Shakira, thank you, thank you for these few minutes. Thank you. After a concert where you pour your heart and soul into it, because you really do, and I could see it with my own eyes, you’re sitting here talking to the Mexican audience. I’ve always liked to think about what an artist of your stature does after the show, and what you do is keep working.
Basically, yes, I go to sleep very late, to be honest. The show ends and I don’t know, I leave here around 2 or 3 in the morning. Between getting here, well, to the house, to the hotel, and I’m already feeling like I’ve been plugged into a socket. It’s hard to calm down a bit, so I end up going to sleep very late, I wake up late, and then it’s back again the next day.
I come here several hours early, I do a little exercise, I stretch, I get ready, I put on makeup, I do my hair, and then… What do you do to rest your body after that two and a half hours of nonstop dancing? You don’t stop for a second. Do you rest your body somehow? Do you rest your hips? I saw you… And she was saying how she rests, how she relaxes, because sleeping 8 hours, not 10 or 12, is enough.
Because also, when I’m with the children, which is most of the time, well, if I have a day off, I try to take them for a walk, take them to a museum, and besides, my children have so much energy. Well, yes, like all children, you too, well, they get it from their mothers. Also, the three of us get along well because we’re very energetic. Well, welcome to Mexico.
You’ve actually settled here for the tour in Central and South America, but welcome. I’m very happy that you’re here. I’m very happy that you feel Mexican. As you said, what does Mexico mean to you, and how do you see Mexico in this season that you’ve been here? First, that it’s very beautiful. I’m delighted with the treatment, with the affection. I don’t want to leave.
Don’t let me down, no, no, I don’t want to leave, and if I do leave, well, I’ll come back. I’m in love with the Mexican public, what they give me every day, that loyalty, that love, how they’ve healed my soul, how every night they sing from the first to the last. They laugh, they dance, they cry, they reflect with me.
It’s more than a concert; it’s an encounter, a communion, and above all, it’s… I think it’s total healing for me, for many of the people there. I also believe that this complicity we have with my audience is unique and has grown. Shakira, you’ve become… and we’ll be talking about this in the next few minutes. But you’ve become a symbol for many women, especially, but also for men, for the possibility of saying, “I’m having a really hard time and I want to say it,” and that’s not easy, yes, it’s not easy because we’ve been taught to hide our feelings in
a society where, especially now with social media, everyone pretends to be okay. And I think it’s also important to recognize vulnerability. We’re also made of flesh and blood, of tears, and that also makes us strong. And who isn’t spared from problems, challenges, and falls? Not everyone. We all go through difficult times; we all experience disappointment at some point.
But we have to keep celebrating life, celebrating with the people we love, with those who truly value us. And the audience has done a great job in making me feel valued, you know, and in making me feel that it’s worth continuing to fight. By the way, did you see what they were shouting? We can’t say the words.
I don’t hear, I don’t hear because I have these. Now that we’ve turned off the cameras, I’m going to tell you what they were shouting. I always ask, “But what are they saying? What are they saying?” Because I don’t hear those things much. Well, I’m going to tell you. I hear the beautiful things: Shakira, Shakira, oh Shakira, my sister, you’re Mexican now, that I do hear and understand.
But other things, better not, better not. I’ll tell you right away, without needing to. You have to be free and you have to express yourself. And people also come to have a cathartic process. Around me, I had people crying, like you said, men crying in anthology, women trying to dance like you, which is beautiful to always see.
And it caught my attention that in all the concerts I ‘ve had the opportunity to go to… I’ve never seen such a wide age range because I wanted to be here, from ladies to my generation who grew up with you, to little girls. You’ve touched so many generations in so many countries. It’s so lovely to see mothers with their daughters.
Yes, but because the daughters want to be here, not because the mothers bring them like at other concerts. Well, it’s very nice, it’s very nice to see children too, and I see the smiles on their faces, the sparkle in their eyes. I feel so inspired, and it makes me want to keep doing this, to go on stage even on my days off.
Well, especially when my children aren’t here, I say, “Oh, I can’t wait for tomorrow, I want to be on stage again.” How beautiful, and to feel all of that. Who do you sing to? Who have you sung to most of your years on stage? Love, heartbreak, you, someone else, who? All of that, everything you say, all of that together.
Yes, yes, yes, to experiences, right? Ah, and when I sing, I remember, and I think, because pain isn’t just something you have to feel, you have to think about it too. It’s the only way to overcome it. And then I also celebrate, I celebrate. It’s a celebration. My concert is a party, I’m having a great time. Yes, it is.
You’ve turned pain into power, that’s how you feel. Or you’ve helped women turn the pain they feel into power thanks to your songs and your lyrics. We have to transform it, we have to sublimate what we have, we have to, I think that’s what I’ve lived through in a way, it’s been an alchemical process, yes, of all that anger, all that frustration, all the pain, everything I could feel at some point, transform it and take advantage of it in creativity, in productivity, to be able to rebuild myself, not like the visuals at the beginning of the
concert, where this woman appears in the desert, well, that’s me, and under that sun, that cruel sun in the desert, she falls apart, she dismantles, this woman falls apart like I once felt, yes, dismantle. And how does she rebuild herself? And yes, and she appears renewed in some way. Pain also makes us, it transforms us, it passes through us, through that sacred fire, and turns us into something, into something more.
Also, in the concert visuals, you appear as a little girl, you as a child, you in your beginnings. You, the one we all remember, with the black hair and the little braids, like Rasit, you’re still you, you’re still you. Finally, and despite everything, that barefoot Shakira, that Shakira. I carry her inside, she hasn’t gone anywhere. She’s still there.
You talk to her. I think I had many conversations with her at many times, and she reminded me who I was, she reminded me of my worth. I think that when you suffer certain disappointments, which are normal in life, which we will all encounter at some point, you feel small, you feel like you’ve lost your own worth, but there are friends, there’s family, there are real people to remind you that that worth is there, and that you can handle that and much more, and that for every person in the world who maybe isn’t what you expected, there are so many
more who surprise you and give you something, and you say, “I’m in a world where, yes, there are one or two who aren’t doing so well, but most people have a good core, a good heart,” and that’s what I felt. I have felt very, very protected by the affection of My audience, in a way, that’s what saved me, that and the love of my children, my friends, my family.
Women don’t cry anymore, Shakira, really, you don’t cry anymore, only for necessary reasons. As I say, the thing is, before they told us how to cry, not behind closed doors, not to cry in front of our children, not to hide our pain, not to keep up appearances, our composure. Now I believe that women have the right to know that no one can tell you how to heal, no one can tell you how to rebuild yourself.
I believe that we all, women and men, have that right to be honest. In honesty, I believe that healing lies in not lying to ourselves, lying to society. That’s not acceptable anymore after everything you’ve been through, everything we all know. Besides, have you completely rebuilt yourself, or are you in the process, or will you never finish rebuilding yourself? I believe that healing processes take many years, but look, I believe that one can be happy even with pain, deep pain, some wound that does n’t heal. No, I don’t know, many times, or when you
‘re at a party, a party where your feet already hurt, but you keep dancing. Yes, that’s how it’s happened to me. I think so, sometimes I feel the pain, but I keep celebrating, I keep dancing, I keep singing. What’s it like to go through these processes that you went through, and that we’ve all gone through, only you with millions of eyes on you, and with millions of people giving their opinions, and with millions of people wanting to be part of this story that only belonged to you and your family, your children? Well, as I said,
everyone tries to rebuild themselves in their own way. Nobody has to tell you how to do it. Mine was largely writing songs. With that, I took a great weight off my shoulders. Writing, for me, is an important cathartic process. God has given me that possibility to express myself in that way, and that’s how I lick my wounds, like a she-wolf licks her wounds, precisely by writing.
And what I do, some will see as good, others as bad, but I am responsible for myself and for being okay, for my Children for my children, for my pack. What does it mean to be a she-wolf, since we’re talking about a pack? A she-wolf is a loyal person, a loyal friend, a protective mother, someone who knows how to adapt to different life situations.
She-wolves have all these characteristics. They are very devoted as mothers, very faithful to their pack, and very resilient. You’ve created a movement, you’ve created a pack, you’ve made us all feel like that in a moment. But I think that’s what the Latina woman is. That’s what the Mexican woman is: an entrepreneurial woman, a hard-working woman.
They are the millions of single mothers or the millions of women who even bring more money to their families than their husbands. They work harder, they make three times the effort of men at home, because we have a heavier burden. They are true she-wolves, and they are the ones who inspire me. These women are the ones who inspire me, and in their honor is Isabel.
Isabel is the she- wolf who appears at my concert several times. You’ve seen her; she’s very tall. Her name is Isabel. Why? Well, I have my reasons. My middle name is Isabel. Okay, then. I identify with her a lot, and she with me, and she appears during the concert precisely because she represents that archetype, the archetype of that woman, that loyal friend, that protective mother, and that resilient woman.
I know we are in the pack. Men are accepted, or men, of course not. When I say ” Los Lobos” (The Wolves), I mean, of course, the men, the women, the little wolves, the she-wolves, everyone there, we are a pack because we have the same values, because we believe in the same things. That’s how I feel, that’s why when I sing I feel so alive.
I feel that my audience knows me and understands me, almost like my mother, almost like my children know me very well. My audience and I have a communication that I have rarely seen in other situations, other relationships. A public artist, it’s too deep, it goes beyond time. It’s many years, it’s 30 years of Shakira, it’s 30 years of Pies Descalzos, it’s 20 years of Fixación Oral, right? Yes, it’s many years, and many generations have been accompanying and supporting me, and yes, we have grown together in a way. What’s next for you, Shakira? You’ve done it
all, you’ve been to World Cups, you’ve been on the biggest stages, you’ve been to the Super Bowl, you’ve been everywhere. You’re relevant, you’re famous, you’re important. You’ve helped millions of women with your music. What’s next? Keep making music. I realize, I’ve also realized that I have a great time in the studio and that’s where I feel most comfortable, maybe creating music, writing, and I have a lot of things to let out.
I still have a lot of songs to write and a lot of music to explore. I think that’s what’s left for me. And from there, well, whatever life surprises me with. Hey, to wrap things up, after these concerts in Mexico you’re going to the United States. Where are you going? What do you expect from this tour in the United States, which has given you so many important things? Yes, because it’s going to be my first stadium tour in the United States.
We have Miami, New York, Boston, Chicago, and well, Texas. We’re going to be in so many places. Charlotte. We start on May 13th in Charlotte, right now. It’s like 20 concerts at a time when music for Latinos, music that takes them back to their roots, means so much because of the context they ‘re living in. That gives it a Another ingredient for your tour? Yes, of course, I know I’ll be accompanied by my Latin community at each and every concert in the United States, and that makes me feel very comfortable.
I’m really looking forward to singing Antología, Pies Descalzos, all those songs. Of course, it was a relevant song there in the United States, but above all, I think there are going to be many surprises, and I’ll be accompanied by friends and colleagues who are coming to support me. So, that’s going to be very special for me, just like it was today being with Grupo Frontera.
Ah, very, very exciting, and María Chilam. Ah, María Chilam, who are spectacular. And I think those moments are very exciting for me too. I know they are for the audience as well, but for me, they are a luxury. And I know that in the United States, since it’s already undergone a certain process of evolution, now my friends can come and accompany me.
Hey Shakira, you were saying that in the United States this will be your first stadium tour, but what you’ve done in Mexico, what you’re about to accomplish on Sunday when the tour ends here, is a record that no one has ever had, and that no one has ever even… This tour has been epic, and well, being here in Mexico, in this stadium, singing seven times for my audience, I just can’t wrap my head around it, I can’t believe it, but it’s a gift you, the Mexican audience, have given me, and I really want to come back. I hope you’ll let me. How
incredible, Shakira, thank you, thank you so much for these few minutes in the extreme exhaustion you’re experiencing. Thank you, I really appreciate it. If you could only sing one song from your entire repertoire, forever, just one, which would it be? Oh no, no, that would be c
ruel. A favor, of course, I can’t, it’s not like… Oh no, I don’t know, like if they asked you something like that, very, very, very fatalistic, no, I’m not going to answer that. Thank you so much, Shakira. Thank you so much for everything, thank you for being with me. Thank you for your patience. Thank you for accepting me as I am, and for supporting me so much, and for loving me.
I love you all so much! [Laughs]
QQ4 Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The friendship began on a live television program in November of 1986 in the 11 seconds after Bob Dylan called Keith Richards music derivative on camera. Keith Richard’s response to that assessment, one sentence said without anger, without performance, with the specific directness of a man who has nothing to prove and knows it made Bob Dylan laugh.
Then made Bob Dylan go quiet. then made Bob Dylan say two words that people who know Bob Dylan say he almost never said to anyone. This is the story of those 11 seconds and the 40 years that followed them. The program was a live music interview special broadcast on an American network on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The format was simple.
Two musicians, a host, an hour of conversation about music and the state of it. The producers had assembled the pairing of Bob Dylan and Keith Richards with the specific calculation of television producers who understand that two people with equally strong and potentially incompatible views about what music is and what it should do will produce better television than two people who agree about everything.
The calculation was correct, though not in the way the producers had anticipated. Bob Dylan was 45 years old in November of 1986. Bob Dylan had released Empire Burlesque the previous year and had been on the road for most of the intervening period as part of the True Confessions tour with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.
Bob Dylan was in November of 1986 in one of the most prolific and restless phases of a career that had consisted almost entirely of prolific and restless phases. A career that had moved through folk, rock, country, gospel, and back again, that had been declared finished at least six times by the music press, and at each time continued with the serene indifference of a river to the opinions of people standing on its banks.
Bob Dylan had been redefining what music could be. Since 1962, Bob Dylan had invented and reinvented himself so many times that reinvention had become his defining characteristic, not in the superficial sense of a performer changing costumes, but in the deeper sense of a musician who had never allowed his work to settle into a form that could be anticipated or categorized from the outside.
Bob Dylan understood influence and originality and the relationship between them better than almost anyone alive in 1986. Bob Dylan had spent 24 years thinking carefully and specifically about where music came from and where music was going and what it meant that those two things were always in constant conversation with each other.
Keith Richards was 42 years old in November of 1986. Keith Richards had been playing guitar professionally since 1962. Keith Richards had built a career on a foundation of American blues and rhythm and blues. A foundation that Keith Richards had studied with the systematic devotion of someone who understood that the tradition he was building on was not incidental to the music he was making, but essential to it.
that you could not understand what Keith Richards did without understanding where Keith Richards had come from and what Keith Richards had been listening to since he was a teenager in Dartford with American Import Records and a secondhand guitar and no teacher except the recordings themselves. Keith Richards had never pretended otherwise. Keith Richards had in fact spent considerable energy across his career making the lineage explicit, naming the artists, citing the recordings, insisting on the acknowledgement of influence that the mainstream music
industry had a long history of suppressing or ignoring or crediting to the wrong people. If anything, Keith Richards was more transparent about his sources than most musicians of his generation. Keith Richards had always said openly that the Rolling Stones came directly from the blues, that Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson and the specific tradition of the Mississippi Delta were not background influences, but foundational ones.
The music Keith Richards made was in direct and sustained conversation with that tradition, something Keith Richards considered not a limitation, but a responsibility and a form of respect. The interview had been running for 8 minutes when the host asked Bob Dylan about the current state of rock and roll.
Bob Dylan answered with the density and the indirection that characterized Bob Dylan’s responses to direct questions, turning the question over, approaching it from an unexpected angle, finding his way to what he actually thought through a series of observations that moved like a river rather than a road. Bob Dylan was not a straightforward interview subject.
Bob Dylan had been asked about rock and roll in hundreds of interviews across 24 years and had developed the habit of treating the question as an invitation to think out loud rather than a request for a prepared position. The producer Gerald Sherman said afterward that in the first 8 minutes of the interview, he had been slightly anxious, not because anything was going wrong, but because nothing was going anywhere in particular yet.
The interview had the feeling of two conversations happening simultaneously. Bob Dylan’s internal one and the external one visible to the cameras. And Gerald Sherman was not certain in those first eight minutes that the two conversations would converge into something. Bob Dylan talked about influence. Bob Dylan talked about originality.
Bob Dylan talked about the difference between music that absorbed a tradition and transformed it and music that absorbed a tradition and reproduced it. And then Bob Dylan made his assessment. And then Bob Dylan said with the precision of a man making a musical assessment rather than a personal judgment that the Rolling Stones work, and Bob Dylan was specific, naming Keith Richards as the guitarist whose approach he was discussing was derivative in a way that Bob Dylan found limiting.
Bob Dylan said it without hostility. Bob Dylan said it as a technical observation about the relationship between source material and the work that came from it. Bob Dylan said that Keith Richards played the blues the way the blues had already been played, rather than using the blues as a starting point for something that had not yet been played.
Keith Richards had been listening to this with the specific attention Keith Richards gave to things being said about music by people who knew music. Keith Richards did not interrupt. Keith Richards did not shift in his chair or display any of the visible signals of a person preparing a defensive response. Keith Richards listened to Bob Dylan’s complete observation all the way to its conclusion without interrupting and without displaying any visible signal of preparing a response.
Then Keith Richards said one sentence. The sentence was not a rebuttal. The sentence did not defend Keith Richards music or argue for its originality or challenge Bob Dylan’s characterization of what the blues meant in the context of rock and roll. The sentence was something else entirely, something that required a specific kind of confidence to say.
The confidence of a person who has spent long enough thinking about the same things as the person they are talking to that they can locate the exact point where their thinking diverges and say something useful about that point rather than simply defending their own position. The sentence acknowledged everything Bob Dylan had said, the assessment, the distinction Bob Dylan was drawing, the specific musical concern underlying the observation, and then turned it 90°.
Keith Richards took Bob Dylan’s own framework, the one Bob Dylan had used to analyze Keith Richards relationship to the blues tradition, and applied it back to Bob Dylan’s work with the same precision Bob Dylan had used to apply it to Keith Richards. Spare aimed. The sentence asked Bob Dylan something about Bob Dylan’s own music, about the relationship between Bob Dylan’s sources and Bob Dylan’s output that Bob Dylan had not been asked on television before.
The sentence did not attack. The sentence illuminated. Bob Dylan laughed. The laugh was not the polite laugh of someone responding to a joke. The laugh was the involuntary laugh of someone who has been genuinely surprised. The specific kind of surprise that a person of exceptional intelligence experiences when someone else’s intelligence exceeds their expectations.
Bob Dylan laughed for 4 seconds. Then Bob Dylan stopped laughing. Then Bob Dylan was quiet for 3 seconds in the way that Bob Dylan was quiet when Bob Dylan was thinking rather than performing thought. Then Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” The producer in the booth, a man named Gerald Sherman, who had been working in television for 14 years, said afterward that in 14 years of live television production, he had never heard Bob Dylan say those two words in a public forum.
Gerald Sherman said he had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions and had observed Bob Dylan in numerous other contexts and that you’re right was not a phrase that Bob Dylan deployed easily or often because Bob Dylan had spent 24 years being right about music in ways that other people eventually caught up with. And the experience of being right ahead of everyone else does not generally produce a man who says you’re right readily when someone else makes a point.
The host of the program, a journalist named Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said afterward that the 11 seconds between Bob Dylan’s assessment and Bob Dylan saying, “You’re right,” were the most extraordinary 11 seconds of television she had been present for. Patricia Wells said that what she witnessed in those 11 seconds was not a debate or a confrontation or a celebrity exchange of competing opinions.
Patricia Wells said what she witnessed was one musician recognizing another musician as an equal, which was in the specific context of Bob Dylan in 1986, not something that happened in public very often. The interview continued for another 42 minutes after those 11 seconds. The conversation between Bob Dylan and Keith Richards in the remaining 42 minutes was described by everyone who watched it as fundamentally different from the first 8 minutes.
The host, Patricia Wells, who had been conducting music interviews for 12 years and understood the difference between the performance of conversation and actual conversation, said that at approximately the 9-minute mark, something shifted in the studio. That the formal interview, architecture dissolved, and what replaced it was something less structured and more genuine.
Bob Dylan and Keith Richards talked about influence and originality and the blues and what it meant to build on a tradition without being consumed by it. They talked about specific recordings and specific musicians with the specificity of two people who had spent their entire adult lives thinking about these things and rarely found another person who had thought about them with equivalent care.
They talked about where music came from and where music was going and whether those two questions were actually one question or two. Patricia Wells said afterward that she had asked approximately four questions in the remaining 42 minutes because Bob Dylan and Keith Richards did not require questions. They required only a room and a camera and the shared understanding that what they were saying together was worth recording carefully.
She said it was the best interview she had ever conducted and that she had conducted the smallest part of it. After the program, Bob Dylan and Keith Richards were in the corridor outside the studio when the host Patricia Wells passed them. Patricia Wells said she did not stop because she did not want to interrupt.
She observed them for approximately 30 seconds from a distance. She said they were talking with the ease of people who had known each other for years rather than people who had met for the first time 2 hours earlier. She said that something had shifted between them during the broadcast that the broadcast had made permanent rather than temporary.
She continued down the corridor and did not look back. She said in her account of that evening that she had decided in that moment not to interrupt the conversation because some conversations are more valuable than any question a journalist might ask and that the conversation she had observed for 30 seconds in the corridor outside the studio was one of them.
She had been a music journalist for 12 years. She recognized the difference. Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have maintained their friendship across four decades. They have appeared together at various events, most significantly at the concert for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995, where people who were present described them as inseparable for most of the evening, occupying the same corner of the backstage area and talking with the concentrated attention of people who only have a limited amount of time together and intend to use it
well. Bob Dylan has spoken about Keith Richards in interviews with the specific thoughtful care that Bob Dylan reserves for musicians whose work Bob Dylan considers genuinely important rather than merely culturally prominent. Keith Richards has spoken about Bob Dylan in similar terms with the specific respect of someone who recognizes in another person a commitment to music that goes deeper than career.
Neither Bob Dylan nor Keith Richards has made a public statement specifically about how the friendship began or about the November 1986 interview. Bob Dylan has not mentioned the 11 seconds. Keith Richards has not mentioned the sentence. The interview exists in the archive. The 11 seconds are there. The laugh is there. The two words are there.
What is also there for anyone who watches the interview from its beginning and pays attention to the shift that happens at the 9-minute mark is the specific moment when two people who thought they were appearing on a television program discovered they were actually talking to each other. What Keith Richards said in that one sentence has never been officially reported.
The people who were in the studio that evening, Gerald Sherman, Patricia Wells, the floor crew, the two camera operators, the makeup artist who was watching from the side of the set, have described the sentence in consistent terms. They have described its effect. They have described Bob Dylan’s laugh and Bob Dylan’s silence and Bob Dylan’s two words.
They have not repeated the sentence itself in the specific understanding that the sentence was said between two musicians on a television program and that its power resided in the specific context of that exchange and would not survive removal from it intact. What can be said is this. Keith Richards said something to Bob Dylan about Bob Dylan’s music that used Bob Dylan’s own observation about Keith Richards as its starting point and arrived somewhere that Bob Dylan had not anticipated.
Keith Richards turned Bob Dylan’s assessment 90° and showed Bob Dylan something about the music they had both spent their lives making that Bob Dylan recognized immediately as true. And Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” Two words said by Bob Dylan in public on live television in 1986 to Keith Richards in response to a single sentence Keith Richards had said about music.
Two words that Gerald Sherman, who had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions, said he had never heard Bob Dylan say in a public forum. Two words that Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said were the most significant two words she had heard in those 12 years. Not because of their content, but because of who said them and what it cost to say them and what it meant that Keith Richards had produced them in 11 seconds from a conversation that began with Bob Dylan calling Keith Richards’s music derivative. And Keith Richards and
Bob Dylan have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The sentence did its work in 11 seconds on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The work has been ongoing ever since. If this story moved you, subscribe and leave a comment below. Have you ever said something to someone that turned a potential disagreement into an unexpected and lasting connection? Tell us about it in the comments below.
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