Colin Padalecki and Forrest Frank of Surfaces.Photo: Dan Franco
Forrest Frank and Colin Padalecki of the pop-duoSurfacesare from small-town Texas — but their music is making big waves.
On Friday, Surfaces released its fifth album,Hidden Youth, which comes after previous albumsSurf,Where the Light Is,HorizonsandPacifico.Throughout their career, the pair has amassed over 11.4 billion streams and 10.7 million monthly listeners on Spotify alone.
Frank and Padalecki didn’t know each other when they each started making music and sharing it online, but they found each other on the internet and enjoyed the other’s style. “Being from Texas and our small towns, we just had no connections to the music industry and didn’t have any connections to musicians in general,” Frank tells PEOPLE. “And so, we were making music on our own and just kind of putting it up on SoundCloud just for fun. And then, a year after that, Colin proposed the idea of us making a song together. And we did, and the rest is history.”
The first time they met up, it was clear the two were meant to make music together. “We just kind of talked about music and had very similar personalities and similar outlooks on life and had similar aspirations when it came to music,” Padalecki says. “So it definitely felt natural and we never really forced songwriting or production together.”
Surfaces are currently ontour, opening for the pop-rock bandLANY. The band kicked off its tour on Aug. 3 in Columbia, Maryland, and has been traveling around North America ever since.
“It’s definitely been a new experience,” Padalecki says. “It’s really fun to have to earn the admiration of the crowd — you have to win the crowd over because obviously, most of the people don’t know every song you’ll be playing. It feels that much better when you get to make new fans and see new smiles and new head bobs.”
Frank and Padalecki say the tour is even more fun since LANY’s guitarist Paul Klein and drummer Jake Goss are good friends of theirs. “Jake is just a full-of-life person. He’s really encouraging. He’s all smiles,” Frank says. “Paul’s very creative and just a really deep, but also lively jokester. They’ve just been really inviting and it makes the tour itself feel kind of like a summer camp, in a way.”
“We definitely wanted to capture the essence of Joshua Tree,” Padalecki says. “Around us, there were beautiful sunsets, beautiful cacti and vegetation. And we went on trails and we climbed the rock mountains and it felt very adventurous — a very honest and open time to express ourselves and capture the energy of that.”
The first track on the album, “Golden Hour,” came to Padalecki after hearing a loud sound wave from an outdoor propane gas fireplace. Their friend Conrad Hsiang, who makes music under the namePublic Library Commuteand has helped produce songs for Surfaces in the past, started playing guitar around the sound from the fireplace, and Padalecki began to sing over it.
“We all just stopped and were like, ‘Whoa,'” Frank says. “Then it just kind of just felt like the rotation of the earth stopped for a second, and we just kind of sunk into this vibe and just kind of cranked out the whole song. And it’s funny how much that song feels like that house in Joshua Tree.”
Surface’s Hidden Youth.Courtesy of 10K Projects
“We wanted to mess around with topography and give it layers,” Padalecki explains. “Because when we were out in the desert, in the mountains and everything, it just felt so awesome. And it had so much depth to it. And it just made sense for us this time around to give this cover art the same amount of depth that the desert gave us in the music.”
They asked their friend Adam Kingman, a woodworker in Lake Union, to create the cover artwork in the style they envisioned. “He hand-cut every single one of those layers, painted it how we had imagined, and then took the final picture product of it,” Padalecki continues. “And it’s just a really cool way to further our cover art.”
With Surfaces’ first album debuting in 2017 and their newest album dropping Friday, half of the duo’s existence has been during COVID. But the pandemic didn’t affect the way the two self-proclaimed bedroom-pop artists made music. “We still make albums in living rooms and in our rooms, and not much changed for us when it came to the music-making process,” Padalecki explains.
The one thing that was affected, however, was the pair’s inspiration for song ideas, especially since they find so much of their inspiration in the outdoors. “It’s really hard to be inspired, especially in our songwriting process, because we’re always trying to relay emotions and stories that we’ve lived through and we felt, like any other songwriter,” Padalecki continues. “And it’s really hard to draw from that inspiration bucket when it’s running kind of dry with experience because everyone’s locked up in their houses and you’re not going outside.”
But it was actually during the first year of the pandemic that Frank and Padalecki watched their 2019 single “Sunday Best” climb the charts and change their career — the song now has over 800 million streams on Spotify. “It just confirmed that we were doing the right thing, because we took a lot of risks in doing music,” Frank says. “I went to a four-year college and got a job and ended up quitting that to do this music thing. And Colin had taken a lot of financial risks.”
“But we really loved what we were doing and we’d spent a lot of years on it and so, seeing that song grow and then eventually just fully blossom into a hit was really special to watch,” Frank continues. “And it just confirmed that all the effort was not for nothing.”
source: people.com
