Karima Santi’s songwriting goes so much deeper than “vibes”
The multi-hyphenate singer, songwriter, and producer certainly delivers immaculate vibes with her blend of indie soul, acid jazz, sophistipop, and conscious triphop. But listen to the lyrics, and you’ll uncover layers of deep work by a fiction writer whose pen is just as powerful as her soprano.
Much like her music, Santi’s origin story contains many layers. Peace Corps brought her parents together in Niger, but when they split, her father moved to Paris and her mother took a job at Indiana University. From an early age, Santi split her childhood between these conflicting worlds, but found refuge in music and books. At 14, she began teaching herself to write songs, and chose her stage name “Santi” after the boy Santiago from her favorite novel The Alchemist by Pablo Coelho.
Santi began working on her upcoming album Royale during a brief hiatus from music in 2021. She enrolled in a fiction writing master’s program at Johns Hopkins, but when her assignments spawned more songs than chapters, she dropped out and returned to the studio. However, her fiction studies inspired her new approach to songwriting – where deeper themes, motifs, and characters shape the sonic world as much as the lyrics.
Listen to Royale and you’ll discover a cast of characters across the 8 tracks. A casino theme is the common thread, but Pocket Aces reveals a femme fatale narrator straight out of a noir film. In What are the Chances?, the narrator misses the L train and stumbles into a meet-cute. In Gambling Man, the narrator can’t stay away from trouble and follows her lover straight to Vegas.
Each character is examining the cards for deeper answers, inspired by chance encounters, lucky breaks, and twists of fate in Santi’s own life. The music envelops listeners in an intimate sonic experience, described as "exquisitely fragile" by The Austin Chronicle and praised for its "soft power" by CBS Austin. Santi has spent the past few years making a name for herself in the Austin, TX music scene, but this October Santi is relocating to NYC just in time for the release of Royale on Halloween.