Gloria Estefan

It takes only 20 seconds of rhythmic rapture on “Samba” before a familiar melodic refrain emerges. Not long thereafter, Gloria Estefan’s distinct voice cuts through and reveals the self-referencing interpolation at play, a culture-blending revival of Miami Sound Machine’s 1985 smash “Conga”. Such boldness sets BRAZIL305, the 13th studio album of her decades-long career, off to a truly memorable start. With a titular portmanteau that perfectly encapsulates its contents, the project bridges São Paulo with Miami in riveting fashion. Fan favourites from her bilingual catalogue like “Get on Your Feet” and “Rhythm Is Gonna Get You” transform here with fresh instrumentation that maintains the pop majesty of the original versions. Estefan doesn’t limit the reinterpretations to her own work, providing inventive takes on tracks like Maria Rita’s “O Homem Falou” in both English and Spanish.

The 2006 release of The Essential Gloria Estefan satisfied a long unmet need for a career-spanning English-language retrospective, one that includes the singer's popular hits with Miami Sound Machine in the mid-'80s as well as her subsequent solo recordings. For years, Estefan fans had few best-of choices to choose from – the Spanish-language Exitos de Gloria Estefan (1990), the two-volume Greatest Hits series (1992, 2001), and the latter-day Amor y Suerte: Exitos Romanticos collection (2004) – with no alternatives, not even budget-line knockoffs. The long-overdue release of The Essential Gloria Estefan thankfully resolved this gripe, for it includes the highlights from all aspects of Estefan's varied output, spread generously across two jam-packed discs.

Released just after Cuts Both Ways and a year before her Greatest Hits compilation, Exitos de Gloria Estefan rounds up the key highlights among the singer's Spanish-language recordings for Sony Discos. Expected inclusions like "Conga" and "Don't Wanna Lose You" are here, of course, albeit in Spanish (though "Here We Are" is oddly here in its Portuguese version). More notably, however, Exitos de Gloria Estefan also rounds up unexpected inclusions, some of which never had English-language hit counterparts. "Renacer" is a remake of the title track from Miami Sound Machine's debut album from way back in 1977, for instance, while "Dingui-Li Bangui" is a wonderful song that will be new to most English-language-inclined listeners. And too, the English-language "Dr. Beat" is a welcome inclusion, for it's a catchy and fun dance-pop song from 1984 that was unfortunately left off the Greatest Hits collection. Most of Miami Sound Machine's less commercially successful albums remained out of print for years, so Exitos de Gloria Estefan is one of the few relatively available albums featuring these songs.

Gloria Maria Milagrosa Fajardo Garcia de Estefan, known professionally as Gloria Estefan (born September 1, 1957) is a Cuban American singer, songwriter, and actress. Known as the "Queen Of Latin Pop", she is in the top 100 best selling music artists with over 100 million albums sold worldwide.

In early 1990, when she was one of the biggest pop stars in the world, Gloria Estefan suffered a broken vertebrae when her tour bus was struck in an accident, and her miraculous recovery from that near tragedy greatly informed her successive album, Into the Light. Though often noted as a "comeback" album, that descriptor is misleading. Yes, Into the Light is a comeback – a comeback from her accident, that is. It's not a comeback in the sense that her previous album, Cuts Both Ways, had been a failure or even a disappointment. No, Estefan hadn't fallen off, so to speak, with that album. Quite the opposite. It was a monster hit, breaking into the Top Ten and scoring a couple of high-charting ballads: "Don't Wanna Lose You" and "Here We Are." It also marked a drastic shift away from the unabashed dance-pop of her Miami Sound Machine output toward a more respectable adult contemporary appeal. This shift affected not only her image but also her audience as a result, and that shift is even more apparent on Into the Light. In fact, the shift seems complete, as this is full-fledged adult contemporary album with serious themes and toned-down production.