It’s hard to picture Santi White pushing papers from behind a desk, but it wasn’t long ago when the eccentric rocker was doing just that, working as an A&R rep for Epic Records. It took a request from soul singer and childhood friend Res for help with her 2000 demo, How Do I? (MCA), to make White realize just how disillusioned she’d become with office life.
“I couldn’t find anyone to write the way I wanted the project to be, so I did it myself,” White says from London, where she’s wrapping up a European tour. “Then everyone really freaked out about it, and I realized I didn’t want to work on the business side. So I quit.”
After abandoning her job, White helped form the Philly-based band Stiffed. The outfit recorded two kick-ass, dub-dabbling albums, Sex Sells (Coolhunter, 2003) and Burned Again (Outlook, 2005), before breaking up when White relocated to New York two years ago. It took only one bite of the Big Apple to entice the 31-yearold singer-songwriter to start writing again. She hooked up with old bandmates, bassist John Hill and drummer Chuck Treece—along with Switch, one of the producers behind M.I.A’s Kala (Interscope, 2007)—and began what ultimately became her solo debut, Santogold (Downtown). The album is a hard-hitting shot of new wave, electronica, and dub—imagine M.I.A. fronting Devo—a remarkably creative departure from Stiffed’s punk-edged sounds.
“It’s an evolution thing,” White says. “You’re always going to be a little different than how you started out. what’s really exciting is working with different people, and really pushing it.”
Onstage at the Williamsburg Music Hall in Brooklyn, N.Y., in early December, White’s transformation is complete. She looks like the loser of a brutal paintball war—her black tee and skintight cigarette pants are splattered with white latex, but not one strand of her two-toned haircut is out of place. Mammoth, gold door knockers peek from beneath her blond curtain as she tears through a set. One look at the roomful of hair-tossing hipsters and it’s clear: Santi White has finally found the perfect nine-to-five.
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