Juanes gets back to his roots with 'Vida Cotidiana' debut on 2023 tour

Juanes didn’t know Latin music would explode when he moved to Miami in 1996, electric guitar in tow. The Colombian-born singer would hear Ricky Martin, Juan Gabriel, Julio Iglesias and, less often, Maná as Spanish-language music played on the radio. Three years later, American media outlets proclaimed an “explosion” in Latin American and Latinx culture in the United States, with Shakira, Jennifer Lopez and Martin at the forefront.

“There was a moment of transcendental change in music,” Juanes recalled.

From the very beginning of his solo career, Juanes, whose full name is Juan Esteban Aristizábal Vásquez, has positioned himself right in the center of what is big in Latin music. Like his early-aughts contemporaries, he would dedicate the next decade of his career to hits that toed the line between commercially viable pop and the rock stylings of his heavy-metal origins. Now-classic songs such as “La Camisa Negra,” “A Dios Le Pido” and “Fotografía” (with Nelly Furtado) made him a driving force in the Rock en Español movement of the early 2000s.

More than 20 years since his critically acclaimed debut album, “Fíjate Bien” (“Look Closely”), Juanes is a Spanish-language pop and rock icon with more than 15 million records sold sales worldwide and two dozen Latin Grammys.

U.S. consumers have again wakened up to Spanish-language music out of Latin America: Bad Bunny was the most-streamed artist in 2022 for the third year in a row. Shakira is having a renaissance. Reggaeton is ubiquitous.

“Today, it’s crazy, no? You hear a lot of reggaeton, but people listen to everything,” Juanes said. Recent collaborations between Drake with Bad Bunny and Metallica with J Balvin have the singer “very excited by what happens in music nowadays.”

When we speak, Juanes is in the red-carpeted studio of his Miami house, surrounded by his guitars. He had just returned from his native Medellín, Colombia, where, he tells me in Spanish, he was able to reconnect with “what I am, with the essence.” It’s this essence that he taps into on the new album, a return to the early days of his career. “Vida Cotidiana” (“Daily Life”), the rocker’s first album of original music in four years, sees him put “instruments played by people” — drums, bass and his beloved guitar — back at the forefront.

After years of experimenting with his sound, drawing freely from a variety of influences from hip-hop and reggaeton, he felt he had hit a “limit.” The pandemic-induced break from decades of touring, where he would spend only about a month at home at a time, gave him the space to write music freely and without “established codes,” he said.

Though Juanes has 10 studio albums under his belt, his latest is the most thematically and sonically tied to his early work. It also shows his evolution. The new album — which features collaborations with legend Juan Luis Guerra and young Latin American artists such as Colombian rapper Mabiland — is more introspective and measured. Songs such as “Gris” and “Más” show off his renewed rock roots, complete with soaring guitars and funky bass lines, while the sweeping “Mayo,” a response to the 2021 protests in Colombia, adds to the artist’s long tradition of socially conscious writing.

The decision to return to his roots took years, he said, but was driven by a “need to return to a place in which I felt a lot more comfortable, not just to be comfortable but to feel natural and authentic.”

Now, the tour in support of “Vida Cotidiana” will see Juanes hitting nine spots across the United States, Latin America and Europe over three months.

On Friday, he’ll have his “Vida Cotidiana” debut at Wolf Trap in Northern Virginia, which he calls “one of my favorite venues.” “I’m very, very excited,” he said. “I’m so excited that I don’t want to get too excited for fear something will go wrong.”

Last month, New York authorities cut short Juanes’s performance at New York’s SummerStage after about 17,000 people showed up and overwhelmed the 5,000-person Central Park venue.

“It was a really weird surprise,” he said. “Sad because I couldn’t play, but at the same time it gave me the certainty that people were interested in seeing music like mine.”

Aug. 18 at 8 p.m. at Wolf Trap, 1551 Trap Rd., Vienna. wolftrap.org. $65-$99.