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Santi White, aka Santigold - ILI 5w4
- "I'll never release an album a year because that means I wouldn't be writing the records - there would be no thought going into what I'm saying."
- "I watched a music awards show last year and started crying afterwards. I just felt really sad that people go along with stupid wack shit. I'm sorry, but LMFAO performed at the Super Bowl? Aren't they a joke band? That type of shit makes me cry. I'm like, 'Really?'"
- "Everybody always asks me what music I listen to, but sometimes I don’t listen to a lot of music, because I can’t turn off this mechanism in my head that breaks down sounds. Especially coming out of making a record, you’re constantly listening to that reverb, those drums … Sometimes you’ll like get in a car, and someone will ask if you want the radio on and you’ll be like, “No, please, just silence."
- For me, the process of making music involves channeling a certain part of my subconscious. I’ll close my eyes and see or hear things and I have to be quiet enough to let it come all the way through. These ideas seem to come out of nowhere. With 'GO!' for example, I was with Q-Tip and he was going through all these records, playing samples, and then I just thought “Punk rock drums. Karen O.” I mean, [the idea came] from nothing. So I got a friend to come in and play, and I told the engineer “Can you just distort the drums so it sounds totally fucked up”, and he was like “OK but I don’t think…”, he did it but he wasn’t convinced … but I was like “That’s it!” And then I was like “Karen, you wanna get in on it?”, and she was like “Alright…” I wasn’t sure she’d like it. But it worked. So it’s all feeling…"
- "[My approach to choreography is] like a collage. We’ll watch African tribal dancing and try to work that out, and then we’ll watch Singing In The Rain, then we’ll watch Fosse, or some kids doing the jerk, or some dancehall queens. We just take it all and put it together. That’s what we do that’s really unique, using collage in the choreography, in the same way that I do in my music. I think what it also does is it really helps to translate the music into a physical space. I think that’s really important visually: communicating to people how the music should be taken in physically."
- "I like it to sound like the record. I don’t like jam sessions at all. I don’t like anything that sounds jammed out. I like really tight, straightforward stuff. Obviously there are certain things that have to change. A lot of time I get my voice to sound a certain way by singing something three different ways and then stacking the vocals. And that’s not really possible live. So on stage you’ve gotta play around with how you’re going to present things without losing their essence. On 'Lights Out', I can’t sing it soft on stage like I do on the record, because it doesn’t sound good. You want the energy."
- "I don’t think I worked with any one producer for more than a month. So that means there’s a lot of me in the middle, picking this and picking that, and figuring out how it’s all going to go together. Even if I do pick a track that’s just fully done by a producer, I’ll pick something that totally matches the direction of the record."
- "[Here's] how my first [post-tour] recording session went. The next one I went in with John Hill, who'd I'd worked on the first album with, and I think I had expectations that it would be exactly the same [process] and I'd got into it and it just wasn't. I went in with John for two months and we didn't really come up with much. Then I started to get down, of course. I was like, “this sucks, maybe I suck”. It was stupid because I hadn't yet processed the two years just gone or the impact of travelling around the world. The expectation was the block. In the past the writing was just like boom, boom, boom, and in the past I was writing writing really fast. I wrote some of the album in Jamaica and there were moments there that coloured the whole record. One of them was when I was on a boat - I was with Diplo and John Hill and John's throwing up over the side of the boat and we were flying – it was dangerous. I was sitting cross-legged at the very front, just holding on. My body was literally flying as we're hitting the waves and I was like, “THIS IS SO FUN”. Meanwhile, the music is coming out of a little shitty stereo and Diplo's blasting some old reggae classics and it was so distorted and the waves were crashing and it was so aggressive but so beautiful and so free and I was like, this is what I want my record to sound like."
- "In this era where everything goes really quickly and is trendy and everybody's kind of fickle, I think it's great to have a real fanbase because when I go away for four years it means they're still there."
- "[Jay-Z] said, “Man, all your lyrics are really topical and I feel like every song could correspond with something on the news right now,” which was interesting because I had written most of the songs a year before that."
- "The Beat: Where's your LOLsome dance floor banger about going to a club and having a drink?
Santigold: [Looks incredulous]
The Beat: I'm joking.
Santigold: My songs that are actually for the club are not about being in a club. My club song's called Look At These Hoes [laughs]."
Last edited by Korpsy Knievel; 10-23-2012 at 05:27 AM.