dubiously. “Do you know that? You’re good at singing. You should keep singing.”
Bella smiles during our Zoom call, warm at the recollection. “It was a very memorable and beautiful memory that I’ll just never forget, because it was the moment that I’m like, ‘I want to be a singer one day.’”
What followed were concrete steps in pursuit of that dream, whether miniscule or monumental, throughout multiple stages of her life. There were childhood singing competitions entered and won against her parents’ wishes, and early SoundCloud covers with little to no streams. There were jam sessions during her time in the military, singing to her friends’ beats and into her phone’s Voice Memos app. There was her first TikTok upload, a cover of Ariana Grande’s “raindrops (an angel cried)” that she took down not long after, suddenly shy after it reached over a hundred views.
When her lip syncing videos caught traction later on, she seized it as an opportunity to practice confidence in posting song covers, and eventually became more serious about making her own music. “At that time, I didn’t know anything about labels. I didn’t even know what a manager was. I thought people just wrote songs and then they put it out, you know?” she laughs. “It was a very new world for me.”
Bella narrates that living in Hawaii at the time, “it took me a while to have the courage to fly to L.A.” She had just begun uploading TikToks of her singing, and people reached out with advice to come to Los Angeles to get the gears turning on her music career. She intended to stay for a week when she finally booked the ticket. Three months later, she hadn’t left, and so came the decision to make California her home.
“I want to share my music. I think I’ve been practicing my whole life.”
Things soon fell into place. She signed to Warner Records in 2021, joining a roster of labelmates that include Dua Lipa, Cher, and Blackpink’s Jisoo. In the same year, she released her debut single “Build a Bitch” accompanied by an award-winning music video, and in the following August, she released Dolls, her first EP.
She describes her first project as a portrait of “the built-up internal rage that I’ve had. I’m so, so grateful that I’m able to even share that because I grew up not being able to speak my mind.” Throughout our conversation and in earlier interviews, Bella is candid about having grown up in an abusive household, one where the only things she could say to her adoptive parents were, “Yes sir,” “No sir,” or “Yes ma’am,” “No ma’am.” Because she was silenced as a child, “Dolls was a way for me to speak out and say the things that I want to say.”
Three years after her EP launch, Bella is working on a new record that she describes as “a reflection of myself and my life.” If in Dolls she expressed a torrent of pent-up anger, introspection stands at the fore of her first full-length album, arriving at the end of this year. “I think the album now is about feeling your emotions, and going through life and being hopeful about the future. I’m giving you actual stories and visuals, and explaining why I feel that way.” Of its sonic identity, she teases, “I like to mix the contrast of having a beautiful, dreamy production with very dark lyrics. I think it’s gonna be fun.”
It’s a given that she’s a long way from who she was when she first stepped foot in Los Angeles, and it’s a fact that her loved ones confirm. “I feel so proud of her and how far she has come,” her kuya says. “I remember those times from when we both were working in the field with the blazing Philippine heat, and we had nothing to pass time besides singing to popular songs that only our goats and cows could hear. It made work bearable. To see her now singing on a global stage would make just about anyone proud of her accomplishment.”
Bretman Rock, internet sensation and Bella’s close friend, adds, “Regardless of how you define family, Bella is family for sure. But I will say,” he cheekily prefaces, “and I always tell people this, she comes from the side of the family that can sing. I am not from that side of the family, as you can see. I love watching her step into the pop star that I’ve always known that she was. And honestly, it’s only just right.”
Bella’s trajectory continues to gain momentum, if her ventures outside the upcoming album are any indication. For the second season of Netflix’s Wednesday, she covers two songs for the soundtrack, one of which is a haunting rendition of The Cranberries’ rock hit “Zombie.” The musician also reveals that after two years of auditioning, she is finally set to venture into acting with the horror flick Six Till Midnight directed by Andrew Donoho, her friend and the directorial mind behind four of her seven music videos. When Donoho asked her to come on board the film, she only had one question: will she get to have her own screaming cinematic moment? The answer, she grins, was yes.
Although these creative expressions might ostensibly reveal new sides of Bella to audiences, like singing, they were actually always there. A visit to their family’s farm reels her back to earlier modes of creation. “One summer, my parents got rid of all of my art supplies,” she laments. “Every single thing that I could draw or write with, any notebooks or books that I could draw on, they got rid of it. I loved art so much that I doodled on every single paper.”
Knowing her penchant for illustration, Bryner taught her that she could draw on banana leaves.
“With walis tingting!” she bursts out laughing, describing the makeshift tool she used to carve on fronds in lieu of a pen or pencil. “I was like, ‘Whoa, it’s still here,’” she remarks of the shaded area she once spent hours under. “It might not be the same banana trees, but there’s still banana trees thriving in that same spot where I used to draw. It’s insane.”
Bryner, who accompanied her to their farm, was similarly steeped in sentiment. “It was a very nostalgic feeling, having her visit our old home. We saw the little trees that me and her planted now fully grown and bearing fruit. We reminisced on the things we did as kids, although we didn’t have much childhood growing up since we were just working in the field taking care of animals, trees, and cutting weeds seven days a week. I remember we often saw children our age play outside while we work, it made us a little jealous in a way. Most of those memories came back, and I felt a little emotional.”
As Bella admired her mango trees now towering over her, it became clear that they paralleled her own growth. “It made me realize that even though my childhood was full of traumas and hardships, there were also things that made me happy, like the trees that I planted and the animals I took care of, you know? Finding joy in things.”
At present, that joy looks like calling her brother regularly, and cooking her own meals in Los Angeles to share with her loved ones. She wishes she made tinola more, but alas, her recipe calls for a specific type of leaf that’s not readily available in California. “Wala kasing malunggay dun [It’s because there’s no malunggay there],” she says with lighthearted annoyance, referring to Moringa trees which are common in Southeast Asian countries and can be found on nearly every street corner or home garden in the Philippines. She even thinks in a mix of English and her mother tongue, and when she dreams at night, they play out in Taglish, too.
She finds bliss in writing her hopes down in a manifestation book, including a goal to tour the world.
“I want to share my music,” she says. “I want to be able to be onstage and just perform and sing. I think I’ve been practicing my whole life. I think it still kind of shocks people when they find out that I can sing. And I’m like, ‘I’ve been singing my whole life,’” she insists, deadpan, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “‘I told you this. It’s natural to me.’”
See more exclusive photographs from this story in the October 2025 Issue of Vogue Philippines, available at the link below.
By TICIA ALMAZAN. Photographs by MARK NICDAO. Deputy Editor PAM QUIÑONES. Fashion Editor DAVID MILAN. Styling by KATIE QIAN. Talent: Bella Poarch. Media Channels Editor: Anz Hizon. Producer: Bianca Zaragoza. Makeup: Pam Robes. Hair: Mong Amado. Nails: Extraordinail. Styling Assistants: Neil de Guzman and Ticia Almazan. Video Team: MV Isip and Ara May Tanagon. Photography Assistants: Villie James Bautista, John Phillip Nicdao, Arsan Sulser Hofileña, Crisaldo Soco, and Alex Capongco. Special thanks to Explore PD4, Christopher de Venecia, Marty Ian Gideon Flores, Khrismae Dy, Christian Sajea Dalioan, Matthew Lewis Gutierrez, Tourism Office of San Fabian Pangasinan, Cups & Berry Dagupan, and Marcel Jon Mendoza of Farmville Eco-Farm.
