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| This is a fine example of Laura and her band in a music collaboration from different locations, connected by media, that looks and sounds really good. Recorded last week in Italian. Click HERE to view video on Facebook. |
My favorite Latin American popular singer is... Italian.
Wait, how does that work?
Laura Pausini is how that works. Never mind my opinion. Ask any of the 80 million people who have bought her records.
Laura Pausini is how that works. Never mind my opinion. Ask any of the 80 million people who have bought her records.
When I was living in Italy in 1993-1994, young Laura Pausini was just getting started as the celebrated winner of the San Remo Festival (though I didn't become a fan until much later). Now on May 16 she turns 46 years old, and is widely loved across three generations of Italians.
Tanti Auguri! Happy Birthday to the Queen of Italian "Pop," who toured (and sold out) stadiums in her native land as recently as this past year (2019).
Laura Pausini is also Italy's most successful international recording artist, having had the talent, drive, energy, multilingual capabilities, and largeness of personality to connect with much of Continental Europe while also becoming a mainstay in Latina music from Mexico to Brazil to Chile (i.e. throughout the Hispanic world) for over a quarter of a century.
I sometimes find myself forgetting she's Italian. In this hemisphere, Laura is the multi-Grammy-Award-winning Spanish language singer who covers a range from "pop melodico" to rock. She records an Italian version and a Spanish version of every album she releases (I actually prefer to listen to the Spanish). But she goes way beyond just singing in another language. Laura speaks fluent Spanish and Portuguese, and has "written her own chapter" of Latin American music history to the extent that Hispanics count her as one of their own.
¡Feliz Cumpleaños Laura!
She also speaks (and sings in) French, Catalan, and... oh yeah, English too. But English is like her fifth language. The Anglo music world in the USA and Britain knows her well and many of its musicians have worked with her. But, alas, in terms of fans, she is one of the "biggest-popular-music-artists-that-most-Anglophones-have-never-heard-of" (which, let's face it, is a misfortune for us! — well, not for me, because I love the musicality of Spanish even if I don't understand it very well😉).
In any case, Laura Pausini continues to make great contemporary music in various languages with her melodious, intense, and powerful voice ... even now, in quarantine from her home in Rome (see link above). Of course, everyone looks forward to the time when it will be possible for Laura to sing publicly and internationally, as she did in Spanish in this video from 2016:
