Shakira in Jane magazine

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SHAKIRA PLIES HER MYSTICAL CHARMS AND A LITTLE HIP-SHAKING ON JEFF JOHNSON. WORLD DOMINATION ENSUES. PHOTOGRAPHY BY ROBERT ERDMANN

(Written by Jeff Johnson for Jane Magazine, transcripted by Cassini-Huygens)

My interview with Shakira is destined to not happen. No cabbies on the island of Nassau know where the Albany House, site of the day's photo shoot, is. One lies, though, and drives me to the Radisson and asks a fellow hack, "Where is Albania's?" The man points west and says something about a pink fence. There's a heated exchange. My cabbie explains that he's been in the Bahamas his whole life and never heard of a "pig fence." We drive for nearly an hour. Finally we arrive, and the man relieves me of $60. Thanks! The Albany House is a ritzy place, once owned by the guy who dreamed up Inspector Gadget. Golfers Tiger Woods and Ernie Els, along with investors, are turning it into a resort.
Shakira shows up in her pj's and waves. She's petite - as in tiny, not emaciated. The shoot is outdoors. It starts raining. A curling iron falls on her arm, burning it slightly. Shakira cries, but the shoot proceeds. Her manager then postpones the interview, saying they need to get the burn checked out at a hospital. Another horrible cab ride. No cell phones work. Pay phones do, but there's a rule in the Bahamas that once you put coins into a telephone, a steel-drum band will materialize and start performing loudly. Hours pass. Eventually, Shakira and I meet at Compass Point Studios. And there it hits me: Even the most casual statements sound profound coming out of her mouth.

Embrace your pillows and slippers (subliminal message: chill)

"I'm starting to enjoy things that all adult women enjoy," Shakira tells me. You may know her for her erotically charged hip-shaking and belly dancing, or most recently, for doing both while slathered in greasepaint for her "La Tortura" video. But her words now are not a euphemism for anything nasty, I swear.
"I'm having pleasure by looking at my china," Shakira says. The Bahamas are home for her now (at least sorta - she also has a place in Miami), and the 28-year-old Colombia native is happily revealing what it's like to finally settle down and, you know, admire her dishware.
"Since this crazy life started a few years ago, I haven't stopped," she says. "I haven't had the feeling of having your own pillow and having your slippers always in the same place. Those are the things that are really enjoyable, you know." When Shakira says "crazy life" she says it humbly, like a fishmonger talking about a bin full of prizewinning grouper. But what she really means by "crazy life" is recording her first album in English (2001's Laundry Service), spending a couple of years zipping around the globe promoting it and, in the process, selling 13 million copies - a feat that landed her in the realm of other one-named superstars like Mariah, Madonna and Gwen.
The break-room booth we're sitting in has played host to some of the most famous butts in rock 'n' roll: Led Zeppelin. AC/DC. And, okay, Whitesnake. The studio has a very rec-room/ guys-night-out vibe to it, if the guys had done set design for The Love Boat and filled a U-Haul with rattan chairs and bamboo sofas when the show went off the air. After recording Oral Fixation, Vol. 2 - the English-language follow-up to last summer's return to espanol, Fijacion Oral, Vol. 1 - at her home studio, Shakira is now frantically mixing it here because the masters are due to the label next week.

I ask the singer, who's casually dressed in a pink T-shirt and some fashionable variation of sweatpants, if her comfiness in the Bahamas means she's nesting - that is, getting ready for a kid with fiancé Antonio de la Rua, 31. "It seems like those are the first signs, right? Picking the right china. Going nuts over cutlery. But it's not the time right now," she says, looking directly into my eyes before going back to the pleasure thing. "I'm finding pleasure in having a color-coordinated closet for the first time in my life."
She goes on to mention Freud and Jung, and tells me about sharing her dreams with a psychoanalyst (and worrying when her laptop full of dream journals briefly went missing). I'm reminded of Latin America's rich tradition of magic realism, and it dawns on me that I am in the presence of a visionary.

Don't let curling-iron burns slow you down (subliminal message: persevere)

Crucial Shakira trivia reveals that she wrote her first song at age 8 while living in the Colombian port town of Baranquilla. So, did she sell a million records at age 9? No. Did she throw in the towel? No. She performed wherever she could - hotel lobbies, malls, you name it. "I got instrumental tracks of 'La Isla Bonita' and 'Material Girl,'" she says. "And I had a musician create instrumental tracks of the songs I had written, so I had a decent four- to five-song repertoire that I could sing in these places and earn money."
By the time she was 15, Shakira says excitedly, "I could buy my own car. I was the first one to go to high school in her own car. A 1977 Oldsmobile Omega. 8-B."
"V-8," I correct her, hoping to not ruin a good story. Besides the car, she also wound up with a major-label record deal and put out two teenybopper records that barely made a blip in Colombia. She consoled herself by watching MTV. "I remember the first time I saw the 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' video," Shakira says. "I will never forget that day. I just wanted to see Kurt Cobain's face. I had a feeling he was very cute. But I couldn't see his face." She makes a gesture that indicates face-covering man-hair.
And when she finally saw his face? "He was even cuter," she squeals, then reveals her teen love for the Cure and Metallica. And since we're talking hair... up close, Shakira's curly locks are still really, well, curly, but more subdued than what you see on TV. Isn't that always the case?
Teenage Shakira moved to Bogota and acted in a soap opera because "someone had to pay the bills." Eventually, she got back into music and became big in Latin America. Her two mid-'90s releases, Pies Descalzos (it means "bare feet," and she has a charity of the same name that helps Colombian children) and Donde Estan los Ladrones?, sold around a half-million copies each in the U.S. But you probably never heard of her until the Alanis-inflected Laundry Service, with its praises of humble breasts and the joys found underneath a lover's clothes, hit the airwaves.
And then you probably made a mental note of her dancing. "A woman has to be sensual," Shakira says when I ask if she views it - a rapid hip-shaking so notable it hypnotized civilians in a Verizon commercial - as ultrasexualized. "It's part of our nature. I feel very much in touch with my femininity."
Her dad was born in New York, of Lebanese descent. Her mom is Colombian. "I was raised with strong principles," she says. "I went to a Catholic school. I performed a belly dance there when I was 5. And I used to wear the typical belly dance outfit, showing the belly. So I figured, you know, if the nuns never had a problem with me showing the belly, who would?"
"Not me," I say.

Stay true to friends and family, even when they hide in foliage (subliminal message: be loyal)

A curious thing happens at the photo shoot. I'm walking ahead of Shakira's just-arrived fiancé, Antonio, when I spy a grown gentleman jumping into a bush. He begins gently meowing as Antonio and his friend walk by. Everyone laughs. The meower, it turns out, is a charming guy named Divier, a jack-of-all-trades in Shakira's camp.
Later, while driving me back to the Radisson - coincidentally, where they're shooting the cover art for the new record later that night - Divier explains in Spanish that he has known the singer since she was a girl. Shakira's manager says that Divier and his wife live in Shakira and Antonio's house, and that he's "more family than assistant." I'm going to use the meow greeting.
In the Latin world, Shakira and Antonio are fodder for the tabloids. He is handsome. When I see him, he's in a white polo shirt and sunglasses, sporting a three-day stubble. His father, Fernando, was president of Argentina but was ousted in 2001 during that country's economic woes. Argentines called his dad "de la Ruina," and some even criticized Shakira and Antonio's relationship, but the couple survived.
"It was a terrible and painful moment for the family," Shakira tells me. "I supported Antonio as he had been, all the time, supporting me." Antonio, a lawyer, looks after Shakira's business interests. "He protects me in every sense of the word," she explains. And he must inspire Shakira's lyrics, which are often about relationships, describing the rush, whether sweet or horrible, of being in one.
"Loving someone," Shakira says softly, "is one of the most extreme feelings that you can experience. Feeling that person like your own blood, like your flesh and your whole existence, makes you become a satellite of that person. It's an extreme sensation. I explore these directions, from the pleasure and the warmth and the comfort to the anxiety, the anguish."
It might be jet lag, but I nearly start to cry. I'd never considered a pop star orbiting the person she loves. We move on to a lighter subject. "I am a normal person, and I like to walk around barefoot," Shakira says when I bug her about what she misses now that she's famous. "Going to the supermarket barefoot." Notice she does not mention going to the gas station bathroom barefoot. Just saying.

Learn to sculpt with a kid from Minnesota (subliminal message: adapt and diversify)

Shakira does more than just write music. She's into visual art, too. She spent her last vacation sculpting three busts of Antonio (in aluminum, bronze and that chalky white stuff). "I remember going to sleep thinking about how I was going to finish Antonio's nose," Shakira says, running her fingers across her own face as if to illustrate the difficulty of getting it right.
"I took it so seriously that I was stressed-out," she says. "I looked like a madwoman. I would look at Antonio all the time, trying to get all of his features. It was torture." But in the end, she'd tried something new and succeeded. "It looks like him - but a very young Antonio. That's the way I see him. I see the young boy in him. I like the baby face."
Sometime after all the sculpting and before right now, Shakira wrote 50 or 60 songs for her next album, it became inevitable to think of the project in terms of two records, Fijacion Oral and Oral Fixation, in two languages: Spanish (with some French and German if, as Shakira says, "the song suggested it") and English.
I ask if when she decided to sing in English, rhyming words like thong and song, her fans were okay with her doing something new, or if they cynically viewed her bilingualism as a marketing ploy.
"Maybe at the beginning there was some apprehension," Shakira says. "It's normal when you incorporate change in your life that people are worried. But the fans who've followed my career know what motivates me. They see my intentions." Other than some grumbling when she went blond, and a backlash earlier this year from Ritmo Latino, a U.S. chain of record stores where Shakira's label neglected to schedule any in-stores, the Latin community seems happy to claim her as one of its own.
"English has been a great tool for me to export," she says, pausing a beat. "Spanish as well."
It's working. People who don't speak Spanish are buying her Spanish-language records. "It's a global world now," she says, fanning her arm out across an imaginary horizon. "A kid from Minnesota, can chat on the Internet with a girl from Colombia and a guy in Japan. Nationalism is impossible to instill in people's heads, not like it was 30 years ago."
Her music supports this as well. Fijacion Oral is a melange of bossa nova, Serge Gainsbourg lounge, reggaeton and chilly Depeche Mode synths, and English counterpart Oral Fixation is just as ambitious, throwing chanting monks, Carlos Santana and bubblegum pop into the mix.
"A pop artist doesn't have to be faithful to a certain style," she says. "I just have to be faithful to my own emotions, moods and momentum." Her brow wrinkles slightly. "It would be boring if I just shook my hips all the time and did not have good songs that allow me to sit down, play the guitar and tell a story," she adds. "Music is the soundtrack of a person's life - it's the soundtrack of my life."