i mean the song is just such an absolute standard now a classic that to hear you reinterpret it and breathe this new energy into it this new culture into it is so much fun and so great we had experimented with samba throughout our live shows for
years we did it with rhythm we did it with uh conga which is now samba and uh live for loving you get on your feet so we knew that it would work because of its african base that we share uh both brazil and cuba where our original
sounds came from in that song so i'm glad you're you're enjoying it it must have just been really fun it must have been great to reconnect to it again re-singing songs sometimes after three decades some of them like kongra which became samba was really
a joy and especially fun for me because i usually i'm with my band i wanna we did this in brazil with brazilian musicians these amazing arrangements and uh it was a blast for me you know originally we were supposed to put this
record out in 16 and 17 but i lost my mom right before i was gonna go in to do the vocals and i just couldn't sing so i said the kind of joy that we want to put on this record i'm not feeling right now so it was really important for me to
take the time to grieve and come back with the joy that i knew that my mom would have loved she heard all the music before she passed and she was very excited about it so it was it was uh i enjoyed going to the studio every day and
doing new takes on on these classics i don't know funny's the word but you know it is kind of funny that that when you go through things in your life that are so significantly impactful that even when you have a desire to try
and find your voice it's not there for you how long did it take you to for it to come back to reach that place where you knew you could make an album like this it was well over a year and a half uh just i i didn't want to wait so long that
because i had been talking about the record already to my fans and and i just needed to feel comfortable and go into that studio and know that uh my mom was gonna help me uh in that endeavor which she did eventually but yeah it took a long time it was a very big loss for me and it was sudden because she was doing great and just some something happened because of a condition that she had for a long time and the medications she was on for it that
caused her to have to go to the hospital we fought for 33 days i thought she was coming out of it but at the end it was her time and uh it was brutal my sister and i were able to be with her every moment so that was great and i really made my
mom happy throughout her life i i have no regrets i spent as much time as i possibly could with her but i wanted this record to be a joyful celebration which is also why when we were going to release it last october and covet happened we thought
this is not a good moment we were dealing with all these stresses worldwide then when we were going to release in february then the george floyd thing happened in the united states and out of respect for the protests that were going on and
the very necessary stepping up for justice i also postponed it but then that's what actually caused me to have it released on june the 12th with a song that's an ode to love and joy because i wanted to balance a lot of the negativity that we were
feeling and the sadness and the fear because uh music saved me in my life it was cathartic for me as a child and helped me through my toughest moments so if you're fortunate enough to have fans listening that's
i wanted to put that joy out i i sort of wonder you know how you found that balance and how why you decided to to fight for your rights and the rights of of people in your community and what you believed in but you decided to make it a joyful
experience to get people to dance while they learned my dad was a man that loved freedom and he was very moral man and he took me out of cuba and brought me to the states because he was aware of what was going to happen in the country
he was a police officer there he wanted to be in the military and his dad didn't let him he was my grandfather was a commander in the cuban army and he didn't let him because he didn't want to be accused of nepotism and which was exactly the reason they
were both jailed on the night of the revolution my dad was at the presidential palace so he took us out to raise us in freedom and he was always a man that freedom was very important to him so you won't hear a lot of politics in my
music at all but what you will hear is standing up for freedom of expression in songs like oyamicanto the freedom of every human being to be who they are and the fact that music got me through my toughest moments and i've celebrated
the music of different countries throughout my career but it's always something that is natural to me for example it's part of my vocabulary uh when i did me tierra that was a totally rude cuban centric album it came from
the knowledge that i had of cuba of the 40s and 50s because i learned these songs to sing for my grandmother and my mother and i grew up listening to that so when i wrote the album i even knew the types of lyrics how they were formed in that time
and the concept was to do new music that sounded like it had been around from the 40s i've celebrated caribbean music with alma caribena colombia music with abriendo puertas andean sounds with unwrapped and rap and brazil that i've loved since
i was a child and learned a lot of brazilian tunes to sing in an early band so it's always part of who i am even if i go to the extreme of the glory album that was all pure dance still with that fusion of who i am which
is you know cuban girl born and raised in miami yeah i spoke to james taylor about the idea of working on an album of standards an album of songs that that he remembers from his childhood songs that he was raised on that have a specific
memory attached to him in terms of family in terms of growth and how approaching those songs was one of the most challenging experiences of his career because those songs mean so much to him and his family and is such an impactful
part of his growth that putting his voice on them and trying to reinterpret them it's like the stakes were even higher than following a hit record or anything of that nature i can understand that because it happened to me when i did the standards
record and when i do something like this uh with this brazil 305 likewise you know it was my own tunes that i was covering but i don't i don't want the fans to you know suddenly go oh wait a minute what is that at the same time i love
you know playing in a new field in a new you know fun way to express and yeah you always approach things with respect you know after several years of finally achieving the kind of success that miami sound machine had you had strove to try to get uh you
swerved out um with your husband's support and and decided to go solo and um and and i've i got to ask you and i'm sure many have before but perhaps the answer has changed over time why when it was it was moving at such a pace
and then all of a sudden it's like you know what someone who's a shy individual is now going to make it all about it has to be all about you and that's an interesting decision it wasn't my decision i tried to fight that decision it was emilio's decision i joined his band miami sound machine was his band and at the time that he decided he decided that he wanted to add my name i was getting a lot of offers for example from placido domingo
had asked me to sing on an album with him based on the life of goya and emilio said to me i'm putting your name up front first of all i'm the only original member left on stage and he was going to stop because he wanted to be in control
of what was going on with lighting and sound and i would say but why we have a successful thing it's miami sound machine why why do i have to add my name he goes what's placing placido going to put on the record last of those things with the
girl from miami sound machine he said no you are the front man people need to know who you are and when we dropped the miami sun machine was when he stopped performing on the stage even though we kept the band was always called miami sound
machine and the same guys played with me from 86 that joined the band at that point till now i still have my band with me and i still call the miami sound machine and they're credited with that but i fought that tooth and nail i did not want to
my name to be put out front i didn't what has been the foundation upon which you and emilio have built such a strong and incredible union whilst so many others around you fall well first of all we fell in love with each other
the real people we didn't meet already it's a trap sometimes when you get together after you're well known or something because they always have an image about you and that may not be the person even though we're very different which is a
good balance because we fill in each other's gaps uh if we were both like me we'd still be playing guitar on the couch in our old house if we were both like him we'd be dead of heart attacks so it's like it's a good yin and yang there
um but in the things that matter in the priorities of life in the values uh we're on the same page we rarely differ in business or music or anything having to do with our family even though we have different ways of thinking about a million things
but we rarely argue and it really helps when there's no cause to argue when you constantly are breaking down a relationship uh by having that kind of thing it it's tough what are the values that really matter to you and to emilio and to your family well i
can tell you first of all to be a positive force both in the family in our country in our city and whatever we touch to be honest to be true to our musical thoughts but also to be true to what's the right thing to do be honest
to try to be helpful at every moment and uh try to be better continue to grow and evolve to be positive forces in the world and and put out good energy emilio is the most motivational man i know uh he gives everyone opportunities we
all really feel that everyone is the same and we give the same respect to everyone in our lives and our children have grown up seeing it we didn't have to tell them that because we are friends down from presidents and kings to the homeless
people that we talk to every day when we're on our daily walk and that we have conversations with and that we try to help in whatever way we can and it's not a matter of saying to your kids this is what you have to do it's what
they see you do and it's been important for us every step of the way to every step of the way to make the decisions that are going to carry us forward and that we feel that our family will be proud of us one of the arguments on the front line
of this political fight is how does america relate to its immigrant immigrant population and how does it grow given that the country was built in a large way by that population you know i look at things at this point in my life have
been around for six decades over six decades and i've had the opportunity to view different governments and different you know i've traveled the world i've seen a lot of different things i have no doubt that the people of the
united states are very fair-minded and support immigrants and support the racial injustices like to be that have to be protected and move to another level because i saw it in the 60s i had a father who was in the army in vietnam and i was watching the protests of the vietnam war which i also agreed with but i had to balance the fact that my father thought he was doing something to help this country we know now that the things that go on in the
you know seats of government are very complex and sometimes secret and really stupid sometimes quite honestly but we tend to hear the extreme the extremes are what come to the forefront much more so now that everyone
has a platform to be able to voice these kinds of things so i have no doubt that the country is very still on that path and is on the right path unfortunately government has gone a certain way where we are polarized a two-party system to me is completely
outdated emilia and i are not affiliated we have been for years i think that there's a danger in following a party line in any case we need human beings that can stand up and do the right thing so i wonder sort of how you sort of feel
about about where things are at right now because you're about to release a record in the most unorthodox manner that you possibly could yes this is definitely our world war it's just a silent killer you can't see where the
you know shots are being fired from so it's a it's a very strange thing but at least we have tools like this uh not like 1918 when they had that horrendous uh pandemic that took 50 million people in two years so we still have to latch onto the good
things the good news is that since this album was slated for by previous release i was able to go to brazil we were there a month and we shot a documentary about the roots of samba because for me it is far more than just taking my music and
creating these rhythms i've you know studied the artists that i've loved i've you know wondered where these things came from and i learned so much by going down there um the first single that we did we shot the video on the banks of the abate
lake which is where sama was born literally from these bayannas these women it came from women samba yet later on they weren't allowed or accepted in the samba world because it was viewed very dangerous for them to be out in the
streets in carnival and what it had grown into so um we i was able to interview monarcha who was a gentleman was already in his eighties and he established portela the the second largest samba school there i interviewed him and all his uh the
people that percussionist and people that were with him a part of this creation of this amazing thing and they would break into song in the middle of the interview it was really it was wild it was so good i interviewed
the first woman that was accepted into samba that created uh the biggest hits for a woman the first time of anyone that was able to do samba i interviewed mariarita the daughter of elise regina who is close to sainthood down there she died
very young likewise clara nunes died a year later these women were the first women that were all so accepted in the samba world and to me it's very interesting how even though the music came from women because these bananas would
improvise songs as they were washing clothes on the banks of that lake particularly in bahia and then suddenly they were taken away uh i learned of how the government of brazil tried to silence the slaves from or thought they were stopping them from
uniting or being able to come together by outlawing the instruments to play sambas and then they just moved to their backyards and created somebody so we were able to capture that in that documentary which will eventually be released you