Shakira

#1Shakira was around seven or eight when she returned home to Barranquilla with her mother and realized something was wrong.

#2The furniture was gone. So were the cars.

#3Her father, William Mebarak, had suffered a serious business setback, and the family had sold possessions to deal with the debts. Shakira was angry. She couldn't understand how her parents had allowed their life to fall apart like this.

#4So her parents took her somewhere.

#5They brought her to a park in Barranquilla where children around her age lived in far worse circumstances. Some were barefoot. Some were sniffing glue to escape their hunger.

#6The point wasn't subtle: their own family had lost a great deal, but Shakira was being shown what having almost nothing looked like.

#7She never forgot it.

#8Years later, Shakira would describe her father's financial collapse as having a tremendous impact on her. Restoring her family's financial and social stability became what she called a kind of obsession. She also remembered making herself a promise: if she ever succeeded, she would do something for children like the ones she had seen that day.

#9But the bankruptcy didn't make Shakira want to become a singer.

#10That part had already started.

#11She already loved performing, singing, dancing, and writing. What the crisis seems to have changed was not the dream itself, but the urgency behind it.

#12Success was no longer just something she wanted.

#13It had become something she felt she had to achieve.

#14One of Shakira's earliest memories of writing came from watching her father work at a typewriter.

#15She began writing poems when she was very young, then songs. Her father eventually bought her a typewriter of her own.

#16When Shakira was around eight and had started writing songs, William did something that sounds almost absurd in hindsight.

#17He took his daughter's work to be notarized.

#18There was no music industry fighting over Shakira's songs. There was barely an audience for them. But her father treated what this little girl had written as something valuable enough to protect.

#19School offered a very different verdict.

#20Shakira's unusually strong vibrato kept her out of the choir. She later recalled that a music teacher told her she sounded like a goat.

#21Her parents didn't respond by telling her to stop singing that way.

#22They kept finding places for her to sing.

#23They drove her around Barranquilla to local events, pageants, competitions, and small stages. She began earning her first money as a performer. Eventually, through a persistent introduction, she got the chance to sing for a Sony Colombia executive.

#24By thirteen, Shakira had a record deal.

#25It sounds like the point where the child prodigy story should take off.

#26It didn't.

#27Shakira's first album, "Magia," came out in 1991.

#28It sold only around 1,200 copies.

#29Her second album, "Peligro," didn't change her fortunes either.

#30Looking back, Shakira said that during those early records she had very limited freedom to develop her own ideas. She was already writing, but being a songwriter and having real control over the record being made were two different things.

#31For a while, music stalled badly enough that she took another route. At seventeen, she starred in the Colombian telenovela "El Oasis."

#32Then a song called "¿Dónde Estás Corazón?" began getting attention in Colombia.

#33It gave her another opening.

#34And this one mattered, because there might not be many more. Shakira later recalled being warned that if the next record didn't work, her future with the label was in danger.

#35So she went into the next album differently.

#36She became much more involved in production as well as songwriting, working closely with Luis Fernando Ochoa and bringing more of the rock, Latin, and other sounds she actually cared about into the music.

#37The album was "Pies Descalzos."

#38Released in 1995, it changed everything.

#39"Estoy Aquí" began spreading beyond Colombia. The album traveled across Latin America and beyond. The teenager whose first record had barely sold suddenly had an audience across a continent.

#40And Shakira had learned something important along the way.

#41When she gained more control over what her music sounded like, her career finally began to sound like her too.

#42A few years later, that lesson would be tested on a much larger scale.

#43By the end of the 1990s, Shakira didn't need the United States to prove that she had succeeded.

#44"Pies Descalzos" had been followed by "¿Dónde Están los Ladrones?," another major success. Her Spanish-language music was selling in the United States. Her MTV Unplugged performance pushed her visibility even further.

#45She was already one of Latin America's biggest stars.

#46Then came the possibility of an English-language crossover.

#47Emilio Estefan had become an important figure in her career, and Gloria Estefan encouraged her move into English. There was an obvious way to make the transition easier: someone with command of both languages could adapt Shakira's songs for her.

#48Shakira could simply sing them.

#49She decided that wasn't enough.

#50If they were her songs, she wanted to write them herself.

#51There was one obvious problem.

#52Her English wasn't yet good enough to write the kind of songs she wanted to write.

#53So a singer who had already sold millions of records became a student again.

#54She worked with a dictionary. She read English-language writers and studied the way artists such as Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen used words. She read Walt Whitman. She wasn't merely trying to learn enough English to hold a conversation. She needed a language capable of carrying metaphor, jealousy, desire, humor, and heartbreak.

#55The goal wasn't to learn how to sound American.

#56It was to figure out how to sound like Shakira in English.

#57In 2001, she released "Laundry Service."

#58"Whenever, Wherever" became a global hit. "Underneath Your Clothes" followed. Shakira crossed from Latin superstardom into global pop.

#59And English didn't replace Spanish.

#60She kept making music in both languages, while songs such as "Hips Don't Lie" carried Colombian rhythms and traces of Barranquilla into the center of international pop.

#61She had entered a bigger market without handing somebody else the job of deciding what she sounded like inside it.

#62Around the 2010 World Cup, Shakira met FC Barcelona footballer Gerard Piqué.

#63Their careers were built around opposite kinds of lives.

#64Piqué's work anchored him to Barcelona. Shakira's work depended on movement: recording, television, promotion, touring, countries changing from week to week.

#65For a while, they made those two lives coexist.

#66Their first son, Milan, was born in 2013. Shakira was soon traveling with a baby while working on "The Voice" in the United States.

#67But when Milan approached school age, the equation changed. A child needed a more stable base.

#68Shakira chose Barcelona.

#69Their second son, Sasha, was born in 2015.

#70Years later, Shakira described what happened to her career during this period with a telling phrase: she put it in "second gear." She said she made sacrifices so Piqué could continue playing football in Barcelona.

#71That doesn't mean she stopped working for eleven years.

#72She released albums. She appeared on television. She toured. Her career remained enormous.

#73And Shakira has also spoken about what the choice gave her: the chance to be a present mother and build a close relationship with her sons.

#74So this wasn't simply a decade stolen from an artist.

#75It was a trade she had chosen to make—one that reorganized a life previously built around constant movement.

#76Then, in 2022, the structure she had organized that life around began to collapse.

#77Shakira and Piqué separated after more than a decade together.

#78At almost the same time, her father was seriously injured.

#79William had come to Barcelona while his daughter was going through the separation, then suffered a bad fall and ended up in intensive care.

#80This was the man who had bought her a typewriter, protected the songs she wrote as a child, kept investing in her education after his business failed, and remained one of the people she trusted most.

#81Now, during one of the hardest periods of her adult life, he couldn't be the person she normally turned to for advice.

#82There was more.

#83Shakira was trying to protect two children while photographers and reporters followed the family. Her Spanish tax dispute was hanging over her as well. And Shakira later said that while her father was in intensive care, she learned through the press of what she described as Piqué's betrayal.

#84That last part matters as her account of what happened, rather than something an outsider can reconstruct perfectly from the relationship.

#85And Shakira did not immediately respond by telling the world everything.

#86At first, she was guarded. She declined to publicly explain the private details of why the relationship had ended. She spoke about protecting her children.

#87The emotions came out somewhere else.

#88Gradually, they began showing up in the songs.

#89Songs including "Te Felicito" and "Monotonía" arrived as Shakira was moving through the separation.

#90Then Milan became unusually enthusiastic about one particular idea.

#91His mother should work with Bizarrap.

#92Milan was a huge fan of the Argentine producer. He even sent a message to Shakira's manager arguing that the collaboration had to happen and predicting that the two of them would reach number one.

#93As it happened, Bizarrap had also reached out.

#94Shakira and Bizarrap went into the studio together.

#95In January 2023, they released "Shakira: BZRP Music Sessions, Vol. 53."

#96There was very little ambiguity left in the song.

#97Shakira turned details and emotions from the end of her relationship into lyrics sharp enough that people around her reportedly suggested she soften some of them.

#98She chose not to.

#99Her explanation afterward was revealing. She said she was an artist, not a diplomat. Making music was how she had the right to process what she felt.

#100She described the session as catharsis and therapy. She said she entered the studio one way and came out another, and that getting those feelings out had been necessary for her recovery.

#101In her own telling, then, this wasn't primarily a clever revenge campaign designed around streaming numbers.

#102It was an artist taking something she couldn't resolve privately and putting it into the form she had been using since childhood.

#103A song.

#104Then the numbers arrived anyway.

#105Session #53 drew roughly 14.4 million Spotify streams in its first 24 hours and around 63 million YouTube views in the same period.

#106It raced past 100 million YouTube views and broke multiple streaming records for Latin music.

#107But another kind of response began reaching Shakira too.

#108Women told her that the song sounded like their lives. They shared stories of their own breakups and betrayals and thanked her for saying things they had felt unable to say.

#109Something written out of an intensely private collapse had become communal.

#110In 2024, Shakira gathered this new period of music into an album called "Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran."

#111She described making it as an alchemical process: turning pain, frustration, and vulnerability into creativity and strength.

#112It would be tempting to say the breakup brought Shakira back.

#113That isn't quite what happened.

#114There was no forgotten singer waiting to be rediscovered. Shakira already had three decades of hits, an enormous global audience, and one of the most recognizable catalogs in Latin pop.

#115What the new music gave her was not a career from scratch.

#116It gave an old career a startlingly powerful new present tense.

#117"Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran" won Best Latin Pop Album at the 2025 Grammy Awards.

#118Then Shakira took it on tour.

#119The scale kept growing.

#120The original North American plans centered on arenas, but demand eventually pushed multiple shows into stadiums. In Mexico City alone, Shakira scheduled twelve shows at the same stadium during the tour.

#121By a January 2026 accounting, "Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran World Tour" had grossed about $421.6 million and sold roughly 3.3 million tickets across 86 reported shows.

#122That was enough to make it the highest-grossing tour ever by a Hispanic artist at that point.

#123And the tour wasn't finished.

#124As of September 2026, Shakira was still performing it.

#125It's an extraordinary number for someone who released her breakthrough album more than thirty years earlier.

#126But the more revealing scene may not be found in a box-office total.

#127For that, you have to go back to Barranquilla.

#128In 2025, Shakira brought the tour home to Barranquilla and performed two nights at Estadio Metropolitano.

#129Nearly 100,000 tickets were sold across the two shows.

#130Inside the stadium was a section filled with unusual guests: around 4,000 students and young people invited through Fundación Pies Descalzos. They came from Barranquilla and other parts of Colombia. For some, the trip included their first flight.

#131"Pies Descalzos" had once been the name of the album that rescued Shakira's recording career.

#132After she became successful, it also became the name of the foundation through which she has supported education for children in Colombia.

#133And that takes the story back to the park.

#134The children sitting in the stadium in 2025 were not, of course, the children Shakira had seen in Barranquilla decades earlier. They belonged to another generation entirely.

#135But the promise that began forming in the mind of that angry little girl had survived.

#136What would she do if she succeeded?

#137Decades later, part of the answer was sitting in the audience while she performed.

#138When Shakira was around eight, her father took the songs she had written to be notarized.

#139Nobody was fighting to own them yet.

#140William protected them anyway.

#141Over the decades that followed, Shakira kept running into things she couldn't fully control.

#142Her family's financial security disappeared.

#143Her first records failed.

#144A new global market required a language she couldn't yet write songs in.

#145Building a family forced her to reorganize a life built around travel.

#146Then the shape of that family changed again.

#147It would be too neat to say Shakira simply turned every painful thing into success.

#148Some things failed. Some choices cost her something. Some wounds didn't disappear because a song became a hit.

#149But one behavior does keep resurfacing.

#150She resisted giving other people control of her voice.

#151When she needed another skill, she learned it. When her life became difficult to explain, she returned to the work.

#152And when something happened, she wrote.

#153The child who once turned her father's hidden grief into a song eventually found herself writing through her own.

#154More than thirty years after "Pies Descalzos," she is still taking those songs onto stages in 2026.

#155Long before Shakira was writing about her own heartbreak, William Mebarak had already lived through a family tragedy. A son from an earlier marriage died in a motorcycle accident, and William wore dark glasses so his young daughter wouldn't see him cry. Shakira noticed anyway—and wrote "Tus Gafas Oscuras" about the grief he was trying to hide.