Santigold laughs when I ask what set her new album Spirituals in motion. “I was gonna do an album anyway,” she shrugs. The pandemic just happened to crash through the door while she was thinking about it. Suddenly she wasn’t Santigold the artist; she was Santigold the short-order cook, diaper-changer, and human Roomba for twin toddlers and a six-year-old. “Nobody else could cook in my house. Nobody else was deep cleaning. I was inhabiting this very small part of who I am all the time.”
Out in the backyard shed, though, she carved out two hours here and there to record. Her engineer logged in remotely like a ghostly co-pilot. “Lyrics just started pouring out,” she says. “Thank God for the record. It was a lifeline for me.”
The album kicks off with Numb. “I just thought it sounded good as the intro,” she admits, before conceding it makes sense thematically. The follow-up, “Nothing,” cracked open her defenses. “Once I started singing the vocals, I started crying. I hadn’t been able to cry. I was in survival mode.”
Survival is a running theme, but so is resilience. On “Shake,” she chants we got to keep moving, which sounds like an Instagram mantra until she digs in. “It’s about flow. Allowing things to come, allowing feelings to come, and then letting them pass. Otherwise you just get floored by all the heaviness.”
She doesn’t stop at self-help slogans. “No Paradise” drops the line there’s power in our struggle. She ties it to generational trauma: “A lot of Black women are always in survival mode. Things we’re carrying from our ancestors that we didn’t even know we were carrying. I started writing a book proposal about it, looking at my great-grandmother, my mother, myself, and even my daughter.” Strength, yes. But also a call to figure out which struggles to finally drop. “So that we can actually be free.”
The whiplash between vulnerability and defiance hits hardest in the sequencing—from “Nothing” straight into “High Priestess.” She laughs when I point it out. “It’s true, though. Every day I’m told: you are invisible, you are not powerful. And every day I answer: I am powerful. High Priestess was me bragging, saying not only am I powerful, I’m a massive being.”
Of course, she can’t resist skewering the industry while she’s at it. “Pretty” and “Touch” drag the endless commodity loop of women reduced to body parts. “It’s still naked big butts at the top of the charts. The less you say in your music, the more sellable it is. That’s where we’re at. But that’s not what I’m buying into.”
Her visuals—art films, vignettes, costumes—aren’t carefully storyboarded think pieces. They just spill out. “There’s almost no thought. That’s what’s so freeing. I’m in my head all the time. But when I’m making music, I stop thinking. It just comes through.”
Which brings us to the tea. Yes, tea. She partnered with Brian White and Oliver Luckett to create a line made from yaupon, a holly plant indigenous to the Mississippi Delta. “Indigenous people used it forever, but it got wiped out when tobacco took over. Yaupon has all these amazing qualities. For each tea, I chose ingredients tied to themes of the record. Same with the body products—one spray uses black spruce, which deals with generational trauma and letting go.” She grins like she’s pulling a fast one. “I tried to make the combinations unusual but still palatable. I can’t wait. I just finished the last one last night.”
There’s also a tour, of course. “I always think of my shows as a physical expression of the music. Costumes, visuals, dancing—it’s just more ways of bringing the themes to life. In the past I had dancers sit on blow-up chairs eating Cheetos for ten minutes. With this record, it’ll be the same idea—multi-sensory, but in a different direction.”
And that’s the Santigold paradox: heavy themes wrapped in big hooks, darkness aired out under flashing lights, generational trauma served with a side of yaupon. She’s survived, sure. But she’s also demanding to be heard—loudly, unapologetically, sometimes with a teacup in hand.
Watch the interview above and then check out the videos below.
