Santigold Returns to Her Live Band Roots With Tiny Desk Concert

Santigold, who released fourth album Spirituals in September, has released a new performance on NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert series.

Santigold isn’t giving up on music just yet. On Monday (November 21), NPR released a new Tiny Desk Concert featuring the Spirituals singer-songwriter, who performed “L.E.S. Artistes,” “I’m A Lady,” “Shake,” “Fall First,” and “Ain’t Got Enough.”

“I don’t know what I’m doing up here with no dancers,” the singer joked while backed by a three-piece band (which included Twin Shadow and Chuck Treece on bass and drums, respectively) and two background vocalists. The Tiny Desk Concert makes her latest live performance since canceling her Holified Tour in September, citing “devastating” costs due to inflation and the COVID-19 pandemic.

“All of that on top of the already-tapped mental, spiritual, physical, and emotional resources of just having made it through the past few years,” she wrote in a letter detailing the tour cancellation. “Some of us are finding ourselves simply unable to make it work.”

Since releasing Spirituals, White has launched other media endeavors aside from music, including new roundtable discussion podcast Noble Champions on Talkhouse. In the course of its first season, guests featured on Noble Champions include Questlove, Yasiin Bey, Idris Elba, Bun B, Saul Williams and more.

The podcast’s title stems from a quote by Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, who wrote in 1910 that periods “during which art has no noble champion, during which the true spiritual food is wanting, are periods of retrogression in the spiritual world.”

Watch Santigold’s Tiny Desk Concert below.