Karol G is opening up about the tribulations of her 2021 breakup with Puerto Rican rapper Anuel AA, speaking with GQ about the ways that her emotional struggles influenced her newest album.
Karol and Anuel confirmed their relationship in 2018, and announced their engagement only a few months later. They remained together for two years before ending their relationship in 2021.
"I wanted to die, I was crying horribly," Karol says in GQ's Global Creativity Awards issue. On the opener of her new album, released in February, she uses the beat of Bobby McFerrin's "Don't Worry, Be Happy," and Karol says that she used the song's message as an affirmation for herself following the breakup.
"I wanted to tell people: 'It doesn't matter. Everything is going to be fine,'" she says. The album, Mañana Será Bonito, translates in English to "tomorrow will be beautiful."
Karol adds that the album offers some of her most personal music yet. "[I'm] exposing a very personal part of myself to the public," she says. "I express a lot of pain in my songs…People have told me that they've been able to get through heartbreaks with my songs."
This makes sense to Karol, because her music has helped her in the same way. "It's taught me how to liberate my emotions," she says. "I feel that when listeners sing my songs with me, it's my way of connecting with them. And if I see someone crying, I'll start to cry with them."
Several months after initial rumors of their breakup surfaced, Karol released a statement confirming the news and asking for privacy as she navigated her recovery.
"If just accepting it is hard enough, imagine having to do it in front of millions of people," Karol wrote in Spanish on her Instagram Story in April 2021. "For a long time we tried to keep our relationship away from social media in order to protect ourselves. We never used our relationship for marketing purposes, not today, not even almost three years ago when we started [dating]."
"We were two people with public lives that wanted to have a normal relationship just like another other and that's the reason why we never hid our feelings and went public with our relationship," she continued. "The incredible things that happened to both of us, personally and as artists, were a blessing and a result of our beautiful love."
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