Tommy Castro’s “Closer to the Bone” Exceeds His Own Expectations Despite Early Doubts

If there is one descriptor that clearly does not apply to Tommy Castro, it’s “lazy.”

Just a few weeks into 2025, the busy touring musician has already traveled to several U.S. cities with his band, the Painkillers, and has more than 30 additional dates on the calendar for the weeks and months ahead. Castro is also gearing up to release his 18th album, Closer to the Bone, which is due out on February 7 via Alligator Records.

But during a recent interview with Blues Rock Review, Castro admitted he’s felt concerned that his fans might think he took the easy way out with his latest project, which mostly features blues covers.

“I had my doubts along the way,” he said. “The one thing that kept bothering me is that people might think that I was being lazy because I didn’t write 10 new songs for this album.”

Castro has already started playing some of the material from Closer to the Bone on the road, a practice he usually avoids for music he hasn’t yet released. Though he typically prefers to wait until a new album is out before bringing its songs to the stage, that secrecy didn’t feel as necessary for this 14-track tribute to the blues.

Castro has described Closer to the Bone as a project that he “always wanted to do” and that shows him at his “most authentic.” Three of the songs—album opener “Can’t Catch a Break,” “Crazy Woman Blues” and “Ain’t Worth the Heartache”—are Castro originals, while the rest are carefully selected but lesser-known covers. The reason the album is a little longer than a traditional Tommy Castro & the Painkillers album is because Castro “couldn’t pick one to leave off.”

“I’ve been known to say, ‘I think anything over 10 songs on a record is too much,’” he said. “We had all these tracks, and we just couldn’t decide which one to cut out.”

On his first album since 2021’s Tommy Castro Presents: A Bluesman Came to Town, Castro wanted to avoid covering the same go-to artists and songs that so many others pick when they embark on their own genre tribute projects. Instead, he selected songs written by friends, like Johnny “Nitro” Newton (“One More Night”), and by musicians who influenced him at an early age, like Jimmy Nolen, who played guitar for James Brown’s band (“The Way You Do”). For artists who are covered more frequently, like Ray Charles and Johnny “Guitar” Watson, Castro chose to put his spin on more obscure recordings, like Charles’ “A Fool for You” and Watson’s “She Moves Me.”

Ever since launching his recording career in the mid-1990s, Castro has been “mostly concentrating on creating my own sound and my own voice and my own interpretation of this music that I love,” which has turned Tommy Castro & the Painkillers into a contemporary blues band that blends elements of blues, soul, rock and other influences that inspire them along the way.

“There’s always a good slow blues on all of our albums, and there’s always at least one shuffle,” he said. “That kind of satisfies the traditional blues thing on most of our records, one or two songs, and then we do our original stuff.”

Knowing that he wanted Closer to the Bone to deviate from that genre-blending style and focus solely on traditional blues, Castro brought in Christoffer “Kid” Andersen, trusting the producer’s deep knowledge of the blues to guide the recording process at Andersen’s Greaseland Studios in San Jose, Calif., Castro’s hometown.

“He’s like an encyclopedia of this music—only he can actually do it, he doesn’t just know about it,” Castro said of Andersen. “He can actually do it on all levels when it comes to playing, arranging and producing a recording.”

Castro credited Andersen with shaping the guitar tones used on the album and bringing in vintage guitars and amps to make the songs feel like they came from the 1950s and ’60s. Looking back, Castro said he “knew” that Andersen was the “man for the job” because, “at the end of the day, I could trust him” to help work out whatever decisions surfaced in the studio. “To make a record like this, you need a Kid Anderson,” he said.

Back when Closer to the Bone was in its early stages, it just didn’t feel right to Castro to compose the entire album himself. “All of these songs somehow moved me in a way that, if I had forced myself to write a whole bunch of original songs just so that people would think that I was more legit, or something like that, it would have been the wrong thing,” he said.

Despite that gut feeling—and the decades he has already devoted to making music—Castro’s concerns lingered. “In the back of my mind, it was kind of worrying me that people might think that I was just being lazy,” he said, adding that he wasn’t sure if his listeners would “really get the kind of creativity that I was going for in this album.”

Looking back now on those early insecurities, Castro is “glad” that he “listened to my inner voice.”

“I can listen to this whole record, and I enjoy every track on it,” he said. “It was going to be what it’s going to be. But listening back to it, it way outdid my expectations.”