Rewrapping Gloria
Inside the carefully crafted star is a small voice trying to set a different tone

Start with her body. The scar she has always taken such care to conceal is visible now, snaking along her spine where the surgeon sliced open Gloria Estefan's skin after she broke several vertebrae in a tour-bus crash in Pennsylvania in 1990. Thirteen years later she is lying nearly naked on her stomach in the sand on the private beach behind her getaway house on Florida's Treasure Coast. Her hair is braided into four tight plaits that slither away from her head at odd angles. She wears no makeup but body paint and blue glitter. A three-pronged blood-red shape shimmers on the lower edge of her left shoulder blade. Lyrics from her new album, Unwrapped, are painted across her torso, the letters written in reverse, like a mirror image. The scar, thin but massive in length, weaves in and out of the mysterious symbols on her back like an ancient hieroglyph. Carlos Betancourt stands above the singer, surveying his subject. Tall, toned, and 37 years old, he is dressed in white like an urban babalawo: baggy pants, sleeveless T-shirt, backward baseball cap. The celebrated installation artist met with the pop star several times before today to plan what he calls this "intervention" on her body. The Miami-based artist likes the fact that, as album art, his photographs will be seen by millions of ordinary people beyond the gallery groupies and art department Ph.D.s who already sing his praises from New York to Madrid.

Only now, seeing Gloria's scar glisten in the glare of the June afternoon sun, does Betancourt realize how much is at stake. For the first time in her nearly 25-year career, the star who put the Lite in Latin pop is releasing an album of songs drawn from her personal life -- songs she has written herself. Her back, so vulnerable in the camera's lens, will serve as the back cover photo for Unwrapped. "I was witnessing this liberating moment," the artist will later recall. His hands are sweating. His mind floods with questions: Can I pull this off? What am I doing here? What is art?

Betancourt hides his anxiety from the singer, her family, and the Estefan Enterprises management team who have gathered at the beach house for this two-day photo shoot-turned-ritual. "Hey, Gloria, close your eyes," he commands before spritzing the singer with water. Then he throws sand in her face.

The artist's anxiety subsides when he looks toward the sea and notices Gloria's husband, Emilio Estefan, Jr., imitating him at the water's edge. The music mogul tosses sand at the couple's eight-year-old daughter Emily, whom he has painted in the image of her mother.

"Let's take pictures of Emily!" the gray-bearded impresario shouts, hopping around his daughter's body from corner to corner like an excited child.

"What's going on! I'm working on your wife over here!" Betancourt yells back in mock admonishment. That man is a sponge, he chuckles to himself, amazed at how quickly Estefan has appropriated his technique.

In those few seconds while the artist is distracted, his subject flips over on her back and cranes her neck across a mound of sand. Her head hangs upside down, turning the mirror-writing on her face upside down too. A long-time fan of Betancourt's work, Estefan is re-creating one of his famous self-portraits. Like a spirit worshipped by the Arawaks, early inhabitants of the Caribbean islands, she thrusts out her tongue until it touches her chin.

Not the usual Gloria Estefan glamour shot, but then this is not the usual Gloria Estefan album. There are no timbales, no horns, no rousing piano tumbaos, no exhortations to dance. "You can't shake your conga forever," Emilio laughs before playing the new disc for a reporter at the couple's Crescent Moon Studios. "She's tapped into a place where she's never gone before," explains Estefan Enterprises president Frank Amadeo as he displays a mock-up of the album layout in the company's Miami Beach conference room. "The lyrics are written all over her body, as if she's shedding the words."

Press play. From the first cymbal crash by Manu Katché, the French drummer acclaimed for his work with artists such as Peter Gabriel, Sting, and Youssou N'Dour, it's clear that Unwrapped is a radical departure from the Miami sound. If this is a collection of songs straight from the pop star's heart, then the opening track, "A Little Push," is a coy challenge to listeners less than receptive to hearing any Gloria Estefan record. I think you need a little push in my direction, if you're gonna fall in love, she sings in the chorus, her voice floating atop the thick sonic texture of Katché's drum fills, Dan Warner's guitar riffs, and Luis Angel "El Papa" Pastor's bass line. A lush string arrangement plays a secondary, ambient role rather than the lead typically reserved for syrupy strings in Latin power pop. In case any doubt remains that this is not Latin pop, Estefan boasts of her certain conquest in the song's bridge. The rockers drop out, leaving nothing but her echo over synthesized bells: Deny what you feel, love, she dares. You feel love. Die-hard detractors, the bell tolls for you.

Although Estefan wrote the lyrics, "A Little Push" is a twist on the philosophy of the album's producer, Sebastian Krys: A record is a success when it expresses the personality of the people who made it. All Gloria needed, Krys says, was "a little push" to let listeners know who she really is. "You sort of have preconceived notions of what she's supposed to be," Krys explains. "Those of us who have worked with her know how deep her talent is. I really pushed for her to be involved in every way on this record, because when she gets involved, her personality is going to come through." With wire-rimmed glasses poking through his overgrown sideburns and a baseball cap wrenched over unruly curls, Krys looks more like a rock and roll roadie than a top producer at the epicenter of slick Latin pop. A Miami native, the 32-year-old did his time as a kid in rough local rock outfits at Churchill's and Tobacco Road, but after finishing recording school at Full Sail in Orlando, he found his chance to practice his craft as an intern at Crescent Moon. Inside the Miami sound machine, Krys has managed to muck up pristine production standards with his down-and-dirty recording of Panamanian tropi-punk trio Los Rabanes and down-to-earth treatment of Puerto Rican singer-storyteller Obie Bermudez. In perhaps his greatest achievement to date, earning a Latin Grammy in 2001, Krys produced a wide-open sound for the vallenato-pop star Carlos Vives that takes Dejame Entrar (Let Me In) out of the confines of the studio and into the exuberance of a sonic street festival.

In his eleven years at Crescent Moon, Krys has contributed to several of Estefan's discs. He pitched in as an assistant on Mi Tierra (1993), the landmark Spanish-language album where such heavyweights as Arturo Sandoval and Paquito D'Rivera backed the singer on traditional-style Cuban songs. Later he mixed a few tracks on her two most recent releases, the English-language Gloria! (1998) and the Spanish-language Alma Caribeña (2000).

For aspiring writers and producers coming up through the Estefan system, a stable Emilio insists on referring to as a "family," working with Gloria takes on Oedipal drama. During a break while recording a live concert for Alma Caribeña in the Bahamas, Krys and fellow Enterprise producer Randy Barlow lay on the beach shooting the breeze about what they would do if given the opportunity to record Gloria's next English album. How, Krys wondered aloud, could he convey the woman he knows from the studio: The woman who cracks him up with her black sense of humor and spends hours arguing over politics or philosophy just for fun.

"I really feel like there's a certain depth that hasn't been captured yet. Maybe on Mi Tierra but not on an English album yet," Krys explains. "She never really sat down to write a record. I asked her: What is it that originally made you go into music?"

Listen to the words. What in this world/Feels so alive/Makes us then breaks us/Then helps us survive? Estefan is by herself in the beach house. Her daughter is asleep. Her husband has gone back to Miami on business. It's late. She's tempted to go upstairs and lie down with Emily, but something inside her says: You gotta write this. She opens her composition book, an enormous sketch book filled with lyrics for every song she's written since 1996. The words pour out. She doesn't even realize that every verse is a question. When in the world is it enough/I never knew it could be quite this rough? There is no chorus. The song is a riddle. She keeps writing and writing until she comes up with the answer. Curiously/I never set out to be/Famous.

"These are songs that come from within," the singer explains months later. "I didn't mess with them. I didn't edit out what some people might have misinterpreted." She is in the middle of a media marathon in a suite at the Estefan-owned Cardozo hotel on Ocean Drive. A herd of Latin American reporters grazes on shrimp and strawberries in a second suite upstairs. Her publicity team hovers in the hallway. Large-scale blowups of Carlos Betancourt's photographs ring the room. "Some people who have heard the song have been surprised that I would write it," she says, looking straight ahead, her voice a low rumble. "There are moments, when I'm going through something painful, that I wish I wasn't famous."

Sitting upright on the edge of the sofa, the singer bears no resemblance to the wry jokester or spunky fighter her producer describes. Wary of a reporter who has written unkind things in the past, Estefan looks as prim and reserved in the eye of this media blitz as she does in a photo taken in the bedroom of her house on Tamiami Trail at age twelve. Ribbons in her hair and Mary Janes on her feet, little Gloria Fajardo sits on her frilly white bedspread playing a guitar almost as long as she is tall. As a young girl, she would pick out chords while trying not to think about her father, who was a political prisoner in Cuba, then a U.S. soldier in Vietnam, and then sick at home. Music consoled her. "My mother said the only way she could get a diaper on me was to sing to me," Estefan remembers. "It was always a good escape."

When Estefan's mother would call her daughter downstairs to entertain company, the shy little girl would strum and sing while staring at the floor. "The emotion would come out through my voice," Estefan says. Soon she would have the whole room in tears. Why are you making me sing if you're going to cry? she'd ask her mother afterward. Better to sing alone, locked in her room.

Thirty-four years later, when Sebastian Krys approached Gloria about recording an album of her own songs, she felt like she was getting back on course after a career-long detour that began when Emilio invited her to sing a number with his Miami Latin Boys at a friend's wedding. "I joined a band that was very high energy. That was not part of my presence," she says now. "You've always heard me with a lot of other elements that I let into my life. This is more the me that perhaps would have happened earlier had I not been in a band."

When Krys got the go-ahead from Emilio, he approached everyone in the Enterprise looking for songs that Estefan could make her own by writing the lyrics. "I wanted to tap into that person who started doing music for those reasons: escape and therapy," Krys explains. "For me it was important that she write the lyrics with as little interference as possible. She's a woman. She's got two kids. She's been married for 25 years. What the hell do I know about being a woman? I told her, Say what you want on this record and don't have people interpret that for you." Ironically, though, of the fourteen songs on Unwrapped, the most compelling track is "Wrapped" ("Hoy"), a pop version of an Andean folk rhythm called a guino that Peruvian singer-songwriter Gian Marco, a frequent Estefan Enterprises collaborator, originally wrote for himself. "I kind of begged him to show it to Gloria and Emilio," Krys confesses. Now charting on Latin and adult contemporary radio, the first single and first video from this most personal of albums conveys the sentiments of a 32-year-old Peruvian man.

So what the hell does Gian Marco know about being Gloria Estefan? He laughs over the phone from Lima, where he is composing another set of songs for his own album. "Gloria identifies with my songs," Gian Marco explains. "I think the same thing happens when people hear a song on the radio. We are always hearing stories that have happened to us or that we wish would happen to us."

Indeed, Gloria Estefan fans identify less with her musical style than with her personality as presented in the press: She is the survivor and scandal-free mother chronicled by People and Time magazine; the patron saint of Miami praised in the endless hagiographies of the Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald. "With Gloria's fan base, it's as much about who she is and what she represents as a strong woman, a strong Latina," says Ceci Kurtzman, VP of worldwide marketing for Sony Epic, the division of Sony that handles Estefan's English-language material. "She's a touchstone for a lot of her fans: She's solid, grounded, inspirational." If she can write those stories herself, so much the better.

As for expanding beyond the core fan base, Emilio Estefan, Jr., knows a good idea when he hears one. Whatever Gloria Fajardo may have wanted, her husband had the ambition and the business sense to make Gloria Estefan famous. If mid-career, the star wants to be more herself, Emilio is savvy enough to see the value in marketing her as somebody else. Gloria! the dance diva didn't chart all that well; why not try Gloria, the sensitive singer-songwriter?

The impresario picks up Krys's aesthetic as easily as he appropriates everything else. The producer's turn with Carlos Vives proved that Latin pop doesn't have to sound plastic to sell. Sensitive rocker Juanes has eclipsed Ricky Martin as the model of Latin success. On the English side, Norah Jones demonstrates that there's a considerable audience for comfy, organic-sounding pop. When the album is finished, Mr. Estefan practically shouts: "It's handmade!"

End with her voice. For music critics and fans throughout most of the world, it really doesn't matter how well Gloria Estefan sings. She puts out catchy dance tracks and easy-listening ballads, easy enough to ignore if you don't like what you hear. But in Miami, where Gloria Estefan worship is as omnipresent and sometimes as oppressive as the humidity, and in Latin America, where she remains for better or worse the shining example of making it in El Norte, the singer's less-than-perfect control over her instrument is a shameful open secret.

Producers have done their best to hide the problem with Pro Tools. Monster musicians have played around it. Sources have asked that comments about her vocal shortcomings be kept off the record. In one famous incident, a damning assessment of her ability to sing in clave -- the primary rhythmic pattern of Cuban dance music -- was excised from a record review by an editor at El Nuevo. As though the evidence were not already there, on every record, for everyone to hear.

Like the scar on her back that Betancourt exposed in the album art, Krys convinced Estefan to let him record her voice as it is. Usually with pop music, each musician plays alone and lays down an individual track. The vocals are processed and added later, almost like cutting and pasting a sentence into a word processing document. But Krys is in the habit of recording his artists singing live with a core band. He'll overdub, add other elements later, but he likes the voice to emerge from a communion with the band.

"We played a lot," Estefan says of her time in the studio. "I really absorbed the music. We would let the voice flow in a really natural way, almost as an instrument. Sebastian would say: Relax. Try this. The whole purpose was not to think too much. To let it go."

Unwrapped features some of Estefan's best vocal performances, especially on the ballads "Famous" and "In the Meantime" and in her sweet duet with Carlos Ochoa's quena (Peruvian pipe) on "Wrapped." Krys and fellow rocker John Falcone arranged the music to stay mostly within her alto comfort zone. On "Your Picture" -- another track written originally in Spanish by Gian Marco at Emilio's urging, about a portrait of his parents that hangs in the couple's bedroom -- Gloria's delivery is rich and powerful on the verse. She does pretty well on the chorus, too, until the last two lines soar above her range. She strains and wanders out of tune. The producer didn't try to fix it. "One of the reasons I wanted her to sing and be in that moment was because the songs are really personal," Krys explains. "The vocals are live. And I definitely mixed it pretty dry." That's why you won't hear that faint techno-buzz cutting in whenever a note starts to go awry, a trick that leaves someone like J.Lo, say, sounding like a cyber-singer. "I don't think musically being perfect makes it better," Krys says. Not a particularly demonstrative man, he is starting to breathe a little faster. "It's got to be believable. People's ears have been trained to be perfect and music is not supposed to be perfect. It's supposed to be human."

That's the ethos that has driven American popular music from the blues and country through rock and roll. But Gloria Estefan is no Ma Rainey, Johnny Cash, or Bob Dylan. Guest appearances on Unwrapped by Chrissie Hynde and Stevie Wonder only drive home the fact that Gloria has no rock and roll edge, no funk. There is less hard livin' and heartbreak in her wavering voice than the fragile hope of living right and doing the right thing. This humanity in a hair ribbon will never appeal to rock snobs or jazz heads, but for the fans who look to Estefan for inspiration, it is more than enough.

Krys did not simply want to record the sad little girl in her bedroom with a guitar, but to bring the singer out with a band of musicians whose personality shines through their playing. He recruited frequent pop collaborator Dan Warner for his versatility on guitar. He borrowed Luis Angel "El Papa" Pastor from Carlos Vives for his left-field approach on bass. And he convinced his bosses to fly in from France his idol, drummer Manu Katché. Mesmerized by Katché's inimitable melodic percussion since he heard his first Peter Gabriel album at age fifteen, Krys believed the drummer could help him draw out Estefan's own idiosyncrasy.

Listening to this kid, a producer, discuss the drum setup he would like over lunch in North Miami near the Hit Factory-Criteria Studio where the Estefan sessions will take place, Katché realizes he is getting old. Krys is describing the sound that he grew up with; Katché's sound. "I know, Sebastian," the drummer interrupts, in a French accent tinged with the Anglicisms of Gabriel and Sting. "That's what I'm doing every day." Hearing Krys gush over the importance of playing live, of putting the musicians in the moment, is like hearing himself talk.

"The first thing you hear when you listen to a song is the essence, the emotion," preaches Katché over the phone from Paris. "Everything is an alchemy: the music, the singer, and the words. I don't have to be the drummer with the best chops. I just have to be in it, a part of it. I don't have to shine; I just have to be right for the song.

"It doesn't matter about technically," Katché continues, addressing the issue of Estefan's voice. He practically spits the last word. "I'm not a 'great' drummer, technically. But not many guys could do the same thing I do. Maybe she's not a 'great' singer, but she's got a tone that's perfect. She's got a way of phrasing that inspired me in the sessions. Sometimes when someone sings perfect technically, it can be," he pauses, "boring."

Watching Katché swivel behind the drums in the middle of the studio, slight and cinnamon brown beneath a backward baseball cap, Estefan forgets at times that she is supposed to sing. She stands at a microphone in front of the recording booth. She wears no makeup. Two braids snake out of a bandana tied around her head. She is prodded out of her reverie when a stick drops expectantly, waiting for her to respond. Katché is following her voice, elaborating on her melody. Blink children are grown, Estefan sings. Katché's stick falls on the first and last word of the phrase like a swinging pendulum: Blink. Grown.

A cloth-covered barrier keeps the drummer from muddying up the sound of the other musicians, but the Frenchman can see Estefan at the microphone, guitarist Warner on his stool, and El Papa wielding his bass in an adjacent booth behind glass. Percussionists Luis Enrique, Edwin Bonilla, and Rafael Solano gently slap batás, two-headed Afro-Cuban drums, on their laps. Krys has instructed the musicians to cut loose at the end of "Time Waits." Only El Papa is holding back, laying down a groove to anchor the group. Katché loses himself in the complexity of the rhythm. Estefan chants, her voice hypnotic: Time waits for no one, it all seems to happen so fast. A rumble rolls across the drums like a tidal wave. No end, no beginning, I'll live like each moment's the last. Cymbals crash like sea spray. The banality of the lyrics dissipates in the dense sonic atmosphere.

At the console, when the sessions are over, Krys wraps Estefan's voice in even more layers. Pedro Alfonso, of Bacilos fame, saws his violin into a frenzy. Krys himself plays the Andean charanga like a maniacally ticking clock. In homage to Peter Gabriel's "Biko," the producer throws in his own uncredited wounded moan. The singer's chant is echoed by a synthesized version of her voice, like the quickening pulse of the digital age. The real Gloria Estefan is wrapped in layer upon layer of other people's sounds.

Then one by one the other elements drop out. All that is left is Gloria's voice, unwrapped, doubled in exquisite two-part harmony: Time won't wait, no, no. Her voice, in that moment, is perfect.

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