J Balvin Is Elevating Without Ego

J Balvin is mulling over a secret that even day-one fans wouldn’t know. “Wow, there’s not a lot. I love to play Mario Kart in my free time,” he pauses. “I’m scared of butterflies! I think those two are pretty interesting—you know, being scared of butterflies.”

The Colombian reggaeton superstar is speaking from the Californian desert between shows at Coachella, humbly apologising for the “crazy” Zoom connection and seven-minute delay. “My bad!”

Balvin has been busy. The “F40” singer and rapper also hosted a Ferrari event alongside Mexico’s Peso Pluma—he says his relationship with the luxe Italian sports car brand is symbolic to him as a Latino. “All those things are for the culture,” he declares.

Live, the energetic Balvin commands audiences. But in person, he’s lowkey, answering to José and finishing sentences with a rhetorical “right?” Balvin is known for his flamboyant attire and fluoro hair, attending The Met Gala. But on the day we speak, he’s unrecognisable, with a beard and unbraided hair, loose and curling.

Balvin would become the first Latin American act to perform on Coachella’s main stage in 2018 as Beyoncé’s surprise guest after she blazed a remix of the mega-hit “Mi Gente” (My People)—he reappeared solo the following year.

This go, the dynamo eclipsed headliner Doja Cat with an elaborate production involving an extraterrestrial concept and a buzz cameo by Will Smith reviving the Men In Black theme song. Indeed, Balvin is big on “elevating.”

Balvin makes it seem effortless. “I wish!” he laughs. For Coachella, Balvin spent six months on prep alone. “[The thinking] is just like, ‘How can I be better than the last time?’…I just want to see how I can be better than before.”

“People were expecting a lot from me, but I did it for myself. I expect a lot from me…How can I raise the bar even more?”

Come September, Balvin will bring his Que Bueno Volver a Verte (Good to See You Again) world tour to Australia, following 2023, where he hit Splendour In The Grass and sold out headline shows in minutes. “I love it,” he enthuses of Australia. “It was beautiful.”

The reggaetonero is returning to the spotlight after taking a break. His last release was the LP JOSE in 2021, the same year he welcomed his first child with his wife, Valentina Ferrer. The former Miss Argentina, model, and wellness entrepreneur partly inspired his feminist anthem “Triple S” (shorthand for “Suelta, Soltera y Sin nadie que la joda,” meaning “Single, Strong and Not to Be Messed With”). “I love women—and I love how right now, at this time, more and more women are empowering the others. I think that’s beautiful.”

Speaking about touring, the new family man—who maintains bases in New York and Medellín—says he experiences homesickness on the road, describing it as tough. “You know you always have your favourite couch in your house, right?” he says wistfully. “Or the favourite place that you always just wanna be? It’s your happy place.

“Of course, you’re gonna miss the sofa, watching movies with my kid and my wife—the simple things: to wake up and be with them and see your son smiling at you, saying, ‘Wake up, Dad.’”

In an Anglophone music industry, Balvin is a game-changer, crossing over as a Spanish-language performer. The prince of reggaeton has been streamed billions of times. Balvin has weighed in on immigration debates in the U.S., challenging Donald Trump’s use of xeno-racial tropes back in 2015. He was listed as one of Time’s “100 Most Influential People” in 2020.

But Balvin’s success didn’t happen overnight. The Colombian was originally into rock (he stans Metallica and hopes to catch them in concert eventually) but latched on to reggaeton and, enthralled by the Puerto Rican trailblazer Daddy Yankee (of Gasolina fame), started gigging in Medellín’s clubs in the early 2000s. During this time, Balvin developed not only a melodic pop sound but also a persona, blowing up internationally with 2013’s festive “6 AM.”

Yet his biggest smash came in “Mi Gente.” Balvin subsequently joined the rising Puerto Rican trapper Bad Bunny on Cardi B’s U.S. chart-topper “I Like It”—and he and Bunny reunited for 2019’s joint album OASIS. A música urbana phenom, Balvin presented a homecoming documentary, The Boy From Medellín.

But, despite breaking barriers for Latinx acts, even collaborating with the Albanian diasporic fave Dua Lipa on “Un Día (One Day),” Balvin doesn’t believe that the industry is sufficiently globalised yet. “We still got a lot of things to do—and I think that’s a blessing,” he says. “So there’s a lot more fans that we need to conquer; there’s more places that we gotta be in and do our shows.”

“[Right now] is definitely the best moment for Latin music in history—it is! But it can always get better. And it’s not about me; it’s about the culture in general. We have different artists—and also we’re representing Latinos. So I do it for the culture. It’s not just about me; it’s about my people.”

Balvin tells me he sees himself as a “character,” which is intriguing. So where does J Balvin end and José begin?

“I mean, it’s always a battle with myself to feel the difference between one and the other,” he replies. “But J Balvin is just for the public life—that’s it. I always keep it real because when I see myself in the mirror, I see José. I’m not boosting my ego. I’m just a regular human being like everybody else on this planet. But it’s a constant battle because sometimes the character wants to make you compete a lot, and your spirit doesn’t want to. So you have to find the balance between one and the other.”

Ask if fame has made Balvin happy; again, he’s surprisingly candid. “I was thinking of that—when I had my very first success, I wasn’t as happy as I am now.”

Initially, Balvin was caught up in success—“It’s not that it was fast, because it wasn’t fast,” he stresses. However, it was discombobulating. “I can tell you that when I first really started to become successful, I was blind, and I wasn’t checking the real important things.” These days, he’s grounded. “Now that I’m a dad, now that I have family, I can find the balance between one and the other and be grateful about the whole picture.”

Approaching 40, Balvin has emerged as an advocate for mental health, launching an app called OYE (“Hey, listen”) aimed at especially Latin men. “Mental [ill-health] is like when you have a flu. It’s a sickness—and you just gotta see it like that, right?” Balvin says. “So, to me, it’s just easy to talk about it—because I think the most beautiful thing about human beings is being vulnerable and showing that we’re fragile.”

As “a big artist,” he understands, too, the significance of relatability in promoting openness. “I’ve been through really bad moments in my life with anxiety and depression—a couple years ago, not anymore, thank God. But I’m always taking care of myself—like I’m medicated, and I’m grateful that medicine exists. Also I meditate, I do sports, I try to be surrounded by really good people.”

Recently, Balvin has aired a series of singles—the latest, “Polvo de tu Vida” (Dust of Your Life) featuring Puerto Rican veteran Chencho Corleone. The sleek video accompanying the track continues the space-age futurism of his Coachella set. Freshly signed to Interscope Capitol Miami, the star will release what he calls a comeback album this year. But while heralding a new season, Balvin reveals he has two albums’ worth of material up his sleeve.

“I love my new music because I did it with no hurry. I was basically recording the album as if I were a kid—without any expectations—just having fun doing the music. I was keeping it real to myself and not asking what people want; ideally, just [doing] what I want and how I feel.”

Reports suggest that Balvin is venturing into EDM, with Mura Masa co-producing September’s “Dientes” (Teeth), an aughts crunk&B throwback with Usher and DJ Khalid. Curiously, he befriended Korean DJ Peggy Gou at Coachella. “I definitely wanna work with her,” he says. If anything, Balvin considers his upcoming music to be increasingly hybridised.

“It has a little bit of everything. I always like experimenting with different types of sounds, but I always keep my roots and essence. This [upcoming album] is kind of more focused on reggaeton, and then we have another one with more crazy ideas.”

Balvin is not concerned with external validation. “If I feel comfortable and happy with my work, I feel really confident. If you do it, you expect people to love it, right? But if [the music] doesn’t connect—at the very least, I’m happy with myself that I did my best and that I was happy.”

In 2022, Balvin teamed with Ed Sheeran for an EP after they met randomly in a New York gym—and they’re sitting on a collab LP. “We recorded it completely in Paris and New York more than a year ago,” he shares. “We’re just waiting for the right timing. He has his project, and I have mine. So we definitely wanna drop it.” Balvin imagines “the people will go crazy” as it combines their divergent styles and cultural perspectives. “It’s gonna be a big statement in music history—it’s never done before.”

Balvin admires Sheeran’s professionalism. “The reason he’s so huge is because he works with so much passion, and he’s so disciplined about it.” The Brit doesn’t waste any time in the studio, he observes. “It’s like, ‘Let’s do it’—military vibes!”

Altruistic in his own ambition, Balvin is committed to fostering multiculturalism in a volatile era—his music transcends borders. “I’m not into politics, but this is just about human beings,” he says. “What we need is love in this world—I think that’s all we need. We need love and to help each other. That’s the way I’ve always been living: for service and to help others. So politics—I’ll forget about it and just be focused on ethics and morals and humanity. We’re all the same.”


You can purchase tickets to J Balvin’s upcoming Australian tour here.