Surfaces’ Colin Padalecki Combined Business and Art for Musical Success

When Colin Padalecki came out with Rodeo Underground, the seventh album of his platinum-selling music career last February, he didn’t hold a release party in California. Instead, he hosted it on a big Western estate just 20 minutes from where he grew up outside of San Antonio.

A few of his musical collaborators from L.A. attended in their Vans and T-shirts. Mostly, though, it was grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and old Texas friends in cowboy hats and boots. When he looked out and saw people two-stepping and realized the place felt like the country halls he grew up in, Padalecki felt at home.

A country album from a Texas-born-and-bred musician may not sound like a surprise. But that’s only if you’ve somehow managed not to hear anything from Padalecki’s previous six albums with his successful duo Surfaces. Especially their smash hit “Sunday Best,” which recently surpassed 1 billion streams on Spotify.

When “Sunday Best” was released during the Covid-19 pandemic, stars like Justin Bieber and Jessica Alba shared videos of themselves dancing to it. Surfaces went on to rock massive festivals like Austin City Limits and Lollapalooza. They even collaborated with Elton John at Elton John’s request.

Surfaces’ wild success wasn’t just about catchy music — it became a juggernaut thanks in part to Padalecki’s Mays Business School education, which included key lessons in finance and marketing.

The act’s beachy mix of reggae, pop, gospel, and neo-soul had a surf-friendly style to match, all pastels and oceanic album covers that Padalecki designed himself. He and musical partner Forrest Frank used that distinctive branding to sell not only music, but also merch. “I would be lying if I said I didn’t use a lot of stuff I learned [at Mays] to sign record deals and make good decisions with royalties and publishing,” Padalecki says. “I got all that savviness from being a college-educated business student.”

With Rodeo Underground, Padalecki is taking a calculated risk. His first solo project (released under his first and middle names, Colin Vincent) isn’t just in a different genre — it’s in a completely different emotional register. There are no sad songs in the Surfaces discography, Padalecki acknowledges. Any pain or melancholy that he or Frank felt got channeled into escapism — Surfaces’ jams were most often shorthanded as “feel-good.”

The new album, by contrast, draws on some of the heartbreaks of his past few years, including losing his rancher- namesake grandfather, Leon Vincent Padalecki. “Songs like [“Sunday Best”] came from being sad and looking for ways to feel better. It was nice in my solo project to face it head-on,” Padalecki says. “There’s a lot to cowboy macho men feeling vulnerable, feeling sad. There’s something so charming about a good, sad country song.”

Growing Up Country

Beyoncé, a fellow native Texan, recently won the Grammy for Best Country Album. But Padalecki isn’t hopping on any pop-star-goes-down-home bandwagon — he draws on a childhood so truly country, it sounds like something out of an earlier generation. He grew up in the small town of St. Hedwig (population: 2,300) along with his parents and brother Kyle and his grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins.

After middle school, the bus would drop him at his grandparents Leon and Peggy Padalecki’s cattle ranch, a spread shaded by a single live oak. He and his grandpa would take out the four-wheelers or haul a bale of hay. They’d sit at the back-porch picnic table listening to Merle Haggard or Willie Nelson on KKYX. Padalecki’s grandma would bring around a pitcher of tea so sweet it was liable to make a kid’s teeth fall out.

Padalecki was good in football and great in track — he’d end up pole-vaulting at Texas A&M. But he also was a sensitive soul who’d scratch out poetry and songs. He’d hand songs to his cousin Alexa Padalecki, a church-choir member and the sole musical talent he knew. Alexa founded Surfaces with him, and although she took her own path after the first album, they’ve stayed close.

“You have to understand, my husband and I don’t have a musical bone in our bodies,” says his mom, Lynette Padalecki, chief financial & analytics officer at H-E-B and a member of the advisory board for Mays’ Full-Time MBA program. Her husband, Dwayne Padalecki ’86, was the president of Sysco Buckhead Meat Division before retiring. “With Colin and his brother, it was always sports and academics. When he told me he wanted to major in business, I was like, ‘This is great — maybe I’ll get another accountant!’”

A Well-Rounded Education

Padalecki loved attending Texas A&M, where his dad had been taking him to football games since he was little. He studied and worked tirelessly in track, but music was still calling. He DJ’ed Tuesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays on Northgate, sharpening his sense of the hooks people responded to most. His shifts ended at 2 a.m. Before long his track coaches nicknamed him Sleepy.

Meanwhile, Houston native Forrest Frank, a then-student at Baylor, found Padalecki’s music on SoundCloud and messaged him. They soon started collaborating on Surfaces — Padalecki playing guitar, Frank on lead vocals.

Padalecki lived on Montclair Avenue in College Station, in a blue house that he shared with track teammate Garrett Cragin ’18. It quickly became a music hub — and merchandise center. “Sunday Best” was recorded in a closet there. Padalecki had Surfaces gear printed, and he’d fulfill orders by hand. One Friday, he remembers finishing a final at Mays, then realizing he needed to ship 700 merch orders over the next three days.

The reckonings came.

Three years in, Cragin realized his teammate needed a push to quit track and chase his passion instead of measuring tape up a pole. He’d seen how much more Padalecki loved to make music. Driving back from practice one day, Cragin gave his friend The Talk.

“I told him that he was in a really cool spot because he’d shown flashes of success in music and had a real shot at doing something amazing,” Cragin remembers. “That was an unlock for him.”

Surfaces signed a deal with the Universal Music subsidiary TenThousandProjects soon after, and Padalecki was faced with a second reckoning: whether to finish school.

Lynette Padalecki was firm. She knew one thing about music: It is a tough-enough industry that her son needed a backup plan. “I was that mom,” she says. “I called the management team up and said you all are degreed, I’m degreed, he’s going to get his degree. I need y’all to back me on this. We had an agreement, and he stuck to it.”

As successful as Padalecki has been in music, his mother stands by both the career and life benefits of a college education. “It’s not just being a performer,” she says. “Surfaces is a business, and having that background helped him a lot. The marketing. The contracts. The music business is very complicated, and he has a very good grasp of it.”

It was tough balancing school and the “alternative” education Padalecki was experiencing within the music industry, and it required a few creative requests for flexibility from professors. He still has a typed note from now-Atlantic Music Group CEO Elliot Grainge asking him to be excused from an absence on a test day — Padalecki was going to be playing on Late Night With Seth Meyers.

Considering What’s Next

Over the past few years, Padalecki’s bandmate, Forrest Frank, has also released his own solo records, including New Hymns and Child of God. They’ve performed well on the Billboard Christian charts, and Frank has decided to move away from secular music in favor of these new records.

Still, Padalecki says he’d never close the door on teaming up again. The two young Texans still look like they could be brothers. “That door is always open,” Padalecki says. “He’s not leaving in general, per se — he just kind of found a
higher calling.”

Padalecki isn’t certain where Colin Vincent, his country persona, will go. He says he’s trying not to “chalkboard it” (overthink how to market the music) too much. He aims to go where his creative energies take him, and he knows his business education will continue to give him a leg up in the ever-changing music business.

He does know he’d love to hear one of his new songs playing at the Dixie Chicken or one of the other College Station spots where he got his start DJ’ing. Maybe “Dominoes“ or “Coastline,” the track that most fuses his country sound and Surfaces’ beach love.

He’s not shutting down Surfaces, either, even without Frank. The week before Rodeo Underground was released, Padalecki hosted a songwriting week at a lakehouse in Texas with some of his favorite Surfaces collaborators. They’d write songs and chill lakeside by day, then Padalecki would barbecue or cook up Tex-Mex for the mostly California crew by night.

At 27, he’ll keep chasing the highs of telling a good story, of writing a great song, no matter the genre. Ever an ocean lover, Padalecki says songwriting is like surfing. You have to get out and catch whatever breaks you can. “When the waves are there and you can carve out the perfect wave,” he says, “it’s a feeling that’s unmatched.”