Can Shakira Conquer the World?
MOST OF THE TIME, WHEN SHAKIRA IS recording music in Nassau near her home in the Bahamas, she wears her PJs all day and hardly ever puts on shoes. But today is supposed to be her last day of work on She Wolf, the album she has been creating for a year, so she’s decided to celebrate, dressing up in a silver necklace, a long black silk dress with spaghetti straps and club-kid platform shoes that lift her five-foot-two-inch frame up like stilts. “My boyfriend is six feet tall, and sometimes I feel like I’m his keychain, a small little thing,” she says, then sighs. “I am so ready for this to be over!” she exclaims. “I just told my manager, ‘I’m ready for hair and makeup. Just take me out of here.'”
As Shakira makes her way into the studio, though, her mood begins to darken. When she can’t find the keys to her car in her Gucci handbag, she searches for them with the intensity of someone who has lost her passport before an international flight. Once she finds them, she climbs into her pristine Mercedes SUV, turns up Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and zips down a twisting coastal road, making what seems to be a very illegal U-turn, at least by U.S. standards. On one side, the road is overhung with the dense foliage of mango trees, and on the other, there’s a vast expanse of glittering Caribbean, which she throws a longing look. “I haven’t been in the ocean for so long,” she whines.
There’s already a whirl of activity at the studio, with Shakira’s exhausted management team punching away at their Black-Berries amid engineers making changes in the control room (“I have them create all of my ‘K’s and ‘R’s on the computer, because I cannot say them with my accent myself,” she explains). Compass Point Studios was founded in the late 1970s by Island Records’ Chris Blackwell: AC/DC recorded three albums here, including Back in Black, and the halls are lined with gold records and portraits of Eighties artists chilling in the Caribbean, some in baby-blue shorts and mirrored sunglasses. “I am such a huge fan of Bob Marley, the Cure and AC/DC, and when I heard about this legendary studio where all of them recorded, I knew I had to be here,” says Shakira. “This place is the main reason that I settled in the Bahamas.”
As a musician, Shakira is a perfectionist — “I’m an Aquarius, but I’ve turned into a Virgo over time,” she says. She wrote 60 songs for She Wolf, whittling them down to 10 in the studio over the past four months. Today, she’s supposed to send nine mixes to mastering and finish “Spy,” a two-step song with Wyclef Jean, so that it can be mastered tomorrow as well. “That song is like a couples project,” she says. “We built the house together, but men aren’t very focused on the details. Now, I’m the wife, staying behind to put the flowers in the vase.” Her process as a producer is to listen as much with her body as her ears. In fact, “Hips Don’t Lie,” her first collaboration with Wyclef and the bestselling single of her career, is a phrase she has used in the studio for a long time: “I would say, ‘Hey, do you see my hips moving?'” she says, laughing. “‘No? This is not working. My hips don’t lie.'”
An assistant hands over a pot of coffee, and Shakira pours herself a cup. “I stopped coffee for six months, because when I drink it, I get cravings,” she says. “But now I need to have it three times a day.” She’s trying to watch her weight, even though she shouldn’t. She’s gorgeous, with an expressive, heart-shaped face, a thick fringe of eyelashes and a supertoned body without the plastic endowments up top that usually complete the picture. “In Colombia, I’m the only woman who doesn’t have those,” she says. “Colombian surgeons are the best, along with Brazilians, in South America. It’s cheaper there, and the doctors there make them pretty natural, very good.”
She steps into the control room. “Are you ready?” she asks Gustavo Celis, a Grammy-winning mix engineer, hoping to listen to his new mix of “Men in This Town,” a track about desperate single women prowling for decent guys at places like Los Angeles’ Sky Bar. (Note to Shakira: There are not, nor have there ever been, any decent guys at Sky Bar.)
“I need a little longer,” Celis says tremulously.
She purses her lips. “Can I hear what you have so far?”
Celis shakes his head. “Well, it’s the same as yesterday,” he admits.
“Really,” says Shakira, stringing out the word. Annoyed, she taps a notepad in front of her. “I don’t know if we can get this all clone today,” she says. “It may not be the last day of the record after all.”
But the album is late — will she get some grief from the label for missing her deadline again? She cocks her head, considering the question. “You mean I might have to beg someone for extra time?” she says. “Beg? Ah, no. No.”
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