Gold Star For Robot Girl

“I have several days off, which is wonderful!” Santi White exclaims. There hasn't been a lot of downtime for White as she has toured the world promoting her second album Master Of My Make-Believe and she's relishing the break. “It's really good. Finally I've been getting some time at home. It's like I'm starting to feel like myself again if you know what I mean.” The stand-out single from Master Of My Make-Believe is The Keepers, a cynical track about the state of America and the world at large crammed into a three-and-a-half minute pop song that sounds like a slightly modernised reworking of a proper '80s pop classic.

“It was in the framework of the whole record,” she says about the initial idea behind the track. “A lot of the record is about being in control of your reality, and being responsible and involved with your whole environment – whether that's your internal environment or your external environment. That song's just about taking responsibility for the state of things around us in the world. I mean clearly, it's kind of a wreck in many ways. Ultimately it falls on us. We're the ones who are going to have to live in it, and we're the ones that are to blame for the current state of it. You know, I sing, 'While we sleep in America,' but that's because I'm in America – really it's everywhere. Right before or around the time I wrote it there were nuclear explosions and oil spills, all the uprisings – there's a lot of things pointing out that things are a little bit out of whack. So the song's about not being able to sit back and pretend that you don't have anything to do with that.”

White says that while a lot of people simply don't seem to care, there are other issues at play. Even though the tone of The Keepers may be quite cynical on the surface, she has an optimistic outlook on humanity's ability to instigate change and make good things happen. “It's a big problem and it happens for different reasons,” she says. “While part of it may be apathy, another part of it is that people feel disempowered and they feel like nothing they say or do might make any difference. This feeling of frustration is leading to things like the Occupy Movement. But it's because of that frustration that people aren't being heard. People didn't feel like they were able to make a difference, but they have to sit there and watch things fall apart and go the wrong way. I don't believe that should be the case. It might be more difficult than it has been in the past, but we still can have our say and the more we choose to use our voices, the more we can make a difference.”

The video for The Keepers is another creative victory for White, having directed the video herself, something she says she really enjoyed getting stuck into. It also offered the opportunity to include an old friend in a cameo appearance. As the 1950s-era family featured in the video go about eating their TV dinners in blissful ignorance, there's a drive-by shooting on the house. The man with his finger on the trigger is GZA/Genius of Wu-Tang Clan and Liquid Swords fame. “It was really such an amazing experience,” she says of being the video's director. “I really like how it came out. GZA is one of my favourites! He's an old friend and he's just so wonderful and always down to do something. It was pretty cool that he agreed to be in it.”

However, her working relationship with GZA actually goes way back. “The first time I worked with him was in the '90s,” she says. “I wrote the hook on his song Beneath The Surface. I didn't sing it though, it was this girl Res. I was writing and executive producing her record (How I Do) at the time, so I got her to do the hook for his record. Following that, on his next record [Legend Of The Liquid Sword] I wrote and I sang the hook on the track Stay In Line. One time in Lollapalooza we actually did a short four- or five-song set together where we collaborated on a few songs, which was really fun,” she laughs.

One of her proudest collaborations on a star-studded list was when she fulfilled a lifelong dream by contributing a guest performance on what sadly would become the final Beastie Boys album, Hot Sauce Committee Part Two. Even though her earliest memories of Beastie Boys date way back before her own career, it's clear that she held them in high regard even then.

“Oh man, I loved Beastie Boys growing up,” she says with real enthusiasm. “I was always trying to get my friends and be like, 'We could be the girl Beastie Boys!' and everyone was like, 'Yeah!' But then they never did it and I was the only one who really wanted it! I remember when I was like 12 or 13 and we went to the mall and they had this thing where you could perform any song and they turned it into a wacky video where you would be like flying through space while you were singing this song, you know? We did (You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party). I'm just so mad I don't have the tape anymore because it was amazing. It was on a VHS and I think my dad threw it away years later.”

The details of how the collaboration came together are fuzzy for White, as she says a whole lot of stuff happened all at once with the three MCs, including the Rock The Vote road trip, MTV's initiative to get the kids in America to take to the polls. “That just sparked the friendship,” she says. “I just instantly loved those guys. We would sit around and laugh all day. I went to a lot of Adam Yauch's film screenings for his Oscilloscope film company around that time as well. Collaborating with them was just so much fun. We were talking about doing a punk-rock EP that we really wanted to do but it never happened. I instantly felt like they were kindred spirits and obviously they're heroes of mine.”

She says she was very overwhelmed when she saw the video for the collaboration track Don't Play No Game That I Can't Win – a Robot Chicken-style clip featuring her and the Beasties as action figures. “I loooove that video!” she howls. “Adam had written that whole idea for that video and it's just so good! It's one of my most favourite things I've seen in a long time!”

Santigold will be playing the following shows: