Karol G on Collaborating With Shakira and Making History on the Billboard Charts

Karol G never set out to make music history with her album Mañana Será Bonito,it just happened. The 32-year-old Colombian singer, who is ELLE’s June/July 2023 cover star, reflects on how she became the first female artist to ever have an all-Spanish-language album go number 1 on the Billboard 200 charts.

“We never sat down and said, ‘Okay, let’s think of an album concept que rompe, that will be number one,’” Karol says. “I was just singing about my life. How can that be meaningful for people? If people are connecting with the album, they are connecting directly, literally, with me. Because that is the album: stories from my life, in songs.”

She also spoke about how surreal it was to collaborate with her idol, Shakira, on the song “TQG”: “When we were filming the video, and [Shakira] was shooting her scenes, I was sitting and watching, and my life flashed before my eyes,” Karol recalled. “I was thinking about the World Cups she performed in; I watched Wizards of Waverly Place, and she was in an episode. I couldn’t believe it.” Their single ultimately topped the Billboard Global 200 charts.

Karol has often used her personal experiences as inspiration for her songwriting, and in an industry where male artists often sing more candidly about sex than women, she hasn’t shied away from covering the topic honestly in her discography. “All my life we had listened to music from men,” she said of her reasoning. “But really, we as women say things differently, and we feel things and think about things differently. I was talking about it as a woman without taboos, without obscuring it.”

Read Karol G’s full interview here.

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