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One of Brooklyn’s hottest exports is Santi White, the dynamic punk-electro-dub artist who performs as Santogold. Although she was born in Philadelphia, Brooklyn has been her base since launching her solo music career. According to White, the borough is the Big Apple’s funkiest asset. “It’s go the energy that is uniquely New York,” she says, “but it feels a little less jaded than Manhattan. Like there’s still a raw energy of something untapped and exciting.” The same could be said of White’s music. Her debut album, Santogold, offers some of the most dynamic sounds around, from the pulsing beats and razor-sharp guitars of “L.E.S. Artistes” to the shrill vocals and swooping synthetic bass of “C...

She walks into the room with bleary eyes. It’s the first interview of the day and Canada’s k.d. lang isn’t yet fully awake, so she throws open the hotel-suite window before settling into a couch. The bracing December air somehow seems to kick start the interview about her superb new album, Watershed, into gear. Following her duets of Louis Armstrong covers with Tony Bennett, A Wonderful World, and her collection of Canadian classics, Hymns of the 49th Parallel, it’s her first album of new original material in eight years. Asked why it took so long, lang is quick with the reasons: 9/11, Buddhism and writer’s block. “Basically, my world was turned upside down,” she adds, “and it took me that l...

Senegal’s Youssou N’Dour is a global superstar, a singer with a stunning, ululating voice so rich and emotive that it transcends language. At home, he’s a national hero so revered that his popularity overshadows that of star soccer players and the country’s charismatic president. So imagine the devastation N’Dour felt when Egypt, his deeply spiritual 2004 album, was denounced by Senegalese religious leaders and rejected by Senegalese fans and retailers. He had recorded the album, collaborating with an Egyptian orchestra, to reveal a more tolerant face of Islam in the wake of 9/11. “I was really frustrated at the perceptions of people at home,” admitted N’Dour recently, “because I was praisin...

It’s easy to be cynical about the latest soul sensation from the British Isles to land on these shores. After all, there’s been a steady flow of divas from Ol’ Blighty in recent years, from Joss Stone and Corinne Bailey Rae to Lily Allen and Amy Winehouse. But Duffy is different. The Welsh-born singer’s sound, although steeped in ’60s soul, packs an emotional wallop that gives the newcomer a distinct advantage over her soul sisters. It’s as if the 23-year-old blonde songstress has arrived fully formed—with a lifetime’s worth of longing and heartache in her voice. One listen to Duffy’s debut album, Rockferry, instantly brings to mind the blue-eyed soul of Dusty Springfield—with a little Ronni...

Feist is sitting in a Latin American café in Toronto’s west end, sipping mint tea and talking enthusiastically about ocean waves. She’s just returned from a rare week off in Mexico, where she holidayed with buddies Erlend Øye and Eirik Glambek Bøe, of Norwegian folk-pop duo Kings of Convenience. “My friends were telling me to watch out for the riptide, because it’ll pull you out,” Feist recalls. “But all you have to do is just go with it and it’ll pull you back to shore. You just have to go the full cycle. People don’t have faith in that. They don’t realize it’s all about flow and cycles and currents.” She adds: “I’ve been thinking a lot about that stuff lately, about movement and the natura...

Colin Meloy has always had a vivid imagination. When he was in Grade Two, he wrote a play called The Bloody Knight, about a ghost that haunts a forest by a medieval castle. “It was particularly gruesome,” recalls Meloy cheerfully. “The ghost ends up slaughtering all of the knights at the castle.” The play was staged at his elementary school in Portland, Oregon for an audience of students and teachers. “Thankfully,” adds Meloy, “I had a really supportive teacher who didn’t seem too bothered by all the violence. These days, I’m sure that sort of thing would be cause for some concern within the educational system.” Fortunately, Meloy later found another creative outlet for his wild stories: The...

Lubbock, Texas is famous as the birthplace of Buddy Holly, the pioneering rocker who inspired The Beatles. It’s also the birthplace of the Dixie Chicks’ Natalie Maines, who sings about her hometown on “Lubbock or Leave It,” a roadhouse rocker from the group’s latest album that conjures up images of both Holly and an unwelcoming redneck town. “Dust bowl, Bible belt, got more churches than trees/Raise me, praise me, couldn’t save me, couldn’t keep me on my knees,” Maines warbles. “Oh boy, rave on down loop 289/That’ll be the day you see me back in this fool’s paradise.” Although the song was triggered by a documentary about a Lubbock teenage girl who tried, unsuccessfully, to have sex educatio...

Some bands get the Bono Talk, where U2’s Pope-like singer advises aspiring musicians on various rock truths and how to keep it real. Others get the Elton Chat, with Captain Fantastic dispensing his own sparkling pearls of wisdom. The Killers received the latter while Sir Elton was performing in the group’s glitzy hometown of Las Vegas. Brandon Flowers, The Killers’ singer-keyboardist, recalls that John was doing his thing at Caesar’s Palace last year as his band was recording across the street at the Palm Hotel and Casino. “We’d shoot over to catch his show every now and then and one day he dropped in to see us in the studio—it was quite an honor,” says Flowers. And what did the Chat entail?...

For years, Neko Case has been hailed as a siren, a honky-tonk angel with a stunning contralto described variously as “eerie,” “luscious,” “transcendent” and “the purest voice to emerge from the independent music scene in more than a decade.” But with her fourth studio album, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, Case has been winning high praise for another talent: songwriting. And the accolades for her songs are every bit as wide-ranging as those for her vocals. One critic even used four very different adjectives in a single sentence—“uplifting,” “melancholic,” “rollicking” and “ominous”—to describe them. Let’s just say that Case has never been easy to categorize. American born and Canadian bred,...

The Old Sod has a way of turning up surprisingly soulful female singers. First it was Joss Stone, a blonde, teenage schoolgirl from England’s Devon region, who burst on to the scene with a robust, older-than-her-years voice that drew comparisons to Aretha Franklin. Now comes Corinne Bailey Rae, a twentysomething singer blessed with a smoky, intimate vocal style that has caused British critics to breathlessly describe her as a young Billie Holiday. But, like EMI label mate Stone, Bailey Rae didn’t emerge from the highly cosmopolitan capital of London. Rather, the daughter of a mixed-race marriage hails from the northern city of Leeds. “My dad’s from the Caribbean and my mum’s English,” explai...