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Enrique
on his bitter-sweet relationship with his father
 When
Enrique Iglesias travelled to Toronto in 1995 to begin recording
for his self-titled album, he did it without the blessings of his
father, the legendary singer Julio Iglesias. Enrique made the revelation
in the January 13th edition of London’s Sunday Times, wherein
he said of his father, “He said, ‘You’re nuts, you’re
f—-ing crazy, you don’t know what you’re doing’.”
Enrique added that to this day he does not talk to his father about
his music career, explaining, “I think my father thought that
nothing was going to happen, that I wasn’t going to be successful,
but not because he doesn’t believe in me — he was just
being realistic about the music industry.”
Enrique went
on, “When I sold a million copies, he would say, ‘You
know, you’re not going to pass a million copies — that’s
impossible.’ He always pissed me off like that, and then I
would end up selling 2 million or 3 million, or 4 million. Then
he’d say, ‘Oh yeah, you sold that many copies, but you’re
never going to get a Grammy’.” Enrique won a Grammy Award
for Best Latin Pop performance in 1996. His father won the award
in the very same category in 1987.
Enrique noted
in the interview that he surpassed just about every expectation
that his father held for him, saying, “So every time he would
push me, and then there came a time when there were no more obstacles
he could put in front of me. It used to be that I competed against
that, but now I can compete against myself. It’s come to a
point where it has nothing to do with my father any more.”
Despite their differences in opinion, Enrique said that still keeps
in touch with his father. “It’s not a normal relationship,”
Enrique conceded. “It’s weird in many ways, but we love
each other. I admire him so much.”
Enrique is
the third child of Julio Iglesias and Philippines-born ex-model
Isabel Preysler, although the couple divorced when he was three.
Enrique told a magazine recently that he hopes to be a better singer
than his father. “I’ve always wanted to be better than
my father as a singer, but I think that’s completely normal.
I mean, I think that if tomorrow I have kids and one of them was
to be a singer, I’d expect him to be better than me,”
he said.
The magazine
asked the younger Iglesias if, as a child, he was treated any differently
by his friends because of his world-famous father. “I mean,
they knew he was a singer. Maybe if my father would have been the
guy from Twisted Sister or someone like that, they would have been,
like, ‘Oh yeah? Wow!’ you know? But since it didn’t
really hit the generation I grew up with — my father’s
music — it didn’t really change the way people acted around
me,” he explained.
Enrique on the timelessness of Hero
Enrique Iglesias
found huge success with Hero, the first single from his latest album
Escape, which was released in November. The song peaked at Number
Three on the ‘Billboard Hot 100’ chart the week of November
17, and it climbed to Number One on the ‘Billboard Adult Contemporary
chart’ in early December. Hero also became an anthem of hope
and promise for many following the events of September 11. Iglesias
performed the song at the September 21 telethon, America: A Tribute
To Heroes. Monies raised by the telethon went to the September 11th
Telethon Fund, and are currently being used to help the thousands
of victims’ families. Iglesias told a magazine that he attributes
the timelessness of the song Hero to three things — melody,
lyrics, and production. “I think nowadays a lot of the music
is not based on the song — it’s based on the production.
And for me it goes both ways. I mean you need a good production,
but the essence — what makes a song timeless — is the
melody, the lyric, and of course, the production, but it’s
those three combined that makes a song timeless.”
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