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Shakira's Sense and Sensuality
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"Every artist has their one vanity," says Ceci Kurzman, Shakira's manager. "Some like to have a trainer on the road, or a chef or a babysitter. Shakira asked to have a professor on the road, so she could teach her about the country she was traveling through."
In Barranquilla a few months ago, after Shakira's arrival from her home in Miami, the mood was festive. The city's movers and shakers jostled to be photographed with her. She was the central attraction of the Bare Feet Foundation, the group she founded to raise money for education and nutrition programs for poor Colombian children.
But Shakira, despite her pleasant demeanor, was not afraid to voice sentiments that are rarely embraced on the conservative coast, a region that is known in Colombia for its pervasive corruption and political violence. In a news conference, she talked about income inequality, the sorry state of schools in the region and how state abandonment of Colombia's vast countryside had fueled a grinding guerrilla war.
"There's nothing that justifies violence, but we must study the causes," said Shakira, who shared the dais with Barranquilla's mayor, Guillermo Hoenigsberg. (Not much later he was removed from office for corruption and accused of ties to paramilitary groups.)
But if dabbling in Colombia's social morass is typical Shakira, she readily admits that her main preoccupation is creating music. Peña, the drummer, senses that Shakira may go back to Colombia, at least figuratively, with her next album.
"I would think that she would want to go back to her basic roots, probably going back and doing absolutely Colombian artists," he says. "I don't know if that's in her mind. But I kind of see her going in that direction."
Shakira smiles when asked what kind of album she might come up with. She says she'll take her time; she usually spends three years to produce an album. She intends to write about "anything that goes through my mind, my question marks, my moments of existentialism, my moments of certainty." And she'll do lots of the writing 30,000 feet above earth, as she travels from concert to concert.
"It's the only place I can find myself safe from everything else," she says. "Then is when the songs are born, when I give myself time to swing in that inner world."
