The Sunday Music Drop is a weekly radio series hosted by the KQED weekend news team. In each segment, we feature a song from a local musician or band with an upcoming show and hear about what inspires their music.

Hayward's Ian Santillano is a Filipino-American alternative singer and songwriter who mixes R&B, Americana, and soaring and soulful guitar-lines into his music. He enjoys neo soul, folk and country music and was influenced by his parents who sang karaoke frequently throughout his life.

His song "Explanations" was written and recorded in the house he shares with his mother. Though he does play in bands, Santillano sings all the parts and plays all the instruments in his song. Initially, the song idea started from Stevie Wonder's "I Just Called to Say I Love You." Santillano says his song was inspired by his feeling of constantly being introspective.

"I really love this track because most of the song is just the lead vocal," he said. "The second verse has this crazy harmony [with] crunchy, tracking. It's tracked in this way that it's almost like there are all four individual voices instead of a barbershop quartet where it's a bunch of voices trying to be one voice together."

While Santillano grew up in the Bay Area, he says his upbringing and going to private school led him to feel like he was disconnected from the region.