It Always Translates Into Love
Producer Rudy Perez Is Fluent in Two Romantic Languages: Spanish & Music

By J. Freedom du Lac
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 27, 2007

MIAMI BEACH

Well, of course the soundtrack to Rudy Perez's life opens with a love song.

He's a master of the form, having written, produced and arranged some of the most successful love songs in Latin pop over the past 20 years. His canciónes de amor -- sentimental songs dripping with emotion -- have sold millions around the world. They've been used for breakups, makeups, courtships, wedding dances, babymaking, proms, self-pity sessions and bouts of teenage melodrama. They've won awards. They've made Perez fabulously rich, if not necessarily famous. They've even gotten him hired as a lyric-translator-to-the-stars.

But this particular ballad that started it all didn't actually belong to Perez, the 49-year-old hitmaker whose Range Rover license plate says "CANCION" -- Spanish for "song."

"I was 15 and I'd met my first love, this young girl from Spain," Perez says one night while driving from his Collins Avenue recording studio to a South Beach sushi bar. "She told me, 'Dance to this song with me and listen to the words.' And then I never saw her again. Right as we were falling in love, her father sent her away. He said I wasn't good enough for her. I got my heart broken and kept listening to the song -- one of Julio Iglesias's biggest hits, 'Abrázame.' "

He hums the song's melody.

Ah, memories! And oh, he says, his wife is going to kill him for talking about this. . .

"But it's an important story. That's when I really started listening to Latin music. Before, I had no interest in it except for my mom's great Cuban music. But all of the sudden, I'm writing Latin songs because I'm listening to Julio Iglesias and crying. It changed my life. I'm in the Latin music business because of Julio."

Fans of Latin music tend to love their love songs -- "We sell emotion," says Eddie Fernandez, a senior executive for Universal Music Publishing Group's Latin America division -- and Perez is only happy to oblige. Though he's dabbled in other genres and styles, from jazz (Arturo Sandoval) and opera (Il Divo) to Anglo standards (Michael Bolton) and Anglo pop (Wild Orchid, featuring the singer later known as Fergie), Perez specializes in big ballads about romance and heartbreak.

While some listeners might hear mushy treacle in the music, others embrace it as classic pop. The latter group generally wins out: The long list of hit love songs written, produced and arranged by Perez includes Cristian Castro's "Lo Mejor de Mi" ("My Best Thing"), the Vikki Carr-Ana Gabriel duet "Cosas del Amor ("Things of Love,") Luis Fonsi's "Imagíname Sin Ti" ("Imagine Me Without You") and Luis Miguel's "Ayer" ("Yesterday") -- all of which reached No. 1 on Billboard's Hot Latin Tracks chart.

Six years ago, Pilar Montenegro's remake of "Quitame Ese Hombre" ("Take This Man" Out of My Heart), which Perez produced but didn't write, was No. 1 for a record 13 weeks. The song that replaced it? Jennifer Peña's "El Dolor de Tu Presencia" ("The Pain of Your Presence"), written, produced and arranged by Perez.

"He's written so many hits that have become standards in Latin music," says Universal Music's Fernandez. "He's a great producer, but as a writer, he's one of the best. He writes great love stories with beautiful melodies and lyrics that aren't so complex that people don't get it. People understand the message. And they feel it."

If Perez isn't the king of Latin pop, he's at least a part of the royal family. Jesús Salas, program director for XM Satellite Radio's Latin music channels, puts Perez in a league with such writers as Emilio Estefan, Jorge Luis Piloto, Omar Alfanno and Estafano -- "the top guys in Latin music. He's been delivering big hits year after year."

And now comes Beyoncé, of all people, sashaying onto the Latin charts. The African American hip-hop star didn't speak Spanish before she teamed with Perez and attempted a reverse crossover into the massive global Latin market. Her full-on embrace of the language has resulted in multiple hits in the Latin space: "Irreemplazable" (a translated take on her worldwide English smash, "Irreplaceable"), "Bello Embustero" ("Beautiful Liar") and "Amor Gitano" ("Gypsy Love"), a new ¿duet with Alejandro Fernandez. Originally included on a deluxe edition of Beyoncé's best-selling "B'Day" album, the Spanish songs will be released tomorrow on an eight-track EP.

"I'm blown away by Beyoncé's Spanish," XM's Salas says. "You can be as big as anybody in the English world, but it doesn't mean your first impression with Latinos will be a good one. But you can't even tell that she doesn't speak Spanish fluently. Some of the intricacies of her singing make it sound like she's been doing it for quite some time."

To set her up for success in the Latin market, Perez first translated Beyoncé's songs to Spanish -- though not literally. As "Irreplaceable" became "Irreemplazable," for instance, he tweaked the refrain "to the left, to the left." "You can't say 'a la izquierda, a la izquierda,' " he says. "You're adding another note and it doesn't fit the music. It's awkward and doesn't make any sense. So I made it 'ya lo ves, ya lo ves.' It doesn't mean exactly the same thing, but the concept and the emotion are the same."

Perez wrote out the lyrics phonetically and read through them with Beyoncé, explaining exactly what the words and phrases meant. He did exercises with her, teaching her to roll her r's. And he brought in a living study guide: a 19-year-old Latina singer with a tonal quality similar to Beyoncé's. (Perez wound up hiring the singer for a classical-pop group that he's developing.)

"I wanted Beyoncé to learn the songs by hearing somebody else sing them," Perez says. "We spent hours and hours working on it. She wanted to make it perfect. She worked hard. That's why people are saying it sounds like she's fluent in Spanish." Through her publicist, Beyoncé calls Perez "the most patient teacher" and praises him as an "amazing producer."

It wasn't the first time he's worked on a reverse crossover project. In 2000, as Latin pop was exploding in the United States, Perez guided Christina Aguilera through a Spanish-language album, "Mi Reflejo," which sold more than 3 million copies worldwide and won a Latin Grammy for best female pop vocal album. (Though she's half Ecuadorean, Aguilera didn't speak Spanish.) Perez has also coached Bolton, the Irish pop group Westlife, contemporary Christian singer Jaci Velasquez and actor David Hasselhoff on Spanish-language projects.

David Hasselhoff?!

"I can teach anybody to sing in Spanish if you just give me the time," Perez says. "I wish more artists would do it. The ones who don't are missing out on a huge market."

Perez effortlessly straddles two languages and cultures. He was born in Pinar del Rio, Cuba's westernmost province, in 1958, the year before the Cuban revolution. His father, an army lieutenant under Fulgencio Batista, was imprisoned after Fidel Castro took control of the country. "He was part of the anti-revolution movement," Perez says. The family fled Cuba when Perez was 7 and moved into a housing project in the predominantly black Liberty City section of northwest Miami. Perez began spending time in Baptist churches, where he received a musical education by majoring in gospel.

"If they didn't have a drummer, I'd play drums; if they needed piano, I'd play it," he says. When Perez asked for a piano at home, his father -- a painter -- drew the 88 keys on a piece of cardboard. He later asked for a guitar, and his mother, who worked as a seamstress, told him to get a job and buy it himself. So he did, working the overnight shift at a barbed-wire factory while going to high school during the day. By the time he'd earned enough money for the guitar, Perez says, "my hands were so cut up from the barbed wire that I couldn't play."

Eventually, Perez joined a band as lead singer and guitarist and toured the country. He got married, had a daughter, got divorced, started working at studios around town, got married again and signed to a solo recording contract on the same day he found out that his new bride, Betsy, was pregnant with their first son. (They now have four boys -- three of whom are in a soul-rock band, Price, which is signed to Geffen Records.)

As Perez set out on a promotional tour, he had a chance encounter with José Feliciano in Puerto Rico. "He was getting a manicure, of all things," Perez says. The young artist introduced himself to the blind Latin American idol and, to his surprise, Feliciano had not only heard Perez's music -- he wanted to hire him as a producer.

"He told his manager, 'This is the kid I was waiting for, man!' " Perez says. "His manager told him to take it one day at a time, and Feliciano said: 'Rick, if you can't see this kid's talent, you're the only blind person here.' I was basically a nobody, and all of the sudden I'm in L.A., producing José Feliciano's album. I was 23, and totally in over my head. I wasn't making a lot of money at the time, probably $300 a week. And they offered me $30,000 and all these royalties. I'm pretending I'm cool, going, 'Yeah, that sounds fair.' And then I'm calling Betsy, saying: 'I won the lottery!' I'll never stop being grateful to him for giving me that first shot."

He's since worked with just about every major Latin balladeer of note, including his early inspiration, Iglesias, who recently called Perez "one of the most important voices" in the history of Latin music. And Perez has become a go-to composer for theme songs and commercial campaigns. The Univision Network theme that's been used for the past 19 years? His. Telenovela producers love his stuff. So does his adopted home town: Perez was this year commissioned to create a song for a Miami Beach tourism campaign. He was happy to oblige, given that he has three keys to the glitzy city -- plus another to Miami-Dade County.

Reflecting his résumé, Perez's office is crammed with awards and platinum albums and photos with a litany of Latin luminaries. One such superstar even happens to be here today: Adolfo Angel Alba of the group Los Temerarios has come from Mexico to meet with Perez about a new pop album. This is a Very Big Deal; Los Temerarios have sold something like 30 million CDs worldwide. The group is also going to record a song for a Perez-produced collection of Diane Warren classics en Español.

And Perez is working on two albums of his own: Rudy Perez singing Rudy Perez's greatest hits. He'd stopped performing after Feliciano hired him as a producer, which led to a quarter-century of great success but relative anonymity. No más.

"I've been in the studio close to 30 years," he says. "Friends of mine don't even know that I wrote some of the songs they hear on the radio. And these are people who know me!" He shrugs. "I don't have a manager -- just my wife, Betsy. I never had a marketer. I haven't made myself into a brand. But I'm going to start."

Toward that end, he's founded a company, DIGA Entertainment, that's using phone cards to market entertainment and sporting events. The company is also helping Latin musicians increase their profile on the Internet.

But the center of his franchise will remain a universal and timeless human emotion.

In Perez's office, there's a pad of yellow paper with freshly written lyrics on it. Another love song. And on the Yamaha keyboard, sheet music from an old favorite: It's the Iglesias song "Abrázame." Perfecto!