A Star is Reborn
5
By Worldlisteningpost.com
Shakira’s eleventh studio album, launched in May 2017, showed her in peak form—bearing in mind that with Grammys galore, career record sales over 60 million and YouTube views topping 12 billion, her “peak” has an altitude mere superstars can’t reach. But the El Dorado World Tour scheduled to begin last November was delayed seven months by a vocal cord hemorrhage, and as the Colombian singer-songwriter wondered if she would ever perform again, fans worldwide held their collective breath. Happily, the tour finally opened in June 2018 in Hamburg and will close in Bogotá in November. Shakira also had doubts two years ago, not over vocal issues but from writer’s block and the career-motherhood dilemma. Inspiration returned, she said, after a project with Carols Vives made her realize she could avoid album overload by working one song at a time. The collection that ultimately came together (nine tracks in Spanish, three in English, one French-English mix) is an exhilarating blend of styles—vallenato, reggaeton, bachata, Latin pop—and features collaborations with five male artists. “La Bicicleta,” the duet with Vives that jumpstarted El Dorado, is also a homecoming team-up in which the two banter while cycling across their native turf on Colombia’s Caribbean coast. Sexual tension abounds in “Perro Fiel” (Faithful Dog), co-written and performed with Nicky Jam, an American artist now living in Colombia. Things come to a boil in “Déjà Vu,” an explosive brew of suspicion and seduction sung with the Dominican-American artist Prince Royce. “Me Enamoré” (I Fell in Love) is Shakira’s personal story of falling for her partner, footballer Gerard Piqué. Unlike the mythical city of gold that inspired it, Shakira’s El Dorado is real. And while its creator was uncharacteristically quiet, she spun her gold into platinum. — worldlisteningpost.com
