It’s not easy for Shakira to fit you into her schedule. Sitting down to chat with the 49-year-old Colombian singer requires months of negotiation. For the past year — and the next few months — she has been immersed in a world tour that has brought her around half the planet to deliver around 50 concerts that have earned $420 million, making it the best-selling tour of all time for a Spanish-language artist. During a face-to-face interview, she comes across as talkative, cheerful, and happy. Her team granted the opportunity with the stipulation that questions focus on her current professional era and her three-decade career.
In a well-appointed hotel suite in Mexico, the performer from Barranquilla, Colombia turns down the air conditioning and requests “a juice or a chocolate bar, whichever, it’s all the same.” Just 12 hours ago she gave what was — up until now — the biggest concert of her career, in Mexico City’s Zócalo, which featured 400,000 throats belting out her songs over the course of two hours. It’s likely that she’ll beat that record in May, when she sings on the beach in Copacabana, Brazil. “Another one of my dreams for this tour,” she says. In Mexico, she has filled 13 stadiums on her Las Mujeres ya no Lloran world tour, which will now go to Asia and, in September, to Madrid. She hasn’t sung in Spain for eight years and it’s calling to her, she confesses. In Madrid, a Shakira Stadium will be erected on the outskirts of the city, specifically built to house her concerts on September 25, 26 and 27, with the possibility of extending the series to 10 shows.
“I feel like I’m at the entryway of a new beginning for my career,” begins the artist. “Singing in the Zócalo again,” she says, in reference to the first concert she gave in the biggest public plaza of the Americas in 2007, “but this time with nearly a half-million attendees, is a miracle. Even more so after having done 13 stadium shows in Mexico City.” Ultimately, more than 1.2 million people saw her perform in Mexico, and nearly 3.5 million throughout her 11 months in North and South America. “It’s very poetic, because this was one of the countries that received me with open arms since the beginning of my career,” she says.
I live for my children, who are my top priority. Seeing them grow and become good men is my ultimate dream. But also, being able to harvest the fruits of the labor of so many years, a 30-year career
Shakira
With almost 100 concerts, organized by her 150-person team, in addition to her roles as business owner and philanthropist, does she have too much on her plate? Isn’t she exhausted? “There is always a new challenge and I am really plugged into my career,” she reflects. “It’s a very strange thing, but I feel more connected than ever to my profession, to creating songs and singing them. I am very motivated.”
But there is something that comes before all that, she says: her two sons, Milan and Sasha, who are 13 and 11 years old, grew up in Miami, and have on occasions accompanied her around the world. “I live for my children, they are my top priority,” she says. “Seeing them grow and become good men is my ultimate dream. But also, being able to harvest the fruits of the labor of so many years, a 30-year career. I feel like suddenly, life is paying me back right now.” That hasn’t come easy. As she herself explains, a lot of work went into this tour, “physical, mental, vocal. But I feel more energized than before,” she says. “Despite what people say, I think that time is making things… they get better. They fall into place, but not just that: they improve. Because you’ve learned to pace yourself.”
Does she know herself better now? “Yes, I accept myself more,” she says. “There’s a certain comfort in one’s own skin that maybe I didn’t have when I was 20 years old and my career was beginning, with all the desire and all the ambition to show the world who I was, what I did, for them to know me. Winning the respect of my profession, of the industry, that was what I was most obsessed with at the time.”
And now? “I’m obsessed with making my public happy, seeing them smile, seeing them celebrate, healing alongside them.”
Of course! Spain is where we are going to burn the house down. Because it’s going to see a production that has never been seen before. I am really excited about it
Shakira, on her desire to sing in Spain again
Her return to Spain also carries a symbolic weight in the artist’s life. By the time she performs there in September, it will have been eight years and three months since the last concert she gave in the country, in Barcelona, in another life. Her relationship with Barcelona’s former pro soccer player Gerard Piqué ended acrimoniously in 2022 after 12 years together. She captured the details of that breakup for posterity in Session 53, one of the great breakup songs of our current era, which she performs on this tour. It forms part of a devastating album entitled Las mujeres ya no lloran (Women don’t cry anymore). Those were also the years of the accusations of million-dollar tax fraud against the artist, a process that Shakira ended in a settlement with the Spanish tax authorities in which she admitted her guilt (she said that she’d done so to protect her children) and accepted a three-year jail sentence, which she did not serve, and an $8.5 million fine. Many thought she’d never return to Spain, much less perform in the country.
Nothing could be further from the truth, she says. She loves Spain. She’s far from living in the past. In fact, she (and her team) prefer to allude to it only through circumlocutions and indirect references, and avoid speaking about that long decade during which she kept a low profile — until a high-profile affair blew it all apart.
Is she excited to sing in Spain? “Of course!” Given that she hadn’t performed there in eight years, many people thought she probably didn’t want to come back…
“Why not? Of course! [laughs]. In fact, Spain is where we are going to burn the house down. Because it’s going to see a production that has never been seen before. [the concert promoter] Live Nation is even building the Shakira Stadium. I am really excited about it. I’m even embarrassed to say it but, yes, the Shakira Stadium. And there are going to be many surprises — friends, artists, guests and a lot of other things that I can’t talk about yet because they’ll kill me [laughs].”
What is her current relationship with the country? “I have friends I really miss, I’d say that many of my best friends are there. People who have been extremely important in building these dreams, like [director, photographer and producer] Jaume de Laiguana, like [choreographer] Maite Marcos, who is one of my best friends. And Alejandro [Sanz], who is a peer, but more than a peer, he is a brother. I have a permanent connection to Spain, beginning with the fact that my children are Spanish [laughs]. I think that it is going to be a concert that my sons will want to see.”
At the beginning of her concerts, as she performs the song Girl Like Me, Shakira presents flags from Latin American countries, calling out to women from each of them: “Mexicans! Colombians! Ecuadorians!” Each contingent screams enthusiastically when they are invoked. Will she do the same in Spain? “Of course. I believe in the wide sense of Latina heritage. Spain is included, and Portugal. We have a different way of seeing life, of celebrating it, of facing difficulties. Being Latino is superlative, and it definitely sets us apart.” When someone remarks that in the United States, this is “an especially difficult moment for Latinos,” she has no response.
The Colombian artist wants to celebrate her three decades on stage. She wrote the songs on her first album, Pies descalzos (Bare feet) when she was “17 years old,” she remembers. That teen’s jaw would drop to see her now, at 49 years old. “I thought I’d be weaving or making ceramics already,” she laughs. “But it turns out I’m not, and that this is the best moment. A few years ago, I learned to surf. A few years ago, I rode a skateboard for the first time, which I love. Right now I have a lust for life that I didn’t have before, and an appreciation for life and the good things that happen, because I’ve gone through some really bad things,” she says. “When one is younger, maybe more spoiled, you’re used to only good things happening, you don’t tolerate the bad ones. When you realize that life is full of no’s, you learn to enjoy the yes’s. Even if they’re few, you enjoy them.”
It turns out that this is the best moment. A few years ago, I learned to surf. A few years ago, I rode a skateboard for the first time, which I love. Now I have a lust for life that I didn’t have before, and an appreciation for life and the good things that happen, because I’ve gone through some really bad things
Shakira has brought the Spanish language and Latino identity around the world. Her lyrics, the majority of which she writes herself, and her songs, which touch on all genres from rock to reggaeton, have led her to be among this year’s 17 nominees for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, which describes her as “one of the most successful and culturally significant artists of her generation.” So far, only three musicians of Latin heritage (Carlos Santana, Ritchie Valens, and Linda Ronstadt) have received the honor, and all three have a catalogue that is predominately in English. It’s a reflection of the power of Shakira’s Spanish-language songs, which have been sung around the world by people of all ages. “One of the biggest surprises of this tour, which is a journey through my entire musical repertoire, is that an intergenerational public comes,” she explains. “I see little kids who are six, seven years old, boys and girls, adolescents and then the parents, and sometimes even the parents of the parents. I’ve seen a little grandma wearing wolf ears,” she laughs.
And with purple wigs, like the one she wore for the Las de la Intuición music video? “And with purple wigs, no less! It’s so beautiful to see how these songs have been passed from generation to generation. I’m not surprised to see little girls singing Session 53, Monotonía, Soltera… but when I see them singing Pies descalzos, Estoy aquí, Antología, as if those songs had come out a week ago — the power of music is incredible, of crossing borders, of nothing else mattering besides that feeling that lies in songs that winds up being transcendental.”
Does that make her proud? After all, this is the woman who said at one of her concerts, “I remember that little girl, and I brought her here.”
“That little girl… looking for her has saved me. And that’s why my concert has a narrative, from beginning to end: it starts with a woman who is trying to rebuild, who then goes to search for that inner child and ends up letting loose a shout of freedom and self-love, which is ‘las mujeres ya no lloran, las mujeres facturan (‘women don’t cry anymore, women send a bill’). There is a visual and musical narrative within the show.”
In my dreams, what comes first is seeing my sons grow and become real men, in all senses of the word ‘men’: men of their world, honest men, men who care for others and protect them, who have values. That is what I want to see
That narrative also forms part of her, the woman who plans and supervises down to the last detail. She recognizes having “created each one of the moments”. “Musical as well as the wardrobe; I’ve played a part in the design, obviously in the choreography, in the order of the songs, in the narrative, in the visuals… Everything has been the fulfillment of dreams. All those images you see, I dreamed them over the course of a year and we were able to execute them. It’s a show I’ve poured everything into, all my intellectual and emotional energy, and that right now is yielding the results that it’s yielding.”
As she tours, she never stops composing. At the Zócalo show, she presented a song with her “fellow countryman and local” Beéle, a musician from Barranquilla with an “electronic sound, but also with the traditional instruments of our homeland: the tambora, the alegre, the llamador,” she says proudly. “I am still writing and yes, I am still thinking up ideas all the time.” Does that include the kind of epic ballads that have had her fans singing their hearts out since the very beginning of her career? “I have new ballads too, tucked away. I can’t release everything at once,” she laughs.
So what does Shakira Isabel Mebarak Ripoll have left to accomplish? Shooting a complicit look at her team, sitting on the other side of the table where her pineapple juice awaits, she ventures, “I still have the Eiffel Tower. The Champs-Élysées!,” before dissolving into laughter. Then she stops to think for a moment, and continues, “I have so many dreams. The first is seeing my sons grow and become real men, in all senses of the word ‘men’: men of their world, honest men, men who care for others and protect them, who have values. That is what I want to see.” And then, something a bit more mundane. “I still dream about having a farm with little animals, which I haven’t managed to get yet. I think some day I will,” she jokes. “My sons tell me that they’re going to buy me one someday, the farm with the little animals, so that I can retire there, ordering cows around,” she laughs again. “But meanwhile, while I have ideas and the desire to work and try things, we’re going to keep going. Que siga el baile.” The dance continues.
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