Julio Iglesias
photo: alejandro vilar · cc0 ↗Julio Iglesias trained as a lawyer and kept goal for a Real Madrid youth side before a 1963 car accident ended his sporting ambitions; during a long recovery he took up the guitar and began writing songs. He won Spain's Benidorm song festival in 1968 and spent the 1970s and 1980s becoming the smooth, breathy-voiced crooner often called the 'Spanish Sinatra,' recording in numerous languages and selling records by the hundreds of millions worldwide. His lushly orchestrated romantic ballads made him one of the most commercially successful Latin artists in history and the working template for the international Latin-pop balladeer.
Julio Iglesias is so indebted to the American crooner tradition that critics dubbed him the 'Spanish Sinatra,' and the two eventually recorded together; you hear it in his relaxed, behind-the-beat phrasing and the way he caresses a lyric line rather than belting it.
listen forSet Sinatra's 'Strangers in the Night' beside Julio's 'Me Va, Me Va' and notice the shared crooner's ease, the conversational, unhurried delivery riding a swaying orchestral swing.
Nat King Cole's Spanish-language bolero albums brought a soft, velvet-toned crooning to Latin romantic song, and that smooth, warmly enunciated ballad style is the register Julio Iglesias works in, intimate, unforced, and built for close listening.
listen forCompare Cole's tender 'Quizás, Quizás, Quizás' with Julio's 'Manuela' and hear how both glide on a gentle bolero sway with a soft, rounded vocal that stays quiet and confiding throughout.
The romantic bolero songbook that Agustín Lara authored is the deep source Julio Iglesias draws on; Iglesias took part in the recorded canon of classic boleros and romantic ballads that Lara's compositions anchor, carrying that Mexican-Iberian songbook into the international pop mainstream.
listen forPlay Lara's 1941 standard 'Solamente una vez' and then Julio's 'De Niña a Mujer' and hear the lineage, the same sentimental, waltzing melodic curve and grand romantic address at the heart of the bolero tradition.