Chrissy Teigen - Featuring Toro Y Moi "Still Sound"

The pomelo is a ridiculous fruit. For some reason he never
learned, Chazwick Bundick received one as a gift for his 24th birthday, in 2010. He wasn’t exactly sure how to eat it. The rind was inches thick. The overly protected inside had an acrid sour taste. Bundick took pictures posing with the fruit, dangling its pink pulp from his lips. One image ended up as the album cover for Underneath the Pine, the second record from Toro Y Moi, Bundick’s musical project that began on a laptop in his bedroom in Columbia, S.C. He thought the photograph of moist citrus dripping from his lips perfectly captured the sound he was exploring. “It was lush. A lot of texture. Intimate and weird, as well,” says Budwick, who studied graphic design at the University of South Carolina. The Gamecock put a career in visual arts on hold when his dreamy homemade debut, Causers of This, became an Internet sensation. He stopped skateboarding too, for fear of snapping his guitar-strumming wrist.

The Toro Y Moi debut was built largely from samples. Acclaim swept Bundick around the globe practically overnight. He quickly assembled a band, reuniting with school friends he grew up playing with in pop-punk bands in South Carolina. The group began emulating the music Bundick was initially sampling, namely funk and film sound tracks from the 1970s. Hence the groovy shift in direction on Pine. Now Bundick is itching to get back into a studio, to record his first album in a professional setting, away from his pillows. Toro Y Moi recently toured Brazil with Broken Social Scene. Checking out at the hotel, Bundick was bummed to learned that he missed hitting a record store right around the corner, one loaded with rare bossa nova. He sighs. “I wasted my time at the beach.”

Q & A with Toro Y Moi

Your favorite beach?

I guess Charleston, South Carolina. It’s better than Myrtle Beach. That’s pretty trashy. Folly Beach in Charleston. There’s some island, too, Sullivan’s Island. That’s the one I always go to.

Your worst experience on the road?

Just recently. We were in Europe. It was the most stressful tour, but every show was good. For starters, the airport lost all of our equipment, like our samplers. We didn’t know what we were going to do. I had to e-mail my girlfriend back in the states and tell her to e-mail us our samples. We had to make a make-shift sampler with our laptop. Then we blew up the transformer in the venue. They had to daisy chain the power from another building.

Your favorite sport?

College football. I’m an SEC man. I’m a Gamecocks fan, but I like Alabama a lot. My dad is a ‘Bama fan. He was a big fan of Bear Bryant.

The first music you ever owned?

I was really into Blink 182, Weezer, At the Drive-In... I still am. The first song I ever wrote was some s****y pop-punk song. Now I’m listening to a lot of stuff my music sounds like.