After a tough few years, Shakira is back with album

Shakira, the boundary-breaking Colombian performer, has been remarkably consistent since beginning her career in the early 90s. Without fail, she toured, released albums, won awards, woven global, genre-defying sounds into her pioneering singles, performed at the Super Bowl halftime show and more. Then, things slowed. Or so it appeared. In reality, the last few years haven’t been kind to Shakira. In 2022, after 11 years and two children together, she separated from soccer player Gerard Piqué, leading to what she’s called the “dissolution of my family.” She faced charges of tax evasion in Spain; in November 2023, she received a suspended three-year sentence and paid a fine of 7.3 million euros ($8 million) in addition to previously unpaid taxes and interest. On “Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran,” her first new album in seven years, Shakira transforms her pain into art — from the bachata “Monotonía” to the electro-pop “Te Felicito” to the mega viral “Shakira: Bzrp Music Sessions, Vol. 53” and beyond. “I’ve been through so much in these past few years that I had to literally pick up the pieces of myself and put them back together,” Shakira told The Associated Press over Zoom from Miami. “And during that process, I think that music was the glue.”

It has been seven years since your last album, ‘El Dorado.’ What did you learn about yourself, musically, in that time?

Well, in those seven years I’ve been raising kids, I’ve been learning a lot about myself as a mother, as a woman. But I’ve also been making music. It’s just that it’s been more of a sporadic thing, you know, here and there. Whenever I had a chance to put out a song, I did that. But I didn’t have the time to really put a whole body of work. This time, it was a compulsion and a need. It was really important for me to be able to express, in and through these songs, so many life experiences and to find catharsis, you know, and to be able to find the therapeutic effects of writing and see myself back in the studio.

You’ve called “Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran” a concept album. What story is it telling?

Because there’s a great diversity in this album — I know it’s a conceptual album — but it didn’t happen on purpose. Nobody chooses to go through the kind of life experiences that I went through when I was writing and creating this album, you know, life gives you lemons. So what do you do? Make lemonade. So I made songs. But there is a great variety within this album. There’s pop, there’s Afrobeat, there’s reggaeton. There’s some Mexican regionals as well. Rock. But there is a common thread.

“She Wolf” turns 15 this year. As a listener, that album felt like a shift in your career — and so does this one. Do you see parallels?

I do, because it is the renaissance of the “She Wolf,” in a way. It is the rebirth of that primal force that I feel that all women have within ourselves. It’s that force that allows us to give birth, feed our offsprings, guarantee their survival of their species, fight whatever fight we have to fight against.

I haven’t seen anyone refer to this as a “divorce album.”

This is not a divorce album. It’s an album that gathers many different life experiences, that gathers the transformation of vulnerability into resilience, the empowerment of finding your strength. It doesn’t only talk about pain; it also talks about triumph. And that’s why these tears are not tears made of resentment anger or just sadness, but tears of triumph and tears of self-recognition and finding confidence within. It’s not linear. There’s ups and downs and valleys and peaks. And this album is made of all of those dynamics.

Associated Press