Chinese-Filipino American singer-songwriter Eila is turning a difficult chapter of young love into music with Loving Me Wrong, her new single released Aug. 26.
The New Jersey-based artist describes the song as a reflection on a relationship marked by emotional highs and lows, and the tendency to hold on in the hope that things will eventually change.
“Loving Me Wrong takes me right back to being young and naively in love, when I was caught in that volatile cycle of constant highs and lows,” Eila said. “You convince yourself that you’re just one argument away from turning it all around.”
The release carries added significance for Eila because of her ties to the Philippines, where both of her parents grew up before immigrating to the United States.
She credits her Chinese-Filipino upbringing, including family karaoke sessions, with helping shape her interest in performing and her understanding of music as a shared experience.
“I owe so much of my passion for music to my Chinese-Filipino roots,” Eila said. “More than anything, it’s the way music naturally brings our community together.”
Eila also traces her history with Philippine audiences to 2014, when she said she appeared on Walang Tulugan and performed a cover rather than her own music.
At the time, she did not feel ready to put her original material before an audience.
“Looking back, I definitely lacked the confidence to sing my music,” she said.
Now, after what her press material describes as 18 song releases, Eila is approaching Filipino listeners with an established catalog and greater confidence in her own work. The Philippines is also identified by her team as her second-largest listening market on Spotify.
Musically, Loving Me Wrong follows her 2025 single Living Proof, but approaches romance from a different perspective. Instead of focusing on the excitement of finding love, the new track examines how affection and pain can coexist in a relationship.
“It is completely possible to feel genuine happiness and devastating heartbreak at the exact same time,” Eila said.
She hopes the song gives listeners who recognize that experience a sense of validation while encouraging them not to lose sight of their own worth.
The track also emerged from a change in how Eila makes music. She said she once struggled to experiment around other songwriters and would sometimes leave collaborative sessions to work through ideas by herself.
Loving Me Wrong, however, was created at a songwriting camp where that collaborative process became part of the song’s development.
“Being in that collaborative space was a beautiful reminder that music is ultimately about connection,” she said.
Beyond the new release, Eila plans to continue performing covers of Filipino songs as a way of staying connected to her heritage and recognizing artists who helped broaden Asian representation in music.
For an artist who once hesitated to perform her own songs before a Philippine audience, Loving Me Wrong arrives at a markedly different point in her career, with Eila now putting her own experiences at the center of the music.
Loving Me Wrong is out now via Symphonic Distribution.