Creation, vulnerability and sacrifice: A conversation with Santigold on her new album ‘Spirituals’

“I’m all in my head and I have anxiety. But when I’m working on music, all that stuff goes away and there’s a real clear path direct to my source of creation.”

Musician Santi White, known to many as Santigold, has been an integral voice in music for the past two decades. Refreshingly, her goal has never been fame (despite releasing critically acclaimed and category-defying albums and even garnering herself a name drop in Beyonce’s ‘Break My Soul’) but instead to create art that moves people.

She recently released her fourth album Spirituals, the title referencing songs sung and performed by enslaved Black people, to help get through the “un-get-through-able.” Written during a tumultuous period of lockdowns, fires and police brutality, Spirituals is equal parts vulnerability and strength. 

Discover more about Australia’s musical talent in FJ’s Music section.

Sitting down with Santi over Zoom, I was excited to understand more about how she creates. After bingeing her 2022 podcast Noble Champions, a platform for “authors, activists and progressive thinkers”, I had a lot of questions for her. 

Hi, Santi! So I was listening to your podcast and you had an episode on the act of creating as a form of spirituality. How do art and spirituality intersect for you?

Hmm, that’s a deep question. And it’s a good one. And I don’t know if my brain is ready for it. I went to Quaker school at a point in my life… What I know of Quakers is that it’s kind of Christianity, but it’s based on the belief, or at least at my school, that there was that of God in everyone… 

So for me, when you speak of creativity and creating it’s coming from that place of connection to the grander scheme of things. And so when I think about making music in particular, but really making anything, it’s really about moving myself out of the way, my smaller self out of the way of my bigger self… the part of me that is all-knowing. It’s about flow, it’s about letting things flow.

And me as a person, I’m like, not really easygoing. And I’m also like, a kind of perfectionist, and I’m like, all in my head and I have anxiety. But when I’m working on music, all that stuff goes away and there’s a real clear path direct to my source of creation. So that’s the spiritual element that I’m talking about. It’s just really moving yourself, moving your judgement. You’re analysing, moving all that out of the way and getting some pure thing from somewhere else… 

Does sharing so much of yourself take a toll? Are the sacrifices you have to make to create art worth it?

Hmm, well, that’s the question that it asked in my song ‘L.E.S Artistes’ isn’t it? Sometimes yes, and sometimes no.  I’ve been doing this for a long time now, and I’m also a mother of three children. So you know, you’ve got to be a working mother. What I’ve learned is that it will take a toll. And if you don’t learn to really identify what your boundaries are… then you won’t make it. Because being an artist is sharing so much of who and what you are with everyone and really giving so much energy. 

If you do that night after night with no self-care, if you say yes to everything and don’t take time for yourself or pay attention to… the lack of sleep or the anxiety… then it does take a toll. So I think the most important thing is to value yourself and your health and your wellness in the process. It is a really, really hard job.

You’ve spoken about the commodification of escapism, especially in commercial music like the Billboard Hot 100. You’ve also said that you “fucking hate the music industry”. Would you say this commodification is part of the reason? 

I just think that the ecosystem of the music industry is completely broken. It’s one that’s built on total disrespect…for the artists who create the art that the entire industry is built on. I’ve also never felt so much like a slave, like a straight-up slave, than I have this year. I don’t know what it was, maybe it’s post-pandemic and the fact that the economy is kind of falling apart and so everybody’s like scrambling trying to lock in their money.

But like, the things that have been put before me, whether it’s tours where everybody’s making way more money and I’m making zero, or whether it’s the fact that I can’t even put out my own record on vinyl because I don’t own it. And a company that I was never signed to owns it… But I’ve never even been signed to this label. I was just sold, my rights were sold to them by somebody else. That’s fucking slavery. It’s just unethical for artists… 

So I do hate it [the music industry]. I really do hate it. As a person who really cares about integrity and authenticity and art, I am trying to figure out a way where I can just continue to do things the way that I want to do them. 

You recently started your own label Little Jerk Records, can you tell me about that?

Yes, I mean, it’s only a label because I put out my own record. It’s not like I’m gonna sign artists… But I’m putting out my own record… I’m kind of building a platform where I can be more direct[ly] in contact with my fans. And that’s really important. And I think that’s kind of the future for artists to cut out all the middlemen and figure out ways to just have direct relationships with their fans and ask your fans ‘What do you want?’ and [then] I make that and I sell it to you.  

Now for a kind of left-of-field question: do you believe in the power of a spell? 

What do you mean by that?

In an episode of your podcast, you had this interesting conversation about beauty. And the way you spoke about it made it sound like creating beautiful art is almost like casting a spell. 

You know, it’s that beauty’s in the eye of the beholder, right? You can find beauty in all kinds of things. But at the same time, as an older woman now and as a Black woman, there are lots of ideals of beauty that I’ve internalised that I wish to get rid of and erase and every time I look at myself, I don’t see what’s being projected as like the ideal beauty and then you tear yourself down. So there’s these things that we’ve internalised that go so deep that we don’t even recognise.

And if you want to call that a spell, I get it. Like the spell being the beliefs that are put upon you, that alter the way that you navigate life, that you move through the world and the ways that you perceive yourself and the world around you dictated by somebody else’s ideals. That is a spell. But as an artist, I just tried to create beauty. I mean, among other things, but one of the main things that is really important that I know I can do is create another vision, write another version, I mean, using our creativity to create a future that we actually want to inhabit.

To listen to Santigold’s album Spirituals, head here.