Shakira’s Journey to Overcoming Adversity and Finding Happiness
We’re heading to Dunkin’ — and we’re taking Shakira’s purple Lamborghini.
It’s an airless, parched afternoon in Miami, and we’ve just left the Sony Music offices, where Shakira took a bunch of calls and meetings. Now, she’s got some free time before she has to pick up her kids at school, so we’re in the Lambo — easily the flashiest car Shakira’s ever owned: “There’s nothing subtle or chic about it,” she chirps happily. The interiors are tricked out in Hulk-bright neon green because it’s a color one of her sons liked. Sometimes, if she’s running errands with them, she relies on her modest Toyota Sienna. But often, she’s out in this unapologetic spectacle of a ride, zooming down the street like she’s doing now, her security guard driving in another vehicle behind her, trying to keep up.
No one really remembers whose idea it was to stop by Dunkin’, but Shakira wanted to go and she knows the way. When we pull up, she steps out of the car and walks inside, long blond hair flowing past her shoulders, oversize Versace glasses covering her face.
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As she heads toward the counter, there’s a rustle as a few customers swivel around: Did Shakira, the pioneering, chart-topping, belly-dancing powerhouse from Colombia, who’s brought her instantly recognizable, often imitated voice to some of pop’s most beloved staples, really just saunter into this specific Dunkin’? Could that actually be the Shakira who graced nearly every household television as a judge on The Voice, as a performer at the 2020 Super Bowl halftime show, and as a Video Vanguard Award winner at the 2023 VMAs? Is everyone chanting, “Shakira, Shakira,” in their heads right now?
Some people seem to clock her and confirm immediately: Yes, duh, that is indeed Shakira, the superstar and global icon, widely considered the most successful female Latin artist of all time, with 95 million records sold over her three-decade career, getting ready to ask for three chocolate doughnuts and an extra-hot coffee. Most of the crowd at the Dunkin’ admires from afar, mouths slightly agape, nerves too jittery to go up and say hi.
But then one brave soul steps forward. As Shakira is wrapping up her order, she’s approached by a green-eyed, twentysomething bodybuilder who looks like he can uproot tree trunks with his bare hands. The guy doesn’t really greet her; he kind of just starts talking at her, telling her he works at a restaurant she visited recently. At first, Shakira just smiles lightly, hiding under her sunglasses. But then he mentions a few restaurant owners and a flash of recognition flickers across her face. Nearby, the guy’s influencer-looking girlfriend glances up from her phone and observes the interaction.
The musclehead offers to pay for Shakira’s order, but she politely declines. Finally, he leans in closer and shoots his shot: “Here, take my number,” he says, holding his phone toward her hands. Shakira breaks into a grin and gestures toward her creative partner and choreographer Maite Marcos, who’s standing nearby, and suggests that she take the phone number instead.
The guy isn’t discouraged: “Next time, whatever you need, I got you. Shoot me a text and we’ll stay connected,” he tells her confidently. Influencer Girlfriend narrows her eyes as Bodybuilder Boy sheepishly ambles back toward her. As they leave, even Shakira’s security guard is laughing, pointing out how annoyed the girlfriend seemed.
Shakira is also pretty amused by the whole thing. “I still got it,” she says, smiling brightly.
And right now, at this moment, chocolate doughnut in hand, Dunkin’ patrons still gawking, it’s clear she’s absolutely thriving. In this phase of her life, she’s doing exactly what she feels like doing, moving with a kind of lightness and peace that you notice almost immediately, even when you’re just running into her at Dunkin’. These days, she’ll tell you, she’s at her most confident and unshakable.
And yet, if you’d bumped into her two years ago, you would have found Shakira during her absolute worst moment, a period so bad it almost shattered an icon whose tenacity and longevity has made her seem indestructible. She’d just been pummeled by a wave of heartbreak and loss, by far the most intense pain she’s ever been through. “The suffering I felt was probably the greatest I had ever experienced in my entire life, and it kept me from functioning at times,” she says. “It felt like someone had stabbed a hole in my chest. And the sensation was so real, almost physical. I physically felt like I had a hole in my chest and that people could see through me.”
At the beginning of 2022, rumors had swirled that Shakira was ending her 11-year relationship with Spanish soccer player Gerard Piqué, the father of her two children, whom she met on the video set for her 2010 World Cup anthem “Waka Waka.” That June, they jointly announced they were splitting up, and the tabloids exploded with rumors that he’d cheated on her with the 23-year-old woman he began dating shortly after their breakup. Soon, the paparazzi were swarming Shakira’s house and her kids’ school in Barcelona, turning a painful family separation into a full-on media circus.
Around then, her then-90-year-old dad — who’s also her best friend — flew in from Colombia to check on her and suffered a horrific fall. At one point, doctors told Shakira he was probably going to die; thankfully, he pulled through and is recovering after six surgeries. At the same time, a complicated legal case, which opened in 2018 when Spanish prosecutors accused Shakira of evading roughly €14.5 million in taxes, ramped up and made its way into headlines. For months, the possibility of a trial loomed over her. (Last November, she settled the tax case and agreed to pay a €7.3 million fine, along with a €432,000 payment to avoid a prison sentence. In a statement, she said she’d made the decision “with the best interest of my kids at heart, who do not want to see their mom sacrifice her personal well-being in this fight.”)
“When it rains, it pours,” she says now, thinking of that gut-wrenching period. “It was crazy, how many things I had to deal with at the same time.”
But as bad as it was, despite all of the heart-pulverizing grief and agony, there were signs early on that she wasn’t just going to roll over and crumble. Will.i.am, her close friend since 2005, says that in early 2022, they had plans to shoot a video in Barcelona for “Don’t You Worry,” Shakira’s collaboration with the Black Eyed Peas and David Guetta. Just before the shoot, which was going to be outside, Shakira called him and asked to move it inside. She didn’t say why, just stressed that she didn’t want to be outdoors. Will.i.am immediately had her back: “I was like, ‘Look, we gotta move this video indoors on a green screen.’ And then everybody was like, ‘Green screen? But we’re set up for the outside!’ I was like, ‘I don’t care what you guys say.’”
When the shoot finally did happen, Shakira, Will.i.am says, showed up “a trillion percent,” performing with everything she had. “The last day of the video is when she tells me what she’s going through with her ex,” he says. She told him that if they’d shot the video outside, paparazzi might have made things difficult. “I’m like, ‘You are a different breed of people,’” he says. “[Some] people would have found any excuse to not work. But she muscled through, spirit on high, vibes on high.”
After that, he made it a point to keep making sure she was OK. “She [is] superhuman, but even superhumans need, like, ‘Hey, checking in on you. Is everything all right?’” Will.i.am sent her texts and voice notes with prayers. “She went through a lot, one [crisis] after another. Boom, boom, boom.”
Other artists stood by her, too. Shakira says John Mayer and Adele called her, and she had support from longtime friends like Carlos Vives and Juan Luis Guerra, particularly after her father’s accident. Coldplay’s Chris Martin, whom she’s known for around a decade, messaged her often. At one point, he sent her a photo of a shattered vase glued together with gold laminate: “Kintsugi — you’re going to be so much stronger once this is over,” he told her, referring to an ancient Japanese style of art he’s often inspired by. “That’s the metaphor,” Martin explains. “That you break and then you get fixed with gold, and you’re more beautiful than you were before. For anyone going through a hard time, me included at times, that’s a really powerful thing to hold on to.”
But there was still so much heartache to overcome, and Shakira started pouring it all into her music. All of a sudden, songs started to crystallize out of the dark. “I had this urge to express myself through my art, my visions, my music, transferring all that pain, all those sharp emotions to a space outside of myself,” she says. The music painted a pretty clear picture: The first clue that her love life was in turmoil came in April 2022, when she released “Te Felicito,” an electro-pop kiss-off to a cheating ex that featured Puerto Rican singer Rauw Alejandro and topped Billboard’s Latin Airplay chart. Then, in October, she tapped reggaeton star Ozuna for “Monotonía,” a weepy bachata ballad that mourns a failed relationship.
In the music video, Shakira is standing in a grocery store when an old lover shoots her directly in the chest. She spends the rest of the video walking around with a gaping hole, chasing a bleeding heart around the floor. She chuckles darkly when she remembers running the images by her team. “[They] raised their hands and rang the alarms and tried to stop me, like, ‘Think about it a little. No, why are you going to expose yourself like that? That’s way too gory.’” But she insists it’s what she needed to say at the time. “They were tough images, yeah? But they were genuine. That’s how I felt.”
Nothing, however, was as wildly freeing as “Bzrp Music Sessions, Vol. 53,” the unforgiving, unexpected session she did with Argentine producer Bizarrap. On it, Shakira lands line after line, laying out the full extent of the betrayal she experienced. She blasts an ex for his deception, jokes that he should work on his brain instead of spending time at the gym, and tells him he’s trading “a Rolex for a Casio.” She even includes a few double entendres, playing with Piqué’s name and the name of his girlfriend. The song shocked a lot of fans, and she has zero regrets about it.
“You don’t know the maximum relief I felt. It was like …” She lets out a giant exhale. “Relief. And then I remember my manager at the time telling me, ‘Please change the lyrics.’ Of course, I was trying to calculate the possible contingencies and the risks, but I said, ‘I’m an artist. I am a woman. And I’m a wounded she-wolf. And no one should tell me how to lick my wounds.’”
Even she was surprised by how gigantic “Bzrp Music Sessions, Vol. 53” got. “I started to see that my fans were there for me,” she says. Something about its raw-nerve energy, the bloodletting of it all, energized the masses around the world and shot the song to Number One on Spotify’s Global 200 chart, collecting 3 billion streams in the process. “We’re in a society that’s used to seeing women confront pain in a submissive way, and I think that’s changed,” Shakira says. She was especially excited that the song charted at the same time that Miley Cyrus’ “Flowers,” an anthem of self-love and independence after a breakup, was blowing up: “We were both thinking the same thing, and the reaction was similar.”
“Bzrp Music Sessions, Vol. 53” went on to win Song of the Year and Best Pop Song at the Latin Grammys in 2023, and became a cornerstone of her album Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran, which she released this March. The record, her first in seven years, hit the top of Billboard’s Latin charts and is still riding high. People hailed this chapter of her career as a comeback, a homecoming, a victorious return. And the momentum hasn’t stopped: Now, Shakira is getting ready to launch a tour that kicks off in November and winds its way through arenas in North America before reaching the rest of the globe. It’s her first since 2018. “I think this is going to be the biggest in my career so far, the most extensive, with the most range. It’s also going to be the longest,” she says, noting that her concerts usually clock in at 90 minutes — she sees this one going on for a little over two hours.
To Will.i.am, Shakira’s latest act is particularly impressive viewed through the lens of the ever-changing pop cycle. “It’s one thing to be like, ‘Yeah, I’ve been here for a minute,’ and you’re not being played on Top 40 or you’re just like a legacy act,” he says. Shakira is moving differently: “She’s competing. She’s not just flexing her legacy. It’s like, ‘I’m out here out-punching, out-swinging, out-basketmaking, outperforming my old self and new artists.’” Martin points out that Shakira’s the rare artist who’s been a gigantic star her whole career: “I’ve always seen her thrive. In my pantheon of great people, she’s never really left for a long, long time.”
But Shakira’s real triumph is less about topping charts or beating the competition and more about something deeply human — about finding the inner mettle that lets you keep moving, even when it feels inconceivably hard. And she didn’t just flourish as an artist; she discovered a new version of herself, particularly impressive in an industry that constantly tells women their best years are behind them. “In finding this freedom, I also found myself,” she says. “This has been a journey back to myself, and the way there was through my music. I’m in a moment where the worst has happened, and this process woke up a new sense of autonomy and independence in me.”
THE FIRST TIME I meet Shakira, we’re in the studio where she recorded part of Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran. She’s handling a few calls before we sit down to talk, speaking in Spanish at warp speed and discussing what sounds like serious business dealings — until I catch the words “tae kwon do.”
It turns out, she’s planning the afternoon for her kids, Milan, 11, and Sasha, 9. They’re wrapping up after-school activities and then heading to the studio to record a children’s album put together by the music school they attend. Sasha is going to sing, and Milan is going to play the drums. Shakira enrolled Milan in lessons after her friend Penélope Cruz sent her a video of her own son, whom Shakira calls a talented percussionist. “I was like, ‘I need to get Milan in lessons!’” she says. Shortly after, she shared a video of Milan at the drums with Alejandro Sanz, her close friend and collaborator on hits like “La Tortura” and “Te Lo Agradezco, Pero No.” “Then he put his son in lessons too!”
Society is used to seeing women confront pain in a submissive way. I think that’s changed.
Shakira and her children have been living in Miami for roughly a year. The move made sense; she has siblings and extended relatives in the city, and it’s much easier to record here compared with Spain. “When I was in Barcelona, it was a huge sacrifice for me and for my career,” she admits. “It was hard to keep up that continuity. It was extremely complicated to bring people to Barcelona. Every time I wanted to do a session, I had to plan it months ahead.”
She had imagined a trade-off, where she’d put her career on pause for a few years and support her partner’s soccer commitments. But eventually, they were going to move back to the U.S. “The plan was always that when my ex retired from professional soccer, we’d go to the States and live there and finish raising our kids there, because of all the sacrifice I’d made all those years accompanying him to play. The idea was to come here, but that moment coincided right with the separation.”
She pauses for a second. “In the end, the plans all come true. Just in a different way.”
An intercontinental move, she admits, was completely nerve-wracking, especially because she worried about how well her kids would adjust. “I’ll never forget, the first day of school, I’d been super nervous, and when I picked them up, they jumped on me and hugged me and said, ‘We love it!’” Shakira remembers. “My eyes had been as wide as saucers all day, waiting for the worst news, and they came out running and jumping with joy.” She’s intensely close to Milan and Sasha and picks up and drops them off most days. Often, she’ll rearrange travel plans to put them to bed at night.
Still, finding her own place and her own set of friends in a new city hasn’t been so easy, given that she’s one of the biggest celebrities on the planet. “When kids find a good environment at school, it’s just easy. Meanwhile, us adults also have to find friends, but there’s no school I can go to at my age,” she says, laughing. Instead, she’s gotten tight with some of the moms at the kids’ school, including a few who are also from Barranquilla. When she has time, she’ll try to get together with other artists; she might call up Rauw Alejandro or Ozuna and try to get them to go wakeboarding with her. She’s into a lot of water sports these days, a change from Barcelona, where she used to play a lot of tennis.
I ask her if she’s seen the Luca Guadagnino film Challengers yet, and she frowns,