Tere made her name on TikTok but said that she has had a ‘rebrand’ since coming to Liverpool
Tere originally made her name on TikTok(Image: Colin Lane/Liverpool Echo)
Rising singer-songwriter Teresa Castillo, or Tere as she’s better known, 20, made her name on TikTok but said that it was only when she came to Liverpool for university that she really discovered who she was as an artist.
As she casts her mind back to what first ignited her interest in music, she believes that it was a chance visit to her cousin’s house nearly 15 years ago. She told the ECHO: “When I went to my cousin’s house over Christmas when I was five or six-years-old, they gave me this toy piano as a present and I had never played any [instrument before]. I was at home with this piano and I had this TV on and I was just playing the songs [in the show] by ear, but not noticing that I was doing it and playing it. But, when my mum saw that, she decided to put me into piano lessons.”
More than a decade since she first took an interest in music, like many other musicians, Teresa started releasing her songs on TikTok and it didn’t take long for her to build a following. She said: “All of my friends were talking about TikTok and how I had to give it a go, so I decided to post some of my songs on the platform and I think it was the third video that blew up crazily. It reached like five million views in like a week or two.”
She has studied at LIPA for the last three years (Image: Colin Lane/Liverpool Echo)
She added: “It was mind blowing and that gave me the push to keep going and posting videos. For me, it was just so impactful, my social [media] have always been like my whole journey because I think they’ve opened so many doors for me and it’s been my main thing.”
In her short career, she has released more than 15 songs with her biggest hit, Ojalá Te Acerques Tú, currently in excess of one million streams on Spotify. Just over a year since she released the hugely popular track, she has continued to hone her pop-rock style and just two months ago released her first English song, LIAR, ahead of her first album release which is currently scheduled for later this year. In recent years she has also performed at the Lo Esencial festival and supported Spanish musician, Beret.
After starting to post her songs on TikTok following some encouragement from friends, she now boasts millions of streams across her social media platforms. She said: “I’ve got over six million streams on digital platforms and all of that has been while I’ve been fully independent.”
She added: “It’s a bit hard for people to take you seriously, because they just assume that you are like a TikTok artist and you lose credibility. But, for me, it’s what made me learn and I saw so many references of people that I’d like to be like. It helped me so much to see the comments from people because I think in my case, I lived in a really small town outside Madrid and I was the girl that did music, people just didn’t do that where I’m from. So, when I started seeing so many people connecting with me through social media, for me it was so necessary to have that support. I think it’s hard for people to take you seriously when you start on social media, but at the same time, it’s what most of the industry is interested in now.”
She has millions of fans on social media (Image: Colin Lane/Liverpool Echo)
After making a name for herself on TikTok in 2020, Teresa continues to use the platform to promote her music, but it was after moving to Liverpool to study at LIPA that she decided to have a “rebrand” and establish a name for herself away from the social media app. She said: “I definitely started in the wrong place, I would say. I think when you blow up so quickly, you start thinking that you have to feed that fanbase you’ve got now, you know? So I started doing what I knew would work. But, I didn’t even stop to think what about what I wanted to do. So I guess my brand was built literally by my fans’s gaze instead of my gaze. So then I reached this point where it was like, what’s my identity?”
“So, coming here was so helpful to realise that I was doing things that were not meaningful for me, they were working, but it was just not what I wanted to do.”
She added: “I had this whole rebrand over these three years which has been so fun to do. I just [started] focusing on what I wanted to say, and I know that maybe made me lose a bit of that fanbase that I used to have, but at the same time if those people are not connected to the actual me then what’s the point of having them anymore.
For me, I think that sentence is so important, ‘I don’t make music just for the audience, because I think that if you get stuck on that, you’ll try to fulfill this expectation that will never stop’. You’ll try to reach this perfection that doesn’t exist because you will never reach it.”
She is set to go on a tour of Spain later this year (Image: Colin Lane/Liverpool Echo)
Now coming to the end of her three year degree at LIPA, she recalled that it was back home in Spain that she first heard about the university. She said: “I went to this event for an artist in Madrid and this girl who was studying production in Liverpool, she was talking about it and it sounded so cool, but I was scared to take a step and study in another country. She was like ‘I study in this uni, it’s called LIPA, you should come and see it, we’re doing open days’. “
Despite some initial trepidation about moving to another country for the first time, she finally decided to take the leap and move to Liverpool. She said: “I saw the uni and I just fell in love instantly. I was like ‘this is the best place ever, I need to be here’. So I applied a week later and I came [to Liverpool] a month later, so it was perfect timing.”
As she prepares to release her first album and go on a tour of Spain, she says that her life is moving fast. She said: “I don’t know where I’m going to live by the end of this year which is exciting. I might go to Madrid, I might go to London, I might go to the US, I don’t know. But, I know that I will be where I have to be.”