Watch Shakira work a stage the way she did at this week's American Music Awards,

Shakira: From Hard Times to the She-Wolves' Den
By Chris Willman

Watching Shakira work a stage the way she did at this week's American Music Awards, it's hard to imagine her ever being just a she-wolf cub. But the seeds of the "She Wolf" singer's successful musical lycanthropy were sown in childhood, when her family faced financial ruin, she tells Yahoo!/Pepsi Music in a new video interview.

"I definitely think there was a turning point in my life, and that was when I was 7, 8 years old and my parents went bankrupt," says the Colombian-born "She Wolf" singer. "It's still very vivid in my memory how I stepped into my apartment and my parents had sold all the furniture. We were undergoing a financial crisis, and of course they had to do what they had to do. They sold both our cars. I was really mad at my parents, because I considered them incompetent for business!"

But Shakira's parents found a productive way to deal with her tween temper tantrum.

"At that point, they did something very smart," she says. "They took me to the park where all the orphans lived, little kids who were barefoot and without parents, kids who had literally nothing in the world. They wanted to show me this other reality, so I could gain some perspective on things. And I did. At that point something clicked in my head, and I wanted to succeed. I wanted to vindicate my parents' social and economic position. But I also wanted to make sure that if I ever did that, I (could) do something about those kids that I saw."

When Shakira sings "Anything you want in the world" as part of the chorus of her new single, "Give It Up to Me," she's most likely singing about satisfying a lover. But that declaration could also serve as the mantra of determination for a self-made singer, songwriter, and dancer who is arguably the only major American music star to have crossed overfrom the Latin market and found true bilingual success.

Her third English-language release, She Wolf, just arrived in stores as part of the pre-Thanksgiving album blitz. It would have come out months sooner, but Shakira delayed the American edition to include "Give It Up to Me," which didn't appear on overseas versions of the CD. She brought her band and dancers to a studio in New York two weeks ago to perform this rising hit live for the Yahoo!/Pepsi cameras.

Interestingly, "Give It Up to Me" had originally been slotted for the next album by superstar producer Timbaland, and he recorded a rap for the tune on top of producing it. When Shakira decided to nabit for the U.S. release of her own CD, she and Timbaland made a last-minute decision to plug a rap by Lil Wayne into the track instead of the producer's. This live Pepsi Music performance proves the number is every bit as hot without any star guests. When you've got Shakira ready to deliver on all cylinders, who really wants to share?

"I wanted She Wolf to be an album different from everything I'd done before," she explains in the Pepsi/Yahoo! interview. "I wanted it to be dancier and more electronic. However, it still keeps the fusion of different elements from India or the Middle East, or my own country, Colombia, or the dancehall of Jamaica. But everything is in an electronica context."

Did she say India? Sure enough, there's actual tabla to be heard in this mostly acoustic rendering of one of the new album tracks, "Gypsy." Get ready for a Middle Eastern hootenanny:

The all-day shoot for Shakira's performance went smoothly, according to Yahoo! Music executive editor Dave DiMartino (other than maybe the last-minute call to "go out and rent some gypsy-esque-looking furniture" for that one number). "She's sweet, and very businesslike—not in the negative sense of the term, but sharp," says DiMartino. Though he notes that the image she's picked up in this country from awards show performances might be something like "a mutation of Madonna and Beyonce," she's also, in her more sensitive mode, "kind of like a Latin Alanis Morissette—singing with heart, versus a pretty girl who got thrown up on the stage because she looks good."

The visual component of her appeal is hardly incidental, though. Maybe that's why it's taken so long to get a followup to her last English-language album, 2005's Oral Fixation Vol. 2—because she's spent the entire intervening time locked in a gym with a trainer and choreographer?

She has a slightly more artistic explanation of her absence. "I'm like Halley's comet. I make an appearance every four years. The reason is because I spend a huge amount of time in the studio working on the arrangements and production on each song, tailoring each song to my needs and to my vision.... But I think that from now on, I'm gonna try to move a little faster, you know?"

Hopefully not any faster than she moves in the following live rendition of "She Wolf," which proceeds at just the right sensual pace for an interspecies transformation. New Moon wolves, watch this and eat your hearts out.