Sunday,
July 16, 2006
Laura Pausini:
Italian Singer a Major Star throughout Latino World
The ANNOTICO Report
Laura Pausini has been an
international performer since 1993, when she won
Laura is a petite beauty whose voice boasts a charming
delicacy. The music she makes is thoroughly romantic, awash in strings and
soaring crescendos. Imagine Celine Dion with less
bombast and better taste.
One reason the Hispanic community has embraced her? Pausini thinks it's her sheer Italian-ness.
She doesn't pander to the crowd with Latin guitars, reggaeton
remixes or Cuban percussion. It's all very organic.
Pausini has sold more than 20
million albums globally, the majority in Spanish. She releases her albums
simultaneously in Italian and has even ventured into Portuguese and French, but
retains her biggest following among Spanish speakers.
Smart Girl!! There are 66 million Italian speakers world wide, and 310 million Spanish speakers world wide,
FIVE times as many. Besides,
Italians were the ORIGINAL Latinos, and both Italian and Spanish sprung from
Latin.
BELLISSIMA: ITALIAN SINGER A
FAVORITE OF LATINOS
Randy
Cordova
The
Jul. 16, 2006
Laura
Pausini has become a major star in the Latin-music
scene by sticking to her roots: She's an Italian-born singer whose music is
overwhelmingly European-flavored pop.
"I'm proud to be Italian," Pausini says,
calling from her home in
Indeed, Pausini has been an international performer
since 1993, when she won her homeland's prestigious San Remo
Music Festival with the song La Solutidine.
The next year she released a Spanish-language version of the tune La Soledad
and an explosive Latin-music career was born.
Pausini has sold more than 20 million albums
globally, the majority in Spanish. She releases her albums simultaneously in
Italian and has even ventured into Portuguese and French, but retains her
biggest following among Spanish speaker! s.
"She's an important figure in Latin music," says Edgar Pineda,
program director at KVVA-FM (107.1). "She has crossed over boundaries of
culture and language and remained popular for a long time."
Other Italian singers have enjoyed success performing in Spanish, including Nek and Eros Ramazzotti, but they
don't have Pausini's staying power. She has been a
star since 1994, and her fans have matured with her. They fell in love to Las
Cosas Que Vives, danced to Mi Respuesta
and broke up to En Ausencia de Ti. At 32,
her core audience is the same age she is.
"She's grown up and moved with the times, and the audience moved with
her," Pineda says. "She's not making music for teenagers anymore;
she's matured and is making music for adults. And she's very consistent in
making records that people want to hear."
The woman at the center of all this attention is a petite beauty whose voice
boasts a charming delicacy. The music she makes! is
thoroughly romantic, awash in strings and soaring crescendos. Imagine Celine Dion with less bombast and better taste.
One reason the Hispanic community has embraced her? Pausini
thinks it's her sheer Italian-ness. She doesn't
pander to the crowd with Latin guitars, reggaeton
remixes or Cuban percussion. It's all very organic.
"I feel that they like me the way I am," she says, in teasingly
accented English in the tradition of Sophia Loren.
"I've never betrayed who I am. I'm in love with the 'Italianity'
of myself, and I'm very proud of it. I do love learning about different types
of music, but it's important to an artist not to change very much. I want to be
honest to who I am and I don't want to betray the Italian culture, which is in
my voice and in my songs."
Of course, it gets confusing at times. When she performs in
"Sometimes, Spanish words come ou! t when I'm singing in
Italian," she giggles. "It's so strange. So much (of my career) is in
Spanish, sometimes I find myself thinking in Spanish and having Spanish
thoughts come out of my mind."
She is enjoying one of her greatest successes with her current album, Escucha. Last year she was honored with a Latin
Grammy for the disc, a feat she repeated this year at the mainstream Grammys. The album's sales were powered by the smash ballad
Viveme, a tune that was used as the
theme song to the popular telenovela La Madrastra.
She is undertaking the biggest
She says she's curious to see how crowds react to three divergent styles of
Spanish-language music.
"Hopefully, the audiences will be open to three very different kinds of
emotional experiences," she says. "It's absol!
utely strange, but also very
interesting."
Another strange thing about Pausini's career: With
all the boundary-crossing she does, she has yet to hit it big in the
English-language world. In 2002, she released her first all-English album, From
the Inside. High-powered remixes of two tunes (Surrender and If
That's Love) topped the dance charts, but the singer wasn't pleased with
the way it was handled.
"I'm not going to release another album in English unless I have the
opportunity to represent my music and my culture," she says. "They
released the songs in dance versions that I didn't even know about. This is not
the kind of music I represent and it's not a compromise I want to make. It's
just not very honest."
She's not ruling out more work in English: She recently recorded with Michael Bubli and sang a "duet" with Ray Charles on a
posthumous album.
"Those are from the heart," she says. "I don!
't want English-speaking Americans to know me in a fake way. I'm too
tough on myself to accept those kinds of compromises."
Reach the reporter at randy.cordova@arizonarepublic.com
or (602) 444-8849
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