Medellin, Collabs and Biggest Hits
C
omb through any era of J Balvin’s decades-long career and you’ll find some impressive accolade or bit of Latin-music history sitting in plain sight: Start early on, when he’d just shot out of Medellín’s music scenes, there’s all the massive achievements he set for songs like 2015’s “Ginza”; he even scored a Guinness World Record for longest consecutive run at Number One on the U.S. Hot Latin Songs chart.
His 2018 album, Vibras, which featured a young Rosalía when she was just breaking out of Spain, shattered streaming records in its first week, and included the global smash “Mi Gente,” the first fully Spanish-language song to reach Number One on Spotify’s Global Top 50 chart. He hit the Coachella main stage when he popped in for Beyoncé’s headlining set and followed that by teaming up with rising peer Bad Bunny, who joined him for the joint album Oasis.
Tons more has followed: His experimental album Colores, his personal turn Jose, his genre-bending Rayo. And yet Balvin, as he recounts all of those stories, is quick to point out that none of it was as easy or as straightforward as it looked. “It feels fast, but it wasn’t,” he admits. “It took me, I mean, 20 years.” And he’s weathered a lot: Mental health issues, controversies, feuds. But one of Balvin’s strengths has been his staying power — and his ability to build a career that’s been focused on longevity.
This year, Balvin released Omerta, his joint album with Colombian newcomer Ryan Castro. The two of them had a whirlwind couple of months, stopping by the Coachella stage to play with Karol G and hitting the World Cup opening ceremony for a headline-making performance. And he’s still going; In a wide-ranging conversation held as part of Rolling Stone’s Residency at the Cherry Lane Theatre, Balvin took us through all of the highs and lows of his career and explained just how he’s made it this far. He took us through his time grinding in the U.S., including working undocumented, his biggest breakthroughs, and his favorite collaborations. He’s not ready to stop any time soon — but he’s taking the time to enjoy the ride these days.
A little bird told us that you just got back from Europe, and that you were celebrating a birthday.
Yeah, it’s my birthday.
Happy birthday!
Thank you so much. Thank you.
Tell us what you did and how you celebrated.
I celebrated with my family, you know — I love to gather with all my friends and celebrate all the blessings, that I’m healthy, that I am 41 and I look 20 [laughs]. But, yeah, it was beautiful to be with all my friends and my family in Ibiza. I was doing a show with DJ Snake also, like two nights in Ibiza. So, we were there already … we made the party there. But it was May 7, my birthday, actually.
So, this was a late celebration.
I was touring, and I’m like, “I have to celebrate my birthday no matter what, so I waited a whole month.”
Watch the video interview below
Since we’re talking about your birthday and a new year and a new beginning, I want to take this moment to look back at your career. And I want to start with you growing up in Medellín. Tell me a little bit about your childhood and what Baby Balvin was like.
Ooh, a headache. My mom says that I used to cry a lot. But, no, it was beautiful. I grew up in Medellín. I grew up middle class. My parents are still together. My mom is always my best friend. She’s my guide. I still call her every time before a show for the blessings. To me, she’s the one who made me believe that I can, you know, that I can make it. And my dad is a super-hard worker, and [I have] an amazing sister that I love. So it’s basically like a regular family, quote marks, you know, from Medelliín, Colombia, a stable family, thank God. And I was always really curious, I was always asking myself. Why? Why, why, why? And I’m still doing that every day.
What was your entry point into music? Was your family musical?
We had some people in the family that were poets. And my mom, she plays accordion. Super random, but we got vallenato in Colombia, so she knows how to play that. What other countries play that? Like in Switzerland or Sweden? The Dominican Republic has an accordion? That’s crazy. That’s so crazy.
Where do you think the bug came from?
That’s a good question. I think just the fact that I grew up with my dad listening to salsa all the time, and listening to baladas, my mom listening to Ricardo Arjona, a lot of Juan Gabriel and Ana Gabriel. I was listening to these guys, and I was like, “This is really good.” I liked it, but then when I started listening to rock, I started listening to Nirvana. I started playing guitar to make their covers, and then I fell in love with Metallica, and then I started doing more covers where I was the guitarist of the group. And then I came to New York once, and I deeply fell in love with the hip-hop culture. And then, I left rock [laughs].
No, but no. I love rock. I’m still listening to rock music. But when I came to New York, this city opened my mind to be like, “Oh, wow, this culture is cool.” The different types of rap, breakdancing, graffiti, like, the whole culture in general caught my attention … also, the business side of rappers doing brands and stuff like that. So I was like, “Oh, I love this.”
I want to get to New York because I know that you have a long love of the city, but actually, as your first entry point into the U.S., you went to Oklahoma for a while as an exchange student.
Super random.
I want to know what your first impressions of the U.S. were, based on getting there first.
You see my face? Wow. I was doing this thing of being an exchange student. It was like a lottery: You put your hand there, you get the paper, and it says Atoka, Oklahoma. And I’m like, “What in the world is this?” I just want to be a little polite. At that time, the internet was just kind of blowing up, so we didn’t have google to search “How’s Oklahoma and Atoka?” And it was funny because when … I got there I was in the middle of a forest, in the middle of nowhere, with coyotes and big bears and all this crazy stuff. And I used to live in a house where the biggest train passed by at six in the morning every day. I didn’t know the first night that I slept there, and I thought it was a huge earthquake. I was like, “What is this?” And it was the train. And then they took me for the first time to the high school. And they had something really weird that I hadn’t even seen when I was in Colombia. They had a basketball donkey game.
What is it?
They were on donkeys, throwing the ball. I’m like, “Wait, I don’t even see this in Colombia.” I was expecting to see kind of like New York, and then it was this town. I think this town has, I don’t know, 5,000 people max. You can google it. It’s called Atoca. I went, for the first time, to high school there. And I remember that I went to the lunchroom. I sat down, and immediately all the people left, and they left me alone. And that’s when you realize that the racism and all this stuff, it was true. And it was really weird to me to feel that, because I never felt that before. But it gave me a lot of strength too, and also to understand how different the world can be.
You did eventually make it to New York, and —
My mom and my family always told me to be nice and to serve people and help them. As a good Latina mom, she’s like, “Jose, if the lady wants to clean something, just go ahead and help her.” So I started helping this lady a lot, and I think she liked that. I was helping her a lot, showing a lot of love. I think they were super cold there to express themselves. She started really having a lot of love for me. And one day I went to school — and I started using Messenger at that time — and she’s like, “No, you cannot use Messenger because you speak in Spanish with your friends, or you’re going to forget English.” I’m like, “I don’t even speak English anyways” [laughs].
So, what’s gonna happen here? And I started seeing a type of a certain behavior that got weird. So she blocked computer science. They didn’t let me use the internet, so I stopped having any contact with any of my friends or my family, and I just didn’t get it. And I was basically kidnapped. And then when I wanted to escape, I packed all my luggage and I was like, “Where’s my passport?” And my passport wasn’t in the room. So that’s when I found out that she got my passport. And I had to do a whole quest to find it six months, no, three months after. So it was a really interesting story.
I didn’t know this full part of the story. How did you get out eventually?
The education there, what I was learning there at that time, it was basically what I learned 10 or seven years ago. I was terrible at math [in Colombia], but there I was the best one and it feels great. So they sent me to compete in the Olympics, the Math Olympics.
You’re a mathlete.
Yeah. So at that time, they had these $5 cards to make these phone calls, long distance. Shit, I’m 41 now. Jesus. So like five minutes. And so I asked a girl if she could lend me her cellphone, and I used the card, and it only gave me like one minute for five dollars — that’s crazy at that time. So I called my dad, and I’m like, “Listen, I haven’t escaped out of respect for you guys, but I’m basically kidnapped.” He was crying, like, “Where you been?” and everything. I’m like, “Well, I just didn’t have any way to contact you guys, but I’m asking you for your blessing, if I’m gonna escape, like, hell yeah.” Then I found my passport, and I escaped in the middle of the night. And that’s how I ended up in New York.
Once you got to New York, there was a period of your life where you were doing all kinds of things. You were dog walking, painting houses, but at the time, you were working without a permit; you were essentially living undocumented. I want to ask you what that period of your life taught you about the Latino experience in the U.S.
It was really hard. The payment, it was crazy. You see the one who got official and the one that doesn’t is just, like, 70 percent less. So a lot of these people taught me a lot about resilience because it was a really tough job. I was painting houses in Miami, Orlando, and fixing floors. And it was really a hard job. Now, I have a lot of love for all the immigrants — also the illegal immigrants — that have this job because it’s really tough, and I know how it feels to be in their place and in their situation. So that’s why I’m so proud to be Latino because I know what resilience is and what they gotta go through. It was really hard. And then I came to New York. Walking dogs is more fun [laughs]. I remember there was one dog that was living in a penthouse by himself. I was like, “This is a dog’s life that I want.” I saw a lot of things, but we’re here, we’re blessed. And I came to New York once again, looking for opportunities, knocking on doors at radio stations until they played my song one day.
Maria-Juliana Rojas
You eventually went back to Medellín and were also very active in the scene. There are pictures of you playing local parties with Karol G. I think you crossed paths with Maluma. What do you remember about that time and these artists who were coming up?
It was beautiful because there were a lot of artists before me in urban music, but I think I was one of the biggest dreamers. What I learned in New Year about business and about how these rappers move, I brought that mentality to Medellin, like, “Oh, I want to create a brand. I want to be not just evolving, but also, like, ‘How can I create my own world, and how can I make a statement in this?’”
I started doing freestyle battles at the beginning, and that’s how I earned my respect in the streets. Before and still maybe in Colombia, just, like, rap and reggaeton was a huge battle. Like, they don’t like each other. That was at that time. I don’t know how it is now — I don’t have time for that. So I earned respect by winning all these freestyle battles, and that way the rappers, when I started doing reggaeton, they couldn’t hate on me because it was like, “Oh, he won so many freestyle battles.” At that time, people were kind of feeling ashamed that they listened to reggaeton. So everybody was kind of in the closet. Everybody loved reggaeton, but they didn’t want to say it.
But the hoods were really loving it. They were loving it, so I started doing reggaeton, playing reggaeton in the hood. And that’s basically the people who really supported me. Basically, it was those hoods which really gave me the love and support. And then I started doing my first shows. I always was like, “I don’t want to [sing] any covers, never,” because I was, like, “These guys are very rich and famous. Why don’t I want to perform their songs?” So I was doing just my own songs, even if no one knew them. I’m like, “One day those songs that you guys don’t know might be big hits, you know?” I was getting more confident onstage and feeling the love of the people. And finally, one day I had a show where they were giving me a million pesos. That sounds big, but a million pesos is like $150 now. I brought my dancers. And I have, like, six dancers, and we had a beautiful show full of my friends, my mom, my grandma, my aunt, just my friends, acting like they didn’t know me. And I remember at the end of the show, I didn’t realize that my dancers, they broke a whole window.
Oh no.
When I got out, and I’m like, “OK, time for the payment.” The guy’s like, “A million. But give me 100 back because your dancers broke a window.” So I end up with $200. I gave the dancers 100. It wasn’t their fault. I kept my 100, and I bought a cellphone. I mean … that was the first thing I bought when I had my first show, my first gig. A nice cellphone at that time, a Motorola, I remember.
After grinding for so long, you now have, like, this incredible period of so many successes. “6 AM” and “Ay Vamos,” and La Familia was a huge album. And then you follow it up with Energíaand “Ginza,” which was something really fresh and new.
Yeah, it was crazy. But going back to Karol G. One day I performed in a sweet 16. The girl who was, you know, it’s her birthday, she’s like, “Oh, I have a cousin. You want to let her come onstage and sing with y’all?” “Yeah, sure.” And that was Karol G. And since then, we’re friends. We don’t see a lot of each other, but she knows that I have love and respect for her and where she is — you from the sweet 16.
You were with her at Coachella. She brought you out.
Yeah, of course. We always support each other. She asked me to go, and of course I was there. That was, I don’t know, three months ago. It was beautiful.
Looking back at that period early in your career when you were having all of these breakthroughs, how did you feel at the time? How did you make sense of it?
People see the glory, but not the story. It was constantly growing, so let’s say it wasn’t like a surprise. From my city, from neighbors and hoods then to Bogota, then to Cali, then Barranquilla, then Colombia, then Venezuela, then Bolivia. It wasn’t something that was just one day to another, so I was really grateful. But at this moment, everything is going so well that you don’t even see it. I think that’s what happened to me. If I go back in time, I think I didn’t enjoy as much as I should enjoy the first time that I blew up. Because I’ve been in different generations and different lives in my career. And on my first one, I didn’t even enjoy it as I should.
What would you do differently? How would you enjoy it more?
Well, because you’ve got to be able to understand how many billions of people are in the world and how many can definitely live doing music and doing what they love. And that’s the things that you maybe realize when you start growing up and you sit back like, “Wow, I definitely live off what I love.” And even though I have a lot of sacrifices and it’s a really painful career — I think it’s a really hard job — it’s a blessing, you know, to do what we do. So now when I grew up, I’m, like, this is special, man. Like, the life we have, it’s a blessing, and of course, at the same time, I cannot deny that it’s really a lot of pressure too.
You’ve always been open about your mental health and the realities of celebrity and fame. You even created a platform for Latinos called Oye that’s dedicated to mental health and wellness. Why was it important to bring that dialogue in and make that a part of your career?
Well, I didn’t think as an artist. I was just thinking I was a human being. I didn’t know I had anxiety and depression until I talked to a shrink. It was a moment in my life that was way before I was an artist. I didn’t know I was suffering from anxiety until I was 21 — I’m like, “Oh, this was anxiety when I was a kid, and I didn’t know.” And then when it got worse, I had a huge depression, and then I understood that one thing is to be sad, another one is to be depressed. When you’re depressed, it’s something that is stronger than you, no matter how much effort you make. I’ve been there. And in my case, it’s a chemical that’s imbalanced, so I need chemicals to balance my chemicals. And thank God for humans and men and art and technology, because we have this field that, at least for me, has been giving me this balance to stay good, and it’s a blessing. So the fact that Latinos, they never talk about it, a lot of machista, you know —
It’s very taboo.
I was like, you know, I’m living in hell, and I think that maybe someone is going to connect with me if I open about this topic. And I took a lot of shots because people are like, “Oh, man, you are one of the biggest Latin stars and you’re complaining about depression, and you have money and you are famous.” And I understand they don’t get it because they don’t know, so many people don’t know what it feels like. I took a lot of shots, and also from my peers. They’re like, “Oh, he’s a pussy. He is weak.” And I’m like, “I have to take the shots, you now?” But at the end of the day, I saved a lot of lives, because every time I do a show, someone comes to me like, “Listen, I wanted to commit suicide, and when you talked about it, I found out that I was suffering from what you were saying.”
So, we have saved a lot of lives. I just wanted to be honest, to express what I was feeling. I remember my label calling me, like, “Why are you talking about that? Why did you do it? Why didn’t you ask?” And I’m like, “Listen, I cannot negotiate my human part. I just can’t.” And that’s what happened. So I took a lot of shots. But I’m grateful because now artists, they call me like, “Yo, I’m feeling this. Is this normal?” “Yeah, of course.” And by the way, all these guys that look so tough, gangsters, and they’re like, “Yo, I feel kind of weird, man.” I’m like, “What’s up? You feeling this? And you’re feeling this? Oh, you’re fucked. Welcome to the club” [laughs].
You’ve always been so personal in your music as well. One of the moments when we’ve seen you be very personal is on your album Jose,which got at that idea of the person and who you are. You have one song where it was the heartbeat of the sonogram of your son. How has fatherhood played a role in your career?
Well, I can separate one from another. It’s not like my sound is going to change or some words are going to change because I have a kid. But I don’t have hard, hard lyrics that are X-rated. I’m the happiest person when I see my kid, and I feel blessed, and I think that it’s the best thing that would happen to me. And I have a great wife, who is a great mom that gave me a lot of peace, too. And it’s a blessing.
You were at the World Cup opening event with Ryan Castro, and you have always been big into sports. Tell me a little bit about that performance and how it felt to be on that stage.
I wanted to take Ryan Castro, who is an artist coming out. He’s from Colombia, but he’s doing really well. And we did an album together [Omerta], so I’m like, “Yo, let’s come to the World Cup. Let’s sing together.” And you don’t realize how big it is until you’re there, and then you see the reaction after that, you see your social media blowing up and everything. But it was beautiful. It was in Mexico with our people, with the Latino gang. I’m happy that I can share those moments with my peers and with my brother, Ryan Castro. I didn’t have anyone to take me to those places when I started. And if I can use my platform to make it easier, all win. I have the chance to be just by myself and take all the credit, but I know who I am. I know what I represent, so why not bring another person to put the flag and be like, “I’m here.”
That’s a good example of something you’ve done throughout your career. On Vibras,you had an appearance by Rosalía before she had blown up. We saw you very early on touring with Bad Bunny, and you guys did Oasis.Tell me what you saw in those artists and what caught your attention.
I just feel that there’s something unique in them. When I heard Rosalía for the first time, she was kind of big in Spain at that time, but not as she is right now. But I found her voice. My producer, Sky, introduced me to her music, and I was like, “This girl is out of this world. This is like an angel.” So we invited her to be part of Vibras. She also had the interlude of that album, and then we did “Brillo.” That was our first song in Vibras, and then with “Con Altura” and a couple of songs. And with Bad Bunny, it happened the same. I saw a guy who was different, you know? Remember that I came in this game and I was kissing my peers on the cheeks, and they’re like, “This guy is gay.” I’m like, “No, I just love to express myself. And if I was gay, I would have a beautiful boyfriend.” The things that we brought to the game when we came, you know, like colored hair, skirts, I was just feeling great about it. It wasn’t that I wanted to take people’s attention. I was expressing myself.
So when I see this kid in Puerto Rico doing his amazing raps, and at that time was basically a trapper. You know DJ Lujan, who is part of the history, of course, introduced me to him. He was like, “Listen to this kid.” And then I’m like, “Oh, this is special.” When I met him, he was a huge fan of my album Energía. And I was like “Oh, it’s cool that he knows what I’m doing and what I bring to the table.” And since that day, I’ve been going to different places. There was a moment when it was me and Nicky Jam. He’s one of my closest friends. But I like it, I always [want] people to not feel like, “I’m competing against you.” Yeah, you’re still competing, but why don’t you embrace your competitors and work together? Me and Benito did Oasis, our album. And then we did the Super Bowl together at that time with Shakira. And Jennifer Lopez. And then you see that Benito just did his Super Bowl. So it’s beautiful that everything’s been working out for all of us in an amazing way.
Do you have a favorite memory from Oasis and from making the album with him?
We shot the video here in New York for “La Cancion.” It’s a funny story about “La Cancion” because we didn’t see it coming. To us, it was a good song, but it was kind of “album filler,” in quote marks. And it’s crazy because we didn’t see that coming. It’s been seven years now, and I’m still charting. It’s crazy. We have beautiful memories of me and Benito doing songs, and I just got back from being with him in Paris. It’s so cool, man. I don’t think I’m the one who made him mainstream at all, but I think that I saw something that a lot of people didn’t see. He was going to be Bad Bunny no matter what. I just feel blessed that I can see part of that greatness too in my story and see Karol and see Anita and see Rosalía. They were going to be huge no matter what, but I had the chance to work with them before they blew up.
When you were onstage at Coachella with Beyoncé, and you guys did “Mi Gente” together, you said, “This is para la cultura.” It was really a moment of representation. Tell me about bringing Beyoncé onto that song and the feeling behind that, of really feeling like this was “para la cultura.”
Since I started, I always wanted to do music in Spanish, of course, because I didn’t know English. I remember back in the day, our huge artists like Enrique Iglesias, Shakira, Ricky Martin, they did crossovers, but they did Spanish and English versions of the same songs. And I’m like, “I ain’t got time for that.” I actually learned English because I wanted to know what the rappers were saying. And that’s the power of music. I’ve seen so many people speak in Spanish to me on Twitter, like “Oh, I learned Spanish because of you.” That goes beyond music.
We’re talking about Beyoncé. I always say things like, “I’m Latino. I’m gonna represent what we do. Our language is Spanish. I’m just gonna do Spanish until everybody in the whole world knows it.” But we cannot forget that before, a lot of artists paved the way for us. In urban music, Daddy Yankee with “Gasolina,” and Wisin y Yandel, and Tego Calderon, Don Omar, they opened those doors for us to let us pass through. But then “Mi Gente” came, and it was a life-changing thing for culture in general, not just for me. So when I was in the studio with Beyoncé’s assistant at the time, and he’s like, “Oh, Blue listens to ‘Mi Gente’ 200 times a day. I’m like, “OK, tell Beyoncé if she wants to jump on the remix …” But I was just being a hustler, you know. A week after, he’s like, “Oh, Beyoncé, she said she’s down.” She definitely did the song because Blue loved it so much. So that’s beautiful. I hope you like the song too, Beyoncé.
I remember I moved to New York, and I was on the couch with my girlfriend, Valentina, who is my wife. We’re not married, but that’s my wife. I received a call. I remember it was like 10 p.m., like, “Hey, do you want to come to Coachella to perform with Beyoncé?” And I’m like, “Hell yeah.” I think three hours before, I was already there. And it was beautiful because it was a great moment because it was the first time, if I’m not mistaken, that an [African] American woman was performing in Coachella on the main stage. We’re sending this message of being a Latino there with Beyoncé, and I think that says it all: Just to see us performing in that place, a song in Spanish, doing a remix with Beyoncé at the main stage in Coachella, that’s for the culture. And that’s those moments that mark maybe a before and after in our game of urban or Latin music in general. That really was a step up.
As you look back, and especially today, when there’s certainly turbulent times in the Latino community, you’ve been someone who’s really represented, has been proud to speak Spanish, has been proud to show up for your community. How do you plan to keep spreading this message of positivity and representation?
Well, I think you’ve got to live by example. I still love more music than when I was a kid. I don’t have the same struggles that I had when I was in Colombia doing music when I was like, “OK, how can I help my dad? How can I have this? How can that be?” Thanks to the people, I have the time to really focus again, to be a kid in the studio and be like, “I just wanna go and have fun now. I’m not gonna think about streams, even though you wanna think about streams.” You have to embrace that the new moment in music is super uncertain — people don’t know where we’re going. Music is totally decentralized now. There’s too many platforms, short memory. And that’s why I like doing music for love. If it becomes a hit, great. If it’s not, I get my thousand percent, so I have no regrets [laughs]. So I go to the studio now and just have fun.
