It's really over

Gloria Estefan says family, projects await after farewell tour

August 23, 2004

Gloria Estefan says it's a farewell tour, but why should we believe her?

After all, Cher, Kiss and others have been lapping the world using that excuse to push more tickets, turning the long goodbye into a cynical art form.

Gloria Estefan says you can believe her when she says her farewell tour is real. Other pop stars' farewell tours have lasted more than a year.

She laughs at the notion too.

"I know, I know," she says in a call with reporters when reminded that the concept of a "farewell tour" has become a joke.

"Quite honestly, why should anybody believe me over anyone else? I guess there's really no reason," she says.

But she wouldn't say it if she didn't mean it.

"Quite honestly, I wouldn't do that," she says. "My fans are only gonna believe me because hopefully I have credibility with them. I don't like drama. The reason I posted it on my site is just so they'd know."

She continues "It was only fair to my fans to let them know that this is their last shot at me actually going to their hometown and checking me out. My fans are really loyal. When I did Vegas they came from all over the world to see that show."

If anyone has doubts, she says, "they'll see when I'm not out on tour anymore."

She has history on her side, too. She hasn't exactly been a touring machine. The "Live and Rewrapped" tour is her first outing in eight years. She has so many other projects going on - plus two children to raise - that she says she's simply not willing to give away large chunks of her life right now. The tour hits the Pepsi Center on Tuesday.

Estefan is gracious, chatting at length and listening patiently as some journalists felt compelled to tell her their life stories and what her music meant to them.

Besides being tired of the grind of touring, she says, she thinks music fans are worn down as well.

"I just think we're saturated, we're really saturated. There's a million ways I wanna grow and evolve. I'm growing older," she says. She'll continue to do one-off shows such as the Las Vegas revue she did earlier this year that was simulcast to movie theaters nationwide.

"It's pretty grueling, touring," she says. It's very hard on me, quite honestly. It's physically grueling. It's like training for the Olympics, but it's two months long. You can't get sick. My life on the road is basically sleeping, working out and doing the show. Even eating I can't do the way I'd want to because you gotta watch your weight."

There are simply more important things in life, she says.

"My daughter is going to be 10 years old. She's going to enter her teenage years very soon," she says.

She didn't tour when Emily was younger because she wanted to get her firmly established in school.

"Do I wanna take these most precious years of her life and traipse around the world with her? When she comes back, she'll be the odd man out," she thought at the time. "I chose to stay home and take her every day and be involved in the school and create a relationship. I did that for my son as well. I didn't tour till my son was around Emily's age."

Whether daughter Emily will get into music is up to her, Estefan says, but the singer and her husband, Emilio, have made a point to put family first.

"Once you start doing this, there's no going back. I see artists like Britney and Christina who have been doing it since they were little and I feel bad for them in a way," Estefan says. "At least I had a normal life and a solid bearing to build on. I'm sure they've missed out on a lot of things that are fun and relaxing. I wouldn't want that for Emily. I'd want her to make the decision, but make it at a point where she can say she had a nice, solid and relaxing youth."

That said, Estefan still loves performing. Her latest album, Unwrapped, features more personal, intimate songs, a far cry from the dance-oriented hits that made her famous with the Miami Sound Machine and her own solo career in the '80s and '90s.

Yet these more traditional rock/pop songs are really where her roots are, she explains.

"I'm more nostalgic for the '60s or '70s. The '80s was a strange decade. Very fortunate for me, but musically I love the older stuff I grew up around - Carole King, Stevie Wonder, Elton John," she says. "I'm still quite attached to that era."

The new show will feature the hits, but also showcase the new music, some of it performed by Estefan alone with her guitar, a first for her.

Other projects are in the works, including an autobiography as well as a first draft of a screenplay to do a movie on the life of Connie Francis.

"We're very close to something I'd definitely take to a studio to show them," she says. "That's the next big project I really wanna get done as soon as possible after this tour."

In post-touring life, "I'd love to produce some music. I love being behind the camera. We're growing very much the film and television aspect of our business. Emilio has several pilots that'll air in the fall," she says. Estefan will also work with American Idol's Diana Degarmo, she says.

Estefan burns a deep groove down the middle of the road

By Steve Knopper, Special to the News
August 26, 2004

Rock singer Neil Young once said traveling in the middle of the road was boring, so he headed for the ditch - "a rougher ride but I saw more interesting people there."

That may be true, but few musicians do more with the middle of the road than Gloria Estefan.

Over a 25-year career of hits in English and Spanish, the 46-year-old, Cuban-born singer-songwriter has shown a masterful touch for the pop charts. Tuesday night at the Pepsi Center, her 17-piece band of Italians, Cubans and Puerto Ricans - plus keyboardist Clay Ostwald, a Boulder native - leapt deftly from Estefan's 1989 Latin-dance hit Get On Your Feet to Vicki Sue Robinson's disco classic Turn the Beat Around to the shimmering ballad Here We Are. All were fun and perky (well, the love song was sad), and none had the merest hint of a rough edge.

Estefan is a superb showperson, telling the crowd poignant stories about her childhood and, as a 9-year-old in Cuba, sending musical tapes to her father who had been exiled in the U.S. (She played a duet with one of those tapes toward the end of the show.) She's also a fine songwriter, with the ability to jam an English ballad into a traditional Peruvian melody (Wrapped), and an above-average singer who knows her limitations.

But as she showed on her farewell tour, her great talent is the ability to turn music from all over the world, in all kinds of styles, into background radio hits. These can be slow and romantic, such as the medley of old tear-jerkers Words, Anything for You, Can't Stay and others. Or they can be lighthearted and upbeat, such as the Miami Sound Machine's 1989 blockbuster 1-2-3, a catchy but subdued dance number that the cab driver might well have played on the way to your prom.

Machine was the operative term in the band Estefan, born Gloria Fajardo, formed with her husband in 1975. It was one of the first Latin crossover bands, making a Spanish-language debut album in the late '70s before scoring hit after hit through the '90s. In recent years, Estefan has delved into more introspective music, including 2003's Unwrapped, from which she sang the nostalgic family ballad Your Picture and Famous, a song about how difficult celebrity can be even after so many years.

If Estefan really wants to unwrap herself, though, she'll write songs with the loopy humor and poignant personal anecdotes that enlivened her stage banter. After the band played a lively, disco-style version of Everlasting Love, complete with '80s video in the background, Estefan admitted she never appeared in the video. She was nine months pregnant at the time, she said, so "I got the best people in the world who do me. Those were all guys!"

There's a lyric somewhere in that, and it's far more interesting than "there's nothing I can do to keep from loving you."

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