This time around, Santi White vowed to herself, she'd have fun making her new album. The last one, Master of My Make-Believe, came with the stresses and strains caused by switching labels and management. She didn't want to do that again.
So White decided that making the album that would become 99c would be a fun experience. "This is my third record so I know recording albums is tough, gruelling and not fun. But I wanted to enjoy myself, I wanted it to be a fun process and I was determined to take nothing less than that.
“I was pregnant when I started writing and I recorded two songs before I had the baby and the rest came two months after the birth. Because I had this new bundle of joy at home, I wanted to carry some of that energy into the studio and bring some of the brightness and lightness with me.”
She set up shop at a friend’s studio and went to work. “It was super-comfortable. I was eight or nine months pregnant at the start so I had a mattress in there and I’d lie on it with my Great Dane and eat chocolates all day. If you have the right space – and the right space is more and more not this clinical studio space where you’re paying $1,200 a day – you get a really nice energy and that powers the work.”
Freshness
She also went for some new people to help her put a shape on the songs, with Rostam Batmanglij (ex-Vampire Weekend), Hit- Boy, TV on the Radio’s Dave Sitek, Patrik Berger, Justin Raisen, Sam Dew and Doc McKinney working on the album.
“I was looking for freshness,” she says. “I was looking for people who didn’t know all the answers, people I didn’t know. John Hill and Switch and all of the producers I’ve worked with previously are family so I wanted to work with people who were not so close to me to see what would come from the process. It’s often a cause for anxiety because you’re surrounded by strangers, but I willed myself to have a good time.
“It totally worked and I’ve found some great new musical kin. It’s rare that I find somebody who is equally into African music and reggae and hip-hop and punk rock and pop and can jump around between them. I’m very particular when it comes to drum sounds and guitar sounds and these guys were right there with me.”
The result of these endeavours is a bit of a thriller. You won't find a brighter, breezier, bolder album than 99c hanging around this season. You certainly won't find anything as rich, vibrant and giddy dealing with themes of narcissism, consumerism and distraction. If only some of the political parties scrapping for your vote these past few weeks had come to your door with such a sparky manifesto.
Product promotion
“When I started writing, I realised I was talking a lot about the realities of being an artist, feeling like a product and the constant need to be selling and promoting myself,” White explains. “I stepped back and thought these were good themes to explore, but I wanted to do so in a really playful way rather than preach.”
But for all the playfulness, it’s clear that White is not down with the changed nature of being an artist in 2016. “It’s so hard to focus on making a record because of all these demands and concerns to market and promote what you do. I’ve spent as much time marketing the new record as I did making the record.
“You have to make so much content because you are racing the rate of consumption. Music has become disposable to many people. There are so many platforms you have to consider – tablet, phone, TV – and you have a billion social media channels which are changing every couple of months.
“Then, you’ve the fact that you’ve everything available all the time for free. When you had to pay for it, you were invested in it and it made it valuable in a different way. The music was good because people cared about making a full album. Now, you’ve a lot of albums which are a few hit tracks and filler so people are less inclined to buy albums.”
False realities
White believes the drop in quality has to do with a reduction in the time artists have to dedicate to creating their work. “If you go back to the era of Da Vinci or Socrates, who didn’t even have electricity, they spent all their time thinking and coming up with concepts. Look at the long-lasting influence of what they were able to think about, create and achieve. Then look at what our artists are putting out [laughs].
“You don’t have time to think because every moment of your life is spent tweeting or Instagraming. And it’s all these false realities, like ‘this is my wonderful life!’. Keeping that up takes time, not to mention making new music, marketing new music, touring new music. The amount of time that goes into trying to get people’s attention online: what if I had all that time to focus on my music?”
Then, there’s the touring. Artists tour so much now because that’s allegedly where the money is, but White says even that doesn’t stack up any more.
“That’s even getting outdated because I don’t make the majority of my income from touring. You’d have to be on the road all the time, which is really gruelling hard work. I love performing, I love the stage show and I love turning the music into a physical thing, but tickets ain’t selling because the economy is so bad.
“Honestly, how we make money now is by doing corporate gigs which are not even in front of your fans. It’s so strange how you make money in this business now. It’s so separate from the art, trust me.”
White says many people have pointed out that it is four years since she had an album out which clearly irks her. "OK, let's break those four years down. I put out Master of My Make Believe in 2012. I toured till 2013 and still did shows in 2014. I managed to squeeze out a baby in the middle of all that and I'm back in the studio two months after that. And people still go 'you take so long'? Please!
"That's not to mention the projects, the make-up line, the frock line, the acting lessons, and appearances in The Office and NTSF:SD:SUV on Adult Swim I did in-between to clean my palate!
“ I take longer to write my records than many people, but if I were trying to keep up with the pace that some people operate at, where they’re putting out an album every 18 months, the quality would suffer so much. I think that drop in quality is widespread now, which is terrible for music and culture.”
- Santigold plays the Body and Soul festival, June 17-19, at Ballinlough Castle, Co Westmeath
