As A Girl, Gloria Estefan Wore Out Carole King’s ‘Tapestry’ Album
BY RICK MASSIMOGloria Estefan comes to the MGM Grand at Foxwoods Resort Casino for three shows next weekend. Platinum-selling artist Carole King shares the bill and the two will perform a set together.
When Gloria Estefan returns to the MGM Grand at Foxwoods (the venue she helped open a year ago) for three shows starting Friday, she’ll have a special guest who means a lot to her: singer, songwriter and fellow platinum-selling artist Carole King.
“She’s probably been one of the most influential people in my career, as a writer and personally as a fan,” Estefan said in an interview.
She said that she and King had spoken on the phone, discussing what songs they would be doing, but that the real rehearsals would begin just a few days before the show. Estefan didn’t want to discuss the set list yet, but said that King would do a set of her own and the two singers would perform together as well.
Estefan remembers listening to King as a girl growing up in Miami.
“She struck a chord. As a teenager growing up, her songs were filled with angst. You could play them on your guitar, which I did, a lot, for my family and friends at school. She was very cool and very young and successful.
And she was one of the first big female icons, and I think that spoke a lot to young women, and I was one of them. I wore out her Tapestry album, for sure, and a lot of others.”
It may seem odd, given her Latin grooves and bilingual lyrics, but the Latin American tour Estefan just finished was her first. “It was my purpose to go back there and perform live,” she says, “and it was a lovefest.”
She describes three-hour shows where they wouldn’t let her leave — “I was able to really pull back and do stuff from 1976, from 1982” — and she “ended up singing a cappella because I ran out of stuff.”
Hey, wait a minute — didn’t she do a farewell tour of the United States in 2004?
“I’m still fare-welling,” Estefan says, “but luxuriously, in bits and pieces.” Her farewell American tour was just that, she adds, adding that her American performance schedule consists only of one-offs and charity shows in major cities. “[This is] still the one; I’m just doing it very slowly.”
Then as now, Estefan’s problem is fitting her career in with the desire to keep her daughter’s life as normal as possible. Her daughter starts high school in the fall, and “that’s going to be difficult,” Estefan acknowledges. “I definitely want to enjoy what’s left of her school career.”
So the touring will end sooner than later, Estefan says, but she’s adamant that she’s not retiring — she’ll continue recording, doing occasional shows and tending to her other business interests, including cookbooks, children’s books and the hospitality industry.
“My husband [Emilio Estefan] and I are both businesspeople, so that’s how we were from the get-go,” Estefan says. “And I always told him — for women in this industry, it’s never like The Stones. Someone like Tina Turner, that’s one in a million, but it’s not natural for [a woman] to survive into her fifties and sixties.”
Estefan is 51. As for music, she hopes to record another Christmas album, and a disc of standards in English, and to continue writing for other artists, as she has done for such as Shakira (“Whenever, Wherever”) and Jennifer Lopez (“Let’s Get Loud”). “At the core, I’m a writer. That’s what makes me the happiest.”
Estefan was one of the first fully bilingual artists, writing and recording in English and Spanish from the beginning of her career. She’s proud to point out that she can do a full show of hits in either language, though she tends to mix it up.
Writing in both languages “really is who I am,” she says; “it wasn’t just recording something in another language to get to a new audience.”
She says songs present themselves as English or Spanish early in the writing process, and she doesn’t write a song in one language and translate it later. “You would think a song like ‘Conga’ would work in Spanish, but to me it doesn’t.
It’s very percussive, and there are a lot of hard consonants in English, whereas in Spanish it’s kind of soft. It really was untranslatable for me. Songs like ‘Mi Tierra’ I wouldn’t do in English, because it’s on the other end of the spectrum. And the subject matter might not have the appeal as it does to people who are Latin who have left their homelands.
“Love songs will work in either language, but in English I have to make them more cerebral, because you get accused of being saccharine and sappy, and there’s no such thing as sappiness in Spanish; you can be as dramatic as you want,” she says with a laugh.
Estefan’s latest album, 2007’s 90 Millas, was a Spanish-language celebration of the music of her native Cuba (she and her family left for Miami in 1959), and she’s guardedly optimistic about the recent loosening of the rules against Cuban-Americans visiting and contributing to their relatives on the island.
It was a good move, she says, but “the only people who can do anything for the Cuban people is the Cuban government. They need to lift their restrictions on the people. … They let tourists enjoy Cuba and they don’t let the Cubans enjoy Cuba.”
Gloria Estefan and Carole King are at MGM Grand at Foxwoods, in Mashantucket, Conn., Friday through Sunday. Each show starts at 8 p.m. Tickets range from $75 to $250; call (866) 646-0609 or go to www.mgmatfoxwoods.com.
rmassimo@projo.com
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