RECORDING | december 2009

TODY CASTILLO | www.todycastillo.com

A Houston institution for much of the last decade, singer/songwriter Tody Castillo has now relocated to Austin. Far be it from the typical reasons that an artist moves there—he actually did it for his family. Not like it hurt his music career, though. Castillo’s sophomore effort, Windhorse, has been drawing accolades both at home and in the Hill Country.

So has Austin been a fresh start for you, musically or otherwise?
Well, you know, moving here – I’m from Corpus but I consider myself from Houston because I lived most of my adult life there. I really kind of grew up in Houston, so there’s always that weird Houston-Austin thing going on, and I probably had the same attitude of ,man, ‘Houston’s a lot cooler, dude!’ So when we moved here I didn’t really have the idea that my music would flourish because I’d already been to New York. But it is a fresh start in a way. The thing was, the real reason that we’re here is just because we spent so much time in Houston and my wife had just finished school—she got her Master’s in acupuncture—Chinese medicine. And now we have two boys. We lived in the Museum District in Houston and we had a nice little place. We loved it and we’d kind of really settled in nicely. But it was really small, and there were still crackheads taking pisses in our courtyard every once in a while. And my kids are playing down there, you know? Now it’s a different story.

Having a family for a lot of artists sort of puts the shutters on touring at least for the time being. Now writing a new batch of songs, does it at all affect the songwriting, knowing that you likely won’t really be taking them on the road anytime soon?
No, I never think about that. You’re right – when you have kids, it does definitely… it’s a weird cliché about how it’s hard to be away from home, but all I ever knew was ‘get on the road.’ And I did a lot of road work. When I moved to New York I was in a couple of different bands and I toured a lot on the Eastern Seaboard there, so all I ever wanted to do was be on the road, but if you do have kids and it wasn’t an accident and you don’t wanna be – it’s hard to get away from. But it doesn’t change the writing, and me and my friends were joking about that: ‘do you get married and become a dad and just start sucking really bad?’ I don’t, I guess because I feel that some of the artists I grew up listening to – that kind of happened to them, you know? Part of that might have just been them getting old. But I don’t do anything different. I had all these paranoias about getting married ruining everything, but if you marry the right person it’s all good.

Four years between albums and really a lot has happened in your life with your brother and your new family – upon releasing Windhorse, did it really get a lot off your chest?
In a way it was, I guess just because of the times. I was probably hanging around the whole Onion Creek scene playing with Paul [Valdez] back in the day and that was kind of around the time when that first record came out and we were playing a ton around town – my brother had just died in that time period. And then my wife lost a couple of people close to her. It was a real rough year. We had just gotten married and just a lot of things were changing. So while we were supporting that first record, a lot of these songs were being written. So a lot of these songs are kind of old now. But I think it’s just like anybody. If anything has any kind of impact on your life, good or bad, and you’re a writer or an artist, it’s gonna come out. You can’t hide it.

Tell me about “Mustang Island.” That’s a standout. Did you actually grow up there?
No, I was born in Kingsville, Texas, which is right next to it. It’s a naval air station. It’s right by Corpus. So I was born there and then I grew up in Corpus. My parents divorced and my dad stayed in Corpus, my mom moved to San Antonio and so I moved there and she remarried and then right around 6th grade or so, that relationship ended and she went to college back in Kingsville and I went to live with my dad in Corpus. So it was kind of a back and forth scene – my grade school was in San Antonio but I graduated from Corpus. So we’d go to the back all the time. We were big skaters and surfer guys.

So Mustang Island was the beach for you?
Yeah, we’d cross the bridge and go into Mustang Island. Only takes a few minutes to get there from where we lived. It was real cool – and that song was about skipping school, going there on a Wednesday or a Tuesday when nobody was there. And it was also raining, but it was awesome, dude. It’s one of those things where I wish I had a picture of it. I wish I had a picture of that day. We were getting close to graduating high school and I just remember thinking ‘well, I’m moving to Houston.’ We were all splitting up. So me and my brother went with a couple of girls from high school, skipped school and went there. You know, you have those days – it wasn’t like it was so mindblowing, but it was just a fun time and the way everything looked, the way the sky was – it was just a great day. It just burned an impression in my memory.

By Lance Scott Walker
Photography by Anthony Rathbun