Gold Sounds

On a recent spring afternoon, Santigold reclines on a couch at the back of her record label's offices, waiting to get into one of the on-site studios. The Bed Stuy-based musician is at Downtown Records in Manhattan to mix and select singles for the as-yet-untitled follow-up to her 2008 self-titled debut. That album spawned hits like "Creator," "Shove It" and, of course, "L.E.S. Artistes," whose pop sensibility is so powerful it can make you nostalgic for the moment you first heard it -- even while you're listening to it for the very first time. Following up a record like that is a tall order, and Santigold (née Santi White) seems frustrated. The studio is shut tight, and the songstress recording in there is singing loudly from the heart; her voice spills out, all hot-pants R&B and orgasmic trills of rolling vowels. Meanwhile, arms folded over her chest, hair cut in a blunt black bob and clad in high heel creepers and a ratty Everything Went Black T-shirt, Santigold looks like she couldn't care less about pop. But looks are deceiving.

"I like stuff that's accessible, so I try to write songs that I feel like people can relate to," the 35-year-old says. "But I think that the window for writing pop music has become so narrow, it's difficult to get in there without doing some cookie-cutter shit."

The woman who penned the anthem that fueled 1,001 nights on Ludlow isn't into pre-fab pop. Known for her genre-blending synthesis of pop, R&B, punk, dub, reggae and electronic music, Santigold has earned praise from both the mainstream and indie-music worlds. Before she was Santigold, she sang lead in Stiffed, a punk band from Philadelphia that released records in the mid-'00s, both produced by Bad Brains bassist Darryl Jenifer. She moved to New York in 2007, put out her first album and was awarded Best Breakthrough Artist at the 2008 NME
Awards. Her debut came in sixth on Rolling Stone's list of best albums that year. Her talents
have been widely recognized by her peers, including M.I.A., Mark Ronson and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. She helped write songs for Christina Aguilera and GZA. She runs an absurdly large guest-appearance gamut, singing vocals on everything from "Don't Play No Game That I Can't Win," one of the standouts on the Beastie Boys' Hot Sauce Committee Part Two, to the Lonely Island's "After Party," Andy Samberg's paean to masturbation. She recently signed to Roc Nation, the management company headed up by Jay-Z. She says the new boss is happy with the early mixes he's heard. "He said it was going to be 'an important album,'" she explains. "I wanted to make some epic songs. The whole record isn't like that, but a few songs definitely are. I wanted to make them feel big. Peter Gabriel-big."

The album won't be out until fall, but one track, "Go," has already leaked, its cheery singsong
melody layered atop a tinny percussive loop that grounds Santigold when she scolds, "People want my power/ and they want my station." (The song also features Nick Zinner and Karen O of the YYYs, and recalls some of M.I.A.'s finer work.) Elsewhere the record maintains its dance-floor-driven ethos, as on the sample-heavy electro track "Freak Like Me," the dub vibe and grinding guitars of "God from the Machine" and the spatial, inspirational "Riot's Gone" and "Disparate Youth." Produced by a variety of like-minded collaborators including Switch, Diplo and Dave Sitek of TV on the Radio, the album has been a little over a year in the making, a process exacerbated by Santigold's post-tour mindset. "After two years, I was exhausted. I had to do a lot of work to get back to a place where I could be creative." She continues, "For me to be on the road and onstage meant being on and giving constantly. You develop a protective shell. Then, when you come back, you're supposed to have a full well after you've been putting yourself out there. How do you even get back to a place where you can create?"

Answer: meditation, a cleanse, writing in her journal and, apparently, rom-coms. "When I'm really stressed out, I like to watch really bad romantic comedies," she says. "I will watch anything, like Life As We Know It, which I enjoyed." Is that the one with Rachel McAdams as the morning television producer? "No, but I watched that one, too!" She also gets a little help from her friends. She cites an evening when Zinner invited her to record with him, just for fun, as a turning point for ending her writer's block; a three-week trip to Jamaica's Port Antonio also helped her loosen up. Some of the songs on the new album have a distinctly Jamaican cast to them -- "God from the Machine" in particular -- which she credits to her time on the island.

And last year, she climbed Mount Kilimanjaro to raise awareness and funds for clean drinking water in Africa. Called Summit on the Summit, it was a trip organized by Kenna, the Ethiopian-born musician, who, Santigold says wryly, "said it would be like a two on a treadmill. It was not a two."

For now, though, she's sequestered in the studio, finishing her album. Then it's back out
on tour across Europe, sharing her new songs and learning to play them live. "For me, writing
songs is a cathartic process," she says. "I always say my songs are about myself. Some of
them are meant to be almost like a pep talk. It takes a lot to put yourself out there like this. You need all the reinforcement you can get.