Two years after Pies Descalzos made her name, Shakira released 1998’s Dónde Están los Ladrones?, a wonderful album that remains her creative peak.
The album’s title (which translates to “Where are the thieves?”) was inspired by an incident in which Shakira’s luggage was stolen at the Bogota airport. She lost her notebook of lyrics for her next album and was forced to start from scratch. This was in the days before external hard drives.
From Bob Dylan singing Christmas carols, I take the natural next step to focus on Colombian pop singer and belly dance enthusiast Shakira. Sorry to be so predictable.
In fact, today is the start of a Shakira theme week (plus a day) covering the six studio albums Shakira has released since her debut 14 years ago. Too few of my theme weeks have focused on female artists (I believe Aimee Mann, Fiona Apple and Lucinda Williams are it) so I’m looking to remedy that imbalance.
I started the Dylan Weekends series back in the closing days of January. And here we are in the closing days of August, a full seven months later.
It took me that long to explore every studio album Dylan has released so far — 34 of them — while leaving out 20 other albums consisting of either greatest hits, live performances or unreleased tracks.
It is to those albums that I will turn my attention next, specifically the amazing bootleg series that is surely the best project of its sort ever attempted.
Fans who’ve followed Bob Dylan over his five decade (and counting) recording career, as well as non-fans who I’ve subjected to six months (and counting) of Dylan Weekends, know to expect the unexpected. But even the die-hards were likely thrown by Dylan’s most recent release, 2009’s Christmas in the Heart, an album of Christmas standards.
Was this a throwback to his Christian phase? A joke? Another acoustic covers collection along the lines of Good As I Been To You and World Gone Wrong? It was none of the above, or maybe all of the above and something else besides.
In writing about Arcade Fire yesterday, I explored the idea of albums that take awhile to grow on you before completely sinking in and making you a lifetime fan of an artist. I don’t know if that will happen with Arcade Fire, but it’s a definite possibility.
My favorite example of the phenomenon (one I’ve probably alluded to a dozen times on this blog already) is Lucinda Williams’ Car Wheels On a Gravel Road.
And on the flip side you have artists who knocked me out on first listen and settled in among my favorites immediately (Ben Folds and Elvis Costello come to mind).
Meet Me In Montauk 