Songfacts®:

• "Nothing" is a track from Spirituals, an album Santigold largely recorded during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic and Black Lives Matter movement. On this defiantly vulnerable number, the African-American musician reflects on invisibility. "It's a song for anyone who has not been seen," she said, "and for me it was an opportunity to explore how that feels."
• All day I fight what I can't see, my nothing
  Over and over, hangs over me
  On the inside I gotta beat my nothing
  Over and over
  To know I mean something
  
  Santigold wrote "Nothing" amid the Black Lives Matter social justice protests, unaware of a heaviness she was carrying. In writing the lyrics, she released the weight and felt freer to be herself, a Black woman in the creative fields. "I have always felt invisible to a degree," she said. "People see only what they think they know, or what they think I should be. Or sometimes, they see nothing at all. This song is about the burden of existing beneath a veil of nothingness. And the strength it requires just to be, despite it."
• Santigold wrote the song with her buddy Ray Brady. Producers Doc McKinney, Illangelo and Dre Skull then came on board to help bring it home.
• Santigold conceived the video inspired by an image by Kenyan-born American visual artist Wangechi Mutu. When the singer was thinking up visual ideas for "Nothing," Mutu's 2014 lithograph, Snake Eater, came to mind.
  
  "I loved the idea of a being that is woman but also beyond human in some way, and even unclassifiable," Santigold explained. "A being for whom there is no name, no category, who is totally unique, and fierce. I wanted to become this type of creature in this video because I don't believe we have to know how to name or define what we're seeing to accept that it exists, that it's beautiful and powerful and worthy of being exactly what it is. How exciting to encounter a being so magnificent that it is beyond our imaginations. How exciting to find that that beast is living within you and to set it free."
• Spirituals is Santigold's fourth album, and her first released independently, via her own Little Jerk Records label. According to press materials, it "captures the feeling of surviving in the modern world while elevating yourself to new places."