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 DEEP SLEEP
While promoting his new album, Insomniac, earlier this summer, ENRIQUE IGLESIAS got our attention by giving a touching performance to one lucky gay fan at London’s G-A-Y nightclub. At least he knows his audience! Now pop’s seductive heartthrob talks about how he was burning up that night…literally.
INSTINCT: Right off the bat, what’s up with the ping-pong motif in your latest single, “Do You Know?”
ENRIQUE IGLESIAS: That wasn’t really premeditated. Brian Kidd, the producer, is a hip-hop producer, and he can make a beat out of nothing. To me it was really about the song and what it was saying. The melody was just so catchy. It was one of those choruses that when I sang it, I just couldn’t get it out of my head.
So how then did “The Ping Pong Song” get tacked on to the title?
It’s funny. The record company would call me and say, “When are you going to finish the ping-pong song?” I would hate it when they called it the ping-pong song. And then when it came time to put it on the album, they asked, “Can we put in brackets, ‘The Ping Pong Song’?” I said, “Please, don’t do that.” But they really fought me on it and wanted to do it, so I was like, whatever. I gave in.
You turned some heads by pulling a young gentleman onstage at London club G-A-Y in early June and serenading him with your song “Hero.” Luckily for us, there were some YouTube-savvy blokes in the audience who caught all the action on their cell phones.
The owner [of G-A-Y] called us and asked us if we wanted to do the show. I think he called us thinking, Let me give it a try. Most likely, he’ll say no. I think when I said yeah, he was surprised.
It’s kind of the norm for mainstream pop artists to perform at G-A-Y. What was your experience like?
I had a great time! I had a blast. It was one of the best clubs I’ve ever played for. I truly mean that. They were singing, like—it was so loud. And I was sick. I was really close to canceling because I was taking antibiotics. I got the flu like two days before and I felt like shit. So that night when I went to sleep at the hotel, I couldn’t hear anything in my ears, because it was so loud in that club. It was one of the loudest crowds I’ve ever played for. I saw the video on YouTube, and you can kind of hear it, that it was really, really loud. But it was just a good club.
It’s a big club, but it’s intimate as far as performances go.
What amazed me that night was the amount of people that were in there. I was thinking, I wonder if it’s legal, the amount of people in here? [Laughs] It took my engineer half an hour to come up to me and get to the front of the house with how tight it was. Although, he’s gay, so I’m sure he had a great time.
Speaking of “Hero,” how did you react when it became one of those touchstone songs after the events of September 11? It got a lot of airplay around that time, with snippets of dialogue from firefighters and newscasters spliced in over the music.
In the beginning, when I first heard it, I freaked out for a few days. I called Jimmy [Iovine] from [Interscope], and I told him that I was afraid people were going to think we actually did that edit and were using it to promote the song. I thought the record company had done that. But no, obviously we hadn’t. Some DJ had done it somewhere. I didn’t write the song because of that. The song was out like a month and a half before September 11. Look, if it made people feel good and if it made people feel better, that’s the way I viewed it. That’s one of the main reasons I write music and what I write songs for: because it makes me feel better. To me, it’s always been like therapy. So if at that point if made people feel better, for me it kind of made me proud. I’m not saying it was gonna change the world, obviously. But if it made one person feel a little better, I felt like I had done a good job.
I read that you initially had about 40 songs for your current album, Insomniac.
What I wanted to do is just write as many songs as possible and really pick the ones I thought were the best. Obviously you want songs that are hit songs, but you wanna kind of write and do what you want. There’s a little bit of everything. The album has everything from hip-hop to rock. It was three years to make this album.
People might think you took three years off, but naturally you were working hard on this album the entire time, right?
What I would do is take breaks in between the recordings. Trust me, I wish I would have done this album in a year instead of three years. I wish!
WEB EXCLUSIVE QUESTIONS
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Insomniac is available now.
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Instinct Online 
written by bryan on August 11, 2007
Enrique is my hero my heart.
Viva Enrique.
veso...
written by Laura on August 17, 2007
I love Enrique! His album is great. Well, so are all of his albums. I truly love all of his songs.
written by Aitutaki on October 25, 2007
I love Ping-pong song!!!