The Sampler: Santigold

Tony Stamp dissects genre-hopping musician Santigold's latest album Spirituals, with help from the artist herself.

Fourteen years after her debut album, it’s become accepted wisdom that American musician Santigold was making genreless music before the internet made it commonplace. She became hugely successful, but was initially met with some amount of confusion.

"When we were working on that first record, we didn't think we would find an audience in the States", she told me via Zoom. "The boxes were so much more set: 'If you look like this your music should sound like this'.

"It was so much harder to exist beyond those boundaries of genre and what was expected for you as whoever you were. Specifically, if you were a Black musician, you should be making RnB and hip hop, and that's it. 

"I knew I was outside genres in an era where people said 'that will not work'. I had A&Rs tell me 'this is all over the place, and you're Black, doing punk-influenced stuff, and that will not work.'

"What happened was, with MySpace, and the beginning of any situation where you could go direct to fans, they were proven wrong."

The fourth Santigold album has just been released, and like her first, it skips between sounds with ease, and stays coherent despite its large roster of producers. Thematically, she’s concerned with race, and motherhood, and on a more macro level, keeping an even head while the world seems to be ending.

The single ‘Shake’ evoked gospel music for me. I may have been influenced by the album’s title, Spirituals, which refers to Negro spirituals - Black music of the 1800s. But Santi told me the name came after the record had been made. It was its thematic connections she was drawing on.

"Negro spirituals were songs that slaves were singing originally,” she explained, “and it was music that was able to help them transcend their environment, and experience feelings of freedom and joy, in times when they weren't free and it wasn't joyous.

"I'm sure we've all experienced that through music at some time, where you feel like you're able to escape. That's why people love music, it takes you somewhere else. 

"When I was working on this record I felt in many ways trapped, and weighed down by the heaviness that was, and still is, the world around us.

"Very literally, during lockdown I couldn't escape. I had twins that just turned two, and a six year-old, and no help in the house, and I was just cooking, cleaning, changing diapers, all night long babies were coming in and out of bed... literally no space to think, no time to shower, barely time to go to the bathroom.

"You're inhabiting this tiny little part of yourself. Yes I'm a mother but I'm also a much larger being than just that one aspect of myself. But I was trapped in that one little role.

"So that was hard, but then beyond that: climate crisis, fires raging around the world... At one point, we were locked in the house, and smoke was seeping in through the doors. All the air purifiers were on red, saying 'dangerous air'.  

"Meanwhile, Black people are getting killed by police all over, and then there's riots, and then there's protests... you're in complete survival mode, and there's nowhere to go, and you're just like 'what can I do?'

"You know what I did? I created. I started writing songs, and that was my way to go inward, and upward and forward. 

"If there was no peace, or no sense of freedom for me personally, or no beauty, I could basically weave myself this lifeline by creating these songs, that created beauty, created light for me to move towards."

The gospel influence may not have been there musically, but it was present in a mental image Santi says sums up the album, telling me, "When I was little, my dad took us to this Baptist church in Baltimore.

"The ushers wore all white, and had white gloves, and fans, and white hats. People would jump up, and music would play, and people would catch the spirit, and then they'd fall, and faint, and there'd be dancing - you could tell they were enraptured.  

“And when I was thinking about this record, I saw me, in that moment of ascension. That moment of rising up, beyond my body, being in between dimensions, and experiencing the multiplicity of being, falling and being supported by these ushers... but the ushers were also me."

‘My Horror’, which starts the album, has lyrics about Santi losing track of what day it is, and looking at herself from outside her body. The malaise she was feeling is apparent, portioned inside a pop song with some reggae bounce and a few of her trademark ‘woops’.

Before she was a solo artist, she fronted a punk band called Stiffed. Even though she and her producers explore electronic terrain, I put it to her that the traces of her musical roots have always remained.

"I've always been influenced by various forms and kinds of punk music,” she agreed, going on to say “I like that energy. I've always said that I'm punk because punk means you do what you want to do. You don't necessarily follow other people's rules that don't fit you.

“Anything can be punk as long as it has that sentiment, and that has definitely been something that I've built my whole career on - questioning rules that don't work for me. I think that's intrinsically punk."

"With 'High Priestess'”, she told me, “I wanted to make a rap-punk song. And I wanted it to be futuristic, not throwback. 

"Trying to merge rap and punk is a very delicate, trial and error thing, 'cause you end up getting a lot of Limp Bizkit, which I definitely did not want!

"You have to be really creative about it, but really the main thing about it was angst. I wanted the energy, the fight, the aggression. 

"We found it, but it was nothing like I would have thought. It was beyond where I thought I would go. It was the intention I was chasing, it wasn't a particular sound. And when it was right, I felt it."

Fourteen producers worked on Spirituals, as well as Santi herself, which makes it all the more impressive how distinctive the album is. And not just that, it was also made during lockdown. For the entire process she was alone, working with her engineer and producers via video chat. I asked her if that made it much more challenging than usual. 

"It was a whole new experience,” she said, but “it was not really more challenging, actually. For what the circumstances were, it was delightful!

"Technology was just perfect enough to carry us through this time: my engineer was able to record me using my equipment, from his house. He was able to tap in and record my whole record, with me alone in my studio, not touching a thing.

"That was recording vocals, and by the time I got to working on production, we had gone to a place called Squamish in Canada. It's a beautiful place: moss-covered forest, roaring rivers. But also, totally isolated. I ended up isolating myself even further when I rented a cabin in the woods, to have some space to create. 

“My friend was the woodpecker that came every day and perched right outside the window, and that was the only living being around.

“So when I could get on my little Zoom sessions with [the producers], it was great!”

I ask if she can tell me who she’s referring to in the song ‘Ushers of the New World’, and she enthusiastically replies, “Us! I’m talking about us. 

“That song’s about us taking responsibility for our future here on this planet, and creating a future that we’d actually want to be here to inhabit.”

It might be Spirituals’ most optimistic track, looking to a utopian version of society, and that’s reflected in the music, which is light, and uncluttered.

The album ends on ‘Fall First’, which is comparably heavy and guitar driven. Santi has spoken in the past about the influence New wave bands like Devo or the Cure have had on her music, and here that seems clearest. 

“I am a total guitar snob,” she says, “and I’m so specific about the sounds that I want. I handed my producer Rostam that track, and said ‘here, finish this one’.

“He sent it back and it was finished. I’m normally so hands on with production, but he killed it. He brought in shoegazer guitars, all these rich layers.

“But the thing that I did at the end was put the vocals way at the front, all the reverb and stuff you wouldn’t normally find in a song like this, I really pushed it with the way we approached the production, to bring it into the future.”

It’s a futuristic album, and the track ‘Witness’ might be its most forward-thinking. I asked if she’s someone who looks to the cutting edge for inspiration.

“I think I might do that naturally, but not on purpose. Everyone’s like ‘this sounds crazy’ and I’m like ‘it does?’

“With that one I was like ‘this is a club track’, and I think the melody and drums are, but the music is so ethereal, which is something I wanted to be consistent across this record. I wanted it to sound like you’re crossing into another world. And on this song in particular, it does feel like you’re entering another dimension.”

I think more than anything, it’s that hunger to create new sounds, and new types of songs, that colour Santigold’s music. At its core it’s pop, but infiltrated by punk, reggae, gospel and a lot more. She told me she never goes into the studio with a preconceived idea, but lets the music become what it needs to be. Spirituals is by turns angry, sad, and joyous, and always 100% committed. The sound of someone trying to transcend their environment.