Santigold unveiled her highly anticipated album Spirituals this month, the follow-up to her 2018 mixtape I Don’t Want: The Gold Fire Sessions. She was supposed to head out on The Holified Tour, which she announced in June and was set to kick off in October in Atlanta, Georgia and end in November in San Diego, California. However, she canceled the tour today due to the way the pandemic has impacted the realities of touring.
“[For] the past several years we have all been through immense challenges, some physical, some mental, some spiritual, some economic,” she wrote on her website. “And yet, as we have begun to trudge on, much of the toll of that experience has been left untended as we rush back in, attempting to make up for lost time, to reconnect, catch up on bills unpaid, to escape the insanity that had begun to set in. For many of us, the landscapes we are re-entering are not the same.”
She continued, “As a touring musician, I don’t think anyone anticipated the new reality that awaited us. After sitting idle (not being able to do shows) for the past couple years, many of us like everyone else, earning no or little income during that time, every musician that could, rushed back out immediately when it was deemed safe to do shows. We were met with the height of inflation — gas, tour buses, hotels, and flight costs skyrocketed — many of our tried-and-true venues unavailable due to a flooded market of artists trying to book shows in the same cities, and positive test results constantly halting schedules with devastating financial consequences. 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. Some of us are finding ourselves simply unable to make it work.”
Read the full statement here.
