Matt Santos: Mixing Well

On June eleventh, the Target Center will be packed with urbane young men in designer sneakers and printed, candy-colored hoodies, some even sporting the peculiar ’80s-era ventilated sunglasses preferrd by their muse, blogger/shopper/rapper Kanye West, who hits Minneapolis that night with his Glow in the Dark Tour.

Matthew Santos, an impressively faux-hawked twenty-five-year-old grad from Minneapolis’s Southwest High, could easily have found himself in the crowd looking in. Instead, he will be watching the spectacle from the wings, as a member of one of the opening acts. Santos, as you may have heard on iTunes, or seen on MTV, has lent his ethereal vocals to Chicago­rapper Lupe Fiasco’s first two albums, with one of their collaborations, “Superstar,” becoming a hit. (The two performed it on the Letterman show last winter.)

Santos moved to Chicago when he was eighteen to study music at Columbia College, a liberal arts school in the South Loop. He last visited his hometown back in March, along with his touring rock band, performing songs from their own record, Matters of the Bittersweet, at the Cedar Cultural Center. Santos’s music has more in common with the acoustic guitar world of Dave Matthews and Jeff Buckley than the South Side hip-hop of Kanye West and Lupe Fiasco. But he plays well with others.

In 2006, Santos was living with a sound engineer in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood when Lupe was recording his debut, Food & Liquor. Santos’s roommate, Greg Magers, had a recording studio in the attic, appropriately named Attic Studios. “And Lupe would come into my living room after working up in the attic studio for the entire day,” Santos says. “So I’d been kicking it with Lu before I even knew who he was.”

Santos was recording an EP in the attic too, As a Crow Flies. Santos and Fiasco inevitably compared notes, and Santos ended up recording a memorable flamenco-edged vocal hook on “American Terrorist,” a standout track on Food & Liquor. When it came time to record Fiasco’s follow-up, The Cool, Santos was ready.

“I always get a call from Greg,” Santos says of the process. “And the call goes like, ‘Yo, Lupe wants to put you on a hook.’ And I go, ‘OK, I’ll come in tomorrow.’ I go in there, Lupe sings me a generic hook and asks me to put my flavor on it.”

Before joining the Kanye tour, Santos signed with Fiasco’s label, 1st and 15th Entertainment. “It’s really encouraging,” he says about now seeing Fiasco’s fans at the Cedar and other smaller venues. “That hip-hop fanatics can dig acoustic music like that.”