A weight has lifted from Shakira, and it has resulted in some record-breaking new music. The 47-year-old Colombian superstar released her new album, Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran, which translates to “women no longer cry,” last Friday and it has already become the highest streamed album of the year.
On Monday’s The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Shakira explained the meaning behind the album’s title.
“For too long we’ve been sent to cry with script in our hands and without an end just because we’re women,” she said. “We have to conceal our pain in front of our kids, in front of society. We have to heal in a certain way. And I don’t think anyone is supposed to tell us how to heal. No one is supposed to tell a she wolf how to lick her wounds, you know? I think that now women decide when to cry, how to cry, and until when. Nobody’s supposed to tell us how to cope with the hardship of life.”
Shakira, who split from longtime love Gerard Piqué in 2022, poked fun at the painful breakup, saying it gave her time to focus on her craft.
“I didn’t have time because of the husband factor. Now I’m husband-less,” she teased. “Yeah, the husband was dragging me down. Now I’m free. Now I can actually work.”
She noted that while she was grieving the end of the relationship, which produced her two children — Milan, 11, and Sasha, 9 — she turned to her music, calling it “the glue.”
“Each one of these songs really was like catharsis to me, and I felt better and better each time I wrote something,” she shared.
She also features her sons on the album, joking that they’re “asking for royalties,” in order to save up for a car one day.
Shakira further explained her new outlook on making music during a recent interview with Zane Lowe for Apple Music 1 saying, “Now it feels totally different. Even though, it’s more challenging because now I’m in charge of these two kids, these two babies that depend on me so much. And I’m a single mother, I don’t have a husband at home to help out with anything. In a way, it’s kind of good not to have a husband because that…I don’t know why it was dragging me down, man. Now I feel like working. I feel like writing songs. I feel like making music. It’s a compulsive need of mine that I didn’t feel before.”
RELATED CONTENT: