La Bicicleta

This is a duet between Shakira and fellow Colombian singer-songwriter Carlos Vives, who has had hits across the Spanish-speaking world with songs that fuse the accordion-driven vallenato with rock, pop and other Caribbean/Colombian ethnic rhythms. Shakira told Ebro Darden during a Beats 1 interview: "Vives is just one of the highest representatives of our folk music. He's done so much for our culture and our idiosyncrasies as a country, and our music. It was sort of a debt that I had with myself, like I owed myself the opportunity to work with him. It's something that we've been talking about over the years. We've been flirting with this idea of working together and then suddenly it happened with the right song and at the right moment. It was really historical for us."

The song came about after Vives sent Shakira demos for his next album. The songstress heard duet possibilities in this tune and got to work: "I felt that it had potential, but I felt that I really wanted to get my hands in the dough," she told The New York Times. "I said, 'Yeah, I like it, but it's missing something.'" Shakira came up with the song's poppy refrain, "Llévame en tu bicicleta" ("Take me on your bicycle"), transforming it into a nostalgic number that describes the pair cycling in places of their childhood.

This marked Shakira's first collaboration with a fellow Colombian artist. (She wrote and recorded it before her pair of duets on El Dorado with Maluma).