Workouts, Lana Del Rey & More – Billboard

When Karol G decided to go on a stadium tour, she recalls, someone asked her how prepared she was. “‘Beyoncé is doing stadiums. Taylor Swift is doing stadiums. Are you ready?’ And I answered, ‘No, today I’m not. But I will be ready, because it depends on me.’”

Six months later, Karol G, the subject of this week’s Billboard cover story, was onstage in a phenomenally quick turnaround, and, most importantly, an astoundingly successful one. By year-end, she was the highest grossing Latin artist of 2023 according to Billboard Boxscore.

But planning to perform in stadiums and actually performing are two very different things. For Karol, it starts with the basic love of performance. “The stage is my happiest place,” she tells Billboard. “It’s not like I’m always happy and perfect when I go onstage. But when I go out, there’s nothing the energy in that place can’t cure.”

When it came time to plan her Mañana Será Bonito Tour, the singer says that she and her team knew it was time to take on bigger audiences. “It was something we discussed a lot internally,” she says. “I came from doing the ‘Bichota’ tour, then $trip Love tour. Everyone said, ‘You have to let people breathe. A lot of artists are touring.’ Then, I released Mañana será bonito. This album, I feel, got into people’s bodies, their veins, and it touched something in them. I had never felt as much love from my fans as with this album.”

Playing Mañana live became a mission. The first step in preparing, says Karol, was “proving to myself that I was ready to do it. We had the pressure of knowing Beyoncé and Taylor Swift would be touring at the same time, so it couldn’t look like Karol G was the one who had no business doing a stadium tour. It was a huge personal challenge from how I looked to how I thought.”

Among the challenges was getting physically fit — between changing her diet and exercise routine and getting mentally prepared for the show, Karol says the physical preparation for her show brought out a major change in her.

“It’s spending two hours and 45 minutes in a place that’s five or six times bigger than what you’re used to, singing and dancing, so there was a big physical challenge,” she says. “I had worked out my entire life, my muscles were used to it, so I began to see changes. And the more change I saw, the more I wanted to do!”

However, she says, the hardest challenge was having Mañana será bonito, and Mañana será bonito: Bichota season – two very different albums — coexist in the same show.

“It’s two completely different worlds,” she says. “So, I wrote a mini book [a concept that opens the show] where I explained everything, and I gave it to [the tour designers], and said: ‘This is my story.  This is Carolina’s story, and I want her to be a siren.’ And they found the way to make it work.”

Going to a Karol G show is a bit like a religious experience — multiple generations gather together in a collective exercise of letting go that begins hours, even days before a show, when fans decide what to wear, what wig to buy, what signs to take to catch Karol’s attention; she’s known for constantly engaging with fans from the stage, sometimes dropping out of a choreography mid-song for a picture, a kiss, a hello.

“It’s an energy,” Karol says. “After a show, I put on Lana Del Rey’s ‘Summertime Sadness’ and I lie in bed crying thinking how amazing shows are. If you could turn off the light and just see the energy, it would be blinding. The most beautiful thing about my shows is people arrive with the intention to heal. Their intentions are so beautiful that when I go onstage, and all that energy is directed toward me, I feel like a battery that’s recharging, and filling up and sometimes I cry a lot in my shows. I try not to, but my heart feels like it’s going to burst.”

Read the full cover story here.