Attention, American Idol fans: Jason Castro’s jaunty major-label debut single, “Let’s Just Fall in Love Again,” premiered last night and is currently streaming at his Web site, www.jasoncastromusic.com.

To celebrate the occasion, the season 7 third runner-up got on the phone with EW.com to discuss his songwriting process, his collaborators, and how he defines success.

EW: What I like about your debut single is that it’s really well-produced, but it doesn’t steamroll the intimate sound we’ve come to expect from you.
Jason Castro: That is definitely something from the onset that I tried to be aware of. You know how some of the Idol projects can turn into manufactured pop things? From my first meeting with Atlantic, I went in there and explained my vision and played for them — I wanted to get my deal off of my songs — and we were all just on the same page. We’ve been on the same page since day one. We decided to do the whole album with one producer, Eric Rosse, and we put a lot of love into it.

EW: So getting back to “Let’s Just Fall in Love Again”…
JC: The original demo was just acoustic, and we wanted to keep that same energy but give it some extra oomph — without losing the magic. That recording actually ended up being like a Frankenstein monster, but you wouldn’t know it. We had pieces from the original demo — the original guitar and the handclaps. We had to use the handclaps because they were really lively. [Laughs.] And when we recorded it out here [in L.A.] we tracked the whole thing, we used drum and bass from our session out here. And then we used a little organ and a couple other things from another session we did in New York.

EW: What about the whistling that starts the track? Where did you come up with that?
JC: It’s the melody from the chorus. It was going to be some line, maybe a guitar line — but the whistling just kind of stuck out. It felt like that kind of song. When have you heard whistling lately? So we were like “Let’s whistle it up!”

EW: Who’s doing the whistling? You?
JC: That is not me, you would be surprised! Don’t tell anybody! Everybody in the studio took turns. We can all whistle — but it wasn’t like that whistle. [Laughs.] That was the key to the project, finding a whistler.

EW: Did someone win the whistle-off?
JC: Somebody in the studio. And actually we brought in an outside whistler, and I don’t want to say it, but he couldn’t cut it. But I don’t want to talk bad about any whistlers around town or anything. READ FULL STORY »