By Max Freedman
At first of the pandemic, Kaina Castillo felt similar to the remainder of us: remoted, uninspired, a bit down. For the 26-year-old Chicago-based musician, who information as Kaina (styled in all caps), that meant going via 2020 with out engaged on music — not even with the tailwind of her breakout 2019 debut album Subsequent to the Solar propelling her ahead. “It was actually tough to ask myself to create something,” she tells MTV Information. “We’ve by no means skilled a time like this, and I feel it is fully honest to say that each one you wish to do is simply lay in mattress and be numb.”
In early 2021, Castillo reckoned with how unmoored she felt from her music in 2020 and determined to do one thing about it. “I used to be like, ‘I have not written a tune, and I am shedding that muscle,’” she says. She gave herself a writing problem and a schedule. Monday via Friday: Journal. Saturday: Begin establishing a tune. Sunday: Start producing it.
The result’s It Was a Dwelling, Castillo’s splendid sophomore album. Its 12 songs — together with a canopy of Stevie Marvel’s “Come Again as a Flower” and a uncommon Sleater-Kinney visitor function — distill the nice and cozy, intimate psychedelia and Latin-inflected pop of Subsequent to the Solar into a fair softer, extra easily flowing palette. The place she usually used righteous language and themes of house on Subsequent to the Solar to reckon together with her place in American society as a first-generation Latinx immigrant, It Was a Dwelling finds her contemplating the individuals who care about her and reaching out to them. The album’s inviting, vibrant but placid sound is a Malicious program for lyrics in regards to the challenges of connecting with others and being weak throughout a interval of prolonged isolation. Although her language is completely conversational, she appears like she’s assembling concepts she’s lengthy struggled to specific. “I used to be in a position to write songs which are easy however contact on actually complicated topics,” she says.
That simplicity speaks volumes to how Castillo upheld neighborhood and empathy in what started as a solitary apply: “I wished every little thing that I made for [the album] to be one thing everybody enjoys at their very own tempo and feels no strain about.” Different artists would possibly create with principally their very own catharsis in thoughts, however Castillo thought-about what would possibly greatest attain and luxury her listeners, whom she meets on their very own stage relatively than asking them to come back as much as hers. “It’s too straightforward / Feeling left behind / With out a motive / It’s made up in my thoughts,” she sings over breezy acoustic arpeggios on “In My Thoughts,” as if to say, Hey, that probably baseless anxiousness you’re experiencing — identical right here, so let’s tackle it collectively. When she desires of a house the place huge teams of visitors come and go on the string-laden, maraca-guided single “Casita,” you get the sense she’s inviting everybody to go to. She’s keen to succeed in anybody who sees themselves in her and vice versa, and as she forges new bonds, she’s all the time real, and he or she by no means overreaches.
“Casita” is among the many album’s most evident (and profitable) makes an attempt to, as Castillo places it, “construct a little bit world for my viewers to come back again to me, for each of us to come back again to one another.” The absence of stay exhibits for nicely over a 12 months made her really feel like she had misplaced contact with a bunch of associates. One in all Castillo’s overarching questions that guided It Was a Dwelling speaks higher to this sense than any makes an attempt to instantly encapsulate it: “How will you ship a digital hug?”
On “Sweetness,” a young ballad dripping with strings and the low-pitched, easy chorus of “I may give a little bit sweetness / I may use a little bit sweetness,” Castillo reveals she additionally wants the digital hug she’s trying to give. “Opening up is tough / I’ll admit it / And I may use a hug / A second to relaxation,” she sings. Being forthright may be intimidating, however it’s a lot simpler if you really feel linked to a sturdy assist system of nice folks. “I are typically the hashtag sturdy buddy,” she says, “and I really feel so uncomfortable asking for assist. That’s what I am speaking about with this complete undertaking. It feels foolish to me generally to be like, ‘I want a hug,’ however it’s not foolish. It is similar to, that is what I want proper now, ?”
For some time, Castillo actually couldn’t get the human embrace she was in search of — she began creating It Was a Dwelling earlier than vaccines have been broadly out there. To take her first steps towards reconnecting with the folks in her life, she requested her bandmates to ship her their musical concepts, which she then rearranged and fleshed out earlier than asking for enter. She wished to create music that she felt her complete band may personal, each figuratively and financially, throughout a time of separation. She additionally thought her full-band strategy to songcraft “could be an ideal alternative for [my bandmates] to flex the a part of their mind” that hadn’t been as energetic given the shortage of live shows.
That course of is how guitarist Brian Sanborn and drummer Ryan the Particular person received co-production credit on the album. Beforehand, Castillo’s main co-producer was her greatest buddy, the atmospheric jazz-rap artist Sen Morimoto, and although the 2 did co-produce and co-write It Was a Dwelling, the LP marks the duo’s first time opening their circle. The Latin-inflected monitor “Good Feeling” is a spotlight of this expanded manufacturing crew: Sanborn co-produced it, and Morimoto’s visitor verse, delivered in his eternally chill voice, appears like flowers blooming from the monitor’s verdant, psychedelic melodies and association. And on “Sweetness,” Ryan the Particular person helps Castillo and Morimoto remodel a slow-paced ballad into an enveloping sensory expertise, with cymbals and toms hitting proper when the opposite parts briefly recede for optimum impact.
In reaching out to others — her bandmates, her listeners — via her music, Castillo says she’s discovered extra confidence. “Though these songs do not feel like as a lot of a celebration” as her previous work, she says, “They’ve extra readability about who I’m … as a result of I’ve the assist of my bandmates and my neighborhood.” Not that she’s ever lacked an ideal set of individuals in her life, however as she tells it, “I am somebody who likes to provide again, mirror again into the world, and be there for different folks on a regular basis.” To middle her personal wants as a substitute and discover them in her lyrics was a daring, unprecedented shift for her. That’s a part of why she doesn’t completely let go of Subsequent to the Solar’s dominant theme: house.
The opposite motive this theme persists is extra revealing. The way in which Castillo explains it, house and neighborhood are inseparable, even in moments of bodily distance. Rising up, her house “was all the time full of individuals dancing and making meals and…simply being [in] neighborhood.” Trying again on how her dad and mom reworked their home right into a communal house for all their family members, she sees herself doing the identical factor together with her music, particularly on It Was a Dwelling. “That is precisely what I do with my life 20 years later,” she says, “otherwise.”
