MAX VADUKUL

How did singing in Spanish come about?
I grew up in Texas and one of my good friends from there is Mexican and she was so excited when she heard that I was doing songs in Spanish. She turned me on to Selena’s album when I was growing up and I listened to it all the time. At the time, I wasn’t too familiar w/ Spanish speaking artists. A lot of my fans are Hispanic and they’ve always told me, ‘you should sing something in Spanish’ but I don’t speak Spanish at all. I took it in school but I don’t speak it at all but I thought let me give this a try.

So a couple of years ago, we did a song w/ Alejandro Sanz at the Latin Grammy’s and basically we just listened to it and it was easier to sing it because we’re singers and we just mocked everything we heard. It was easy for us and we got a great response from it so I said to myself I want to give something back to all my Latin fans but I want to do it right. I don’t want to just pass through it. So I did these songs phonetically, sentence by sentence. And I spent a LOT of time on it making sure it was perfect because I didn’t want to disrespect the language because it’s so beautiful. One of my best friends in the world is Cuban so she was the test. I brought her to the studio and told her, “be honest. You have to tell me if ANYTHING is wrong” so when she approved it I knew everything was right.