Shakira: ‘I put my career on hold for Gerard Piqué’

It was at the video shoot for that last song that she met the footballer Gerard Piqué, who played in the Spanish team that won the tournament. They were a couple for more than a decade, and had two sons, but split very publicly in 2022; Soon after, he started seeing Clara Chia Martí, who is more than 20 years old than Shakira’s junior. The pop star got musical revenge last year in a furiously catchy “diss track” (revenge song) called Bzrp Music Sessions, Vol. 53singing in Spanish: “I’m worth two 22-year-olds/ You traded in a Ferrari for a Twingo.”

That was her biggest hit in years, breaking a host of records, including most streamed/viewed Latin track on Spotify and YouTube, in its first 24 hours and the first Spanish-language song by a woman to go straight into the American Top Ten. And that was after she lost her voice due to a haemorrhage in her vocal cords in 2017, which was apparently healed by a pilgrimage to Lourdes. Shakira’s work continued last year when she avoided a big trial in Spain by pleading guilty to tax fraud of about $15.8 million, receiving an $8 million fine and a suspended prison sentence of three years. So yes, a little bit of drama.

All is calm today, though, on a video call from Shakira’s kitchen in Miami. Wearing a black vest top, her blonde mane falling over her shoulders, she looks a decade younger than her age, as stars of her wattage tend to. “There’s an air fryer there, my bunny cage in the back,” she says, nodding behind her. The bunny, Toby, later makes a guest appearance on her lap, as he makes his playmate, a poodle called Teddy who, she says, “had a really bad haircut yesterday. “He looks like one of those hairless cats now.”

Shakira, known to her friends as Shak, has a new album out, Women Don’t Cry Anymore (Women No Longer Cry), which is entirely in Spanish. With Hispanic artists such as Bad Bunny, J Balvin and Camila Cabello enjoying global success, there is less commercial pressure to sing in English these days. When she crossed over to the anglophone market in 2001, she says, “it was a true challenge for me to export my music in Spanish. There wasn’t so much receptivity from any gatekeepers in the industry and I felt sometimes that I was carrying a whole mountain on my shoulders, like Atlas. It was really hard to gain the respect of a very male-oriented industry that was also very prejudiced against Hispanic artists. All of that has changed. It’s a much more democratic world in which people make their own decisions about who they want to listen to.”

As should be clear, Shakira’s English is excellent, although critics have often patronizingly claimed that her lyrics in the language were lost in translation. Her aim was always to have an unusual turn of phrase, she says, in either language. “I’ve used a lot of words that are new to my fans. “I try to make my own music interesting, otherwise it would be boring.” When she started writing in English she immersed herself in the work of Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Walt Whitman, and enlisted the help of Gloria Estefanwho had made the transition from Spanish to English-language music a couple of decades before her.

The new album is an emotional blend of strident and vulnerable, bouncing between pop, EDM, rap, reggaeton and balladry. It represents “the transformation of pain into creativity, frustration into productivity, anger into passion, vulnerability into resilience”, she says with a straight face. “There were so many pieces of my life that crumbled in front of my eyes and I had to rebuild myself in a way, picking up the bones from the floor and putting them all together. And the glue that kept it all together was music.”

Did revenge come into it too? Bzrp Music Sessions, Vol. 53, which features on the album, feels like that. “No, but it helped me exorcise a lot of the demons that were tormenting me. And it felt good.” She won a Latin Grammy for the song, which was presented to her by Sergio Ramos, formerly of Real Madrid, the sworn enemies of Piqué’s Barcelona. That was mischievous of the organizers. “Or a cosmic joke,” she says with a smile.

What did her sons, Milan, 11, and Sasha, 9, make of the track, in which she sings of their dad: “So much time at the gym/ But maybe work out your brain a bit too”? She frowns. “They know that there’s only one way to live life and it’s accepting the pain. And each one of us has different ways of doing that.” For her it’s writing songs, and the same goes for Milan. “When his father and I were going through separation, he wrote two amazing songs, the kind that will bring you to tears.”

Like mother, like son. Growing up in Barranquilla, the musical capital of Colombia, Shakira Isabel Mebarak Ripoll wrote her own first song at age eight. Dark glasses (Dark Glasses) was about her father, who had lost his son, her older half-brother, to a motorcycle accident and wore shades to hide his grief. Her father ella married her Colombian mother after moving from his native Lebanon and her heritage helped to shape her career. While eating with her family at a Middle Eastern restaurant when she was four, she saw a belly dancer perform. “I was mesmerized by her moves, so I went back home and started imitating her.” The path was set, although a teacher rejected her for the school choir, telling her she sounded like a goat.

This is her first album in seven years, most of which she spent in Barcelona being a mother. “For a long time I put my career on hold, to be next to Gerard, so he could play football,” she says. “There was a lot of sacrifice for love.” Miami, where she now lives with her boys, is much more convenient for her job and is swimming with celebrities, from Cabello to David Beckham, who owns the Inter Miami football team.

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“I’ve talked to Victoria quite a few times since I arrived,” Shakira says of Beckham’s wife. “We’re always talking about when I’m going to go watch a match and I know Milan wants to. We haven’t been able to meet up yet, but we’re on WhatsApp. I met David a long time ago, when he used to play for Real Madrid. “That was before I started my relationship with one of the Barca players.”

Music and football both involve bracing amounts of money and media scrutiny, but there are differences, she says. “Empathy is key in an artist’s work. “An athlete is in a constant state of war and has to avoid empathy at all costs.” Ouch. “That’s why it’s probably a really bad idea for an artist to hook up with an athlete.” Maybe she needs to find herself an artist. “I don’t know what I need…”

An afrobeats-influenced track on the album — called Nassau after the capital of the Bahamas, where she has another home — features the line “I had promised that I would never love again/ You appeared to heal the wounds.” So have you found someone new? She laughs. “You’re very curious.” That’s my job, I protest. “Well, my job is to talk about my feelings through my songs, but it’s hard to explain in interviews.”

• Where did it all go wrong for Gerard Piqué and Shakira?

She’s more upcoming about Last (Last), a pretty piano ballad on which she sings: “Surely with time you’ll regret it/ And some day you’ll want to come back to my door.” Is that about…? “Voldemort, that one that shouldn’t be mentioned? It’s hopefully the last song that I will write about this, and to him.” It was the final song she wrote for the album. “I felt that there was something still there, stuck in my throat, and I needed to get it out. I played it to the marketing head at Sony and he started crying. “I’d never seen a man cry in my studio before.”

From the poignant to the ridiculous — did she discover Piqué’s alleged infidelity via a pot of jam? It was claimed in the Spanish media that some of her jam de ella disappeared from their home de ella in Barcelona. She knew that Piqué and her children hated jam and the suggestion was that another woman had eaten it. It’s an outlandish story, but, well, this is Shakira. She claims not to know what I’m talking about, which seems unlikely, and she insists it’s “not true.”

She can’t talk about the tax case, apparently for legal reasons, although she made a statement after the settlement in November. “Tax authorities in Spain pursued a case against me [as they have against many] high-profile individuals, draining those people’s energy, time and tranquility for years at a time,” she said. “While I was determined to defend my innocence in a trial that my lawyers were confident would have ruled in my favor, I have made the decision to finally resolve this matter with the best interest of my kids at heart.”

With her legal and romantic woes subsiding, the full force of Shakira’s imagination has been unleashed. Her next single from her, Aim (Aiming), is a legendary piece of dance-pop on which Cardi B raps in English and Spanish (“I got an empanada, mama, that he loves to eat”). The potty-mouthed American star “is very witty and ingenious, the way she writes, and she did the same in Spanish.” The video for the song co-stars Lucien Laviscount, the British actor from Emily in Paris, as a centaur on “a planet where women rule as Amazons, who are the daughters of Artemis. I hunt him down and he grows legs and becomes human. It’s very feminine and beautiful, with a very interesting story that is an analogy to women’s empowerment.” It really is good to have her back from her.
Women Don’t Cry Anymore is released on March 22 by Sony Latin