She wolf in disguise

get to know me meme: [1/10] musical artists →  shakira

Touring: “My kids will accompany me to the tour. They’re my biggest incentive for touring. They’ll accompany me for most of it but will have to stay home for a few nights. I was talking about this to Gerard, he said that one of his biggest incentive for playing is knowing that Milan and Sasha are watching him play. I think that’s why he plays with such joy because he knows his sons follow him and idolize him, especially Milan who’s football obsessed. Paternity is the biggest boost of energy for him. And for me it’s the same. Now it’s not only the fans who I want to impress but also my kids. I want them to live this experience with me.”

Family “One thing I have clear, is that family is the most important thing. Love is the most important thing. Everything else is secondary in life. When everybody you love is doing well, everything else will fall into place eventually. But they [Geri and the kids] are the most important in my life for sure.” “Narcissism,egotism,fame…all these things mixed together without a foundation of values and without a strong family basis, and if you don’t dedicate enough time, energy and commitment to our people… You have to have commitment to something in life. To people, ideologies, and our family has to be one of them. I see it that way, and so does Gerard. We’re very compatible in that way, that we share a lot of important core values, and that’s like the common denominator between us.”

Shakira for Los40

Me Enamore: Q: At that moment when you’re drinking the mojitos, who was the one that was the most interested? S: It happened here in Madrid [laughs] but I can’t tell you very much other than what the song says. It’s true that I had the stripped bra, which I still have by the way, and there’s a picture of that moment where I met him along with Cesc Fabregas. He was part of the Waka Waka video but we didn’t meet that time, but then when we were both in Madrid, I was about to perform in Rock in Rio, and we were introduced to each other. Q: He says that he knew you were interested when you responded with a lot of detail when he asked about the weather in South Africa. S: He says that but I only responded what I thought was neccessary. My mission was to make sure he didn’t end up sick, he’s the one that concluded that I was interested in him [laughs].

Motherhood S:“Motherhood has changed me but for good. Now my kids have become the center of my universe.” S:“Their personalities? I think they’re still small to label the type of personality they might have. When they’re this young it’s hard to say if they’re outgoing, introverted, or anything else since you never know how they might change later on or if they’re going through a phase, I just try to give them both the same amount of love and care and hope to discover more about them each day.” Q: Are they anything like you when you were a child? S:“As a child, I was very into school but I also was very restless. I always was writing and seemed a little scatterbrained, but that was because I was always dreaming about conquering the world at a very early age. At four years old, I wrote my first poem called ‘The crystal rose’, which I wrote for my mom. I still haven’t discovered that poetic drive in my kids because I can’t imagine Milan writing me a poem since he’s always thinking about football [laughs]. But of course I always had my dad as a reference who spent the whole day with the type writer. He’s a writer til this day, he’s 85 years old, and he writes a column for a local newspaper in Barranquilla. I always admired his passion for writing and that inspired me to write as well.”

EL TIEMPO interview about Shakira’s evolving music style 

Q: There’s some restlessness about the new sounds you’ve been doing lately. You’ve flirted with a lot of different sounds, what do you see in these new sounds? S: Reggaetton is one of the most contagious sounds out there. I listen to it and I can’t help but dance. I’ll admit to becoming a victim of that movement, and also participant, because even though my music genre isn’t necessarily reggaetton, since ‘La Tortura’ I’ve started to experiment with that sound. During that time, reggaetton was reserved more for Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic and urban artists. So I decided that I would make my interpretation and fusion of it with [Alejandro] Sanz. When ‘La Tortura’ came along I had already fell in love with it. Apart from being a universal rhythm, it’s also very old, almost prehistoric since it exists in African culture, in middle eastern sounds, and also us in the West have called it reggaetton with other sounds and elements.

Q: It’s also very commercial… S: There is an overabundance of urban music today in the radio but it’s because the radio isn’t necessarily the voice of god. The public decides what to listen to, and now with streaming, social media, and the democratization of information and music itself, people have the opportunity of making their own choices and that’s the good part of the moment we’re living in.

Shakira discusses her new album El Dorado

S: Before [making] this album, I spent weeks experiencing a bit of stage fright. This conflict was due to the disjunction between motherhood or the duality of motherhood and the creator. I knew my kids need attention from me but at the same time, the artist inside of me was desperately asking for attention as well. I started of with a lot of resistance and didn’t think I was going to be able to create again. But despite all that, with the help of my family, I was able to find El Dorado and confirm that it [inspiration] hadn’t gone anywhere and it was always there.

Q: The album seems more as a compilation of singles with different sounds and motives than something following a certain concept…

S: That’s exactly what it is. I’ve never liked to make albums with a unifying sound. Every time I enter a music studio, I allow myself to go whatever direction. But this time I experimented with that liberty more than ever when I realized that I didn’t have to work on an album, on a body of songs. That made me change gears. Part of that panic was just in imagining having to lock myself in a music studio surrounded by machines and musical instruments for the next 15 months. That overwhelmed me.

Whenever, wherever. We’re meant to be together.

Shakira interview with Telemundo

Q: Do you guys have any type of pet names for each other or do you guys call each other by name?

S: We do have a names for each other but i’m not going to say them here

Q: It’s not baby right?

S: No, that’s too generic [laughs] but it’s the same [name] for both of us.

Q: You talk about in the song how he ‘was only a kid’, has that age difference at some point affected the relationship? Like sometimes there’s times where you reference a song and the other person doesn’t know what you’re talking about, has that ever happened to you guys?

S: Of course, there’s generational differences all the time! But they keep decreasing overtime. When two people are together for so long, the border that separates the two individuals, starts to blur out.