Elvis Crespo (New York, 54 years old) is as cheerful as his songs. On a terrace of Madrid’s Gran Vía, he poses for photos with ease, while laughing and joking with his Puerto Rican accent, since at six years old he went to live in Guaynabo, near San Juan. It is hard to be next to him without smiling. His clothes are impeccable, he sports hair slicked with gel that leaves perfect curls, and his perfume can be smelled from afar. “I came into this world to make people dance,” he announces. And he has certainly fulfilled his task, because who hasn’t danced at some point in life to Suavemente, Tu sonrisa, or Píntame la carita at a wedding, graduation, or birthday party. But not everything in life is flavor, and the bad streak also knocked on Elvis Crespo’s door.
Read more It’s not just sex, it’s not just affection: Is polyamory normal?
Last June he released Poeta herío, an album inspired by the most cliché, but no less authentic: heartbreak. “I ended a long relationship and in the midst of that process of pain and uncertainty, the ideas for the songs began to be born.” He was inspired by works of Beethoven, Picasso, and Frida Kahlo, also touched by heartaches. “I didn’t want to lock myself in a room and do nothing, but rather I used creation as a therapeutic process.”
Now that he has turned the page, he says, he is in Europe to announce his upcoming tour and the single La graciosa, which he released days ago with Quevedo, number one on the Spotify Spain chart for five consecutive days. Next July he will present his album in various cities such as Zurich, Milan, Madrid, Valencia, Barcelona, and Tenerife. Nine of the 13 songs on Poeta herío are collaborations with other artists. But not just any artists. Crespo managed to bring together legends from different genres like Ivy Queen and Arcángel in reggaeton, Víctor Manuelle and Toño Rosario in tropical rhythms, and also aimed at new generations with singers like Luck Ra, with whom he had already re-released Suavemente in 2025. The singer recognizes the importance of singing alongside other artists: “We are in the era of social media, of content, where collaborations add something and audiences benefit from a collaboration with different colors.”
When he dared to go solo in 1998, Crespo made the biggest hit of his career. He had come from singing in merengue orchestras on cruises, working in a laundry for a couple of years, and being part of the band Manía. At 27 years old, he released the album Suavemente, with the eponymous hit, and everything changed. “It was monstrous, it was too much for me. I didn’t have the personal, spiritual, or musical maturity for what I had to live through,” he says. A success that impacted his “ignorant ego,” as he calls it. He had grown up dreaming of being one of the Menudo boys — a Puerto Rican teenage group in the 70s where Ricky Martin was — so that girls would desire him. “I was always a ladies’ man. I wanted to be famous because I wanted the girls to look at me like that, and with Suavemente I lived that,” he recalls. “I started drinking a lot, alcoholism came into my life and hurt me a lot. Thank God I have been sober for more than 10 years now.” Those were times when mental health and excesses in artists’ lives were not concerns beyond morbid curiosity and magazine covers.
He no longer likes “parties” and avoids after parties after concerts. He gets up at five in the morning to write thank-yous in a journal and go for a run — he already has three marathons under his belt. He is reading five books simultaneously: the biography of Mao Zedong, The Act of Creation, The Artist’s Way, and The Richest Man in Babylon, “because my finances were managed by my ex-wife,” he explains; and a volume on Stalin and Hitler to understand their decisions during World War II.
He says he maintains all this discipline so that the mind doesn’t get bored, “because otherwise it starts looking into old habits.” And to disconnect from work, because for him it is a rule that his life does not revolve around his career, which he sees as equal to that of doctors, teachers, or accountants. He also delegates, trusts his team a lot, and listens to his advisors, just like the great emperors, he says, because at one point he wanted to take control of everything and the price he paid was very high, that of excessive anxiety. “This is a job. I can’t let myself be fooled by the benefits that come from being a public figure.”
During his rehabilitation process, he had no choice but to reconcile with his big hit. He had to end the ghost and the pressure of having to match that song, because more or less, “Suavemente is a composition that plays every night somewhere in the world,” he is grateful today. The frenzy for that piece is such that it was even used as an alarm clock on the Discovery space mission in 2006, the singer recalled regarding the recent Artemis 2 trip. “I think my alcoholism increased because I was competing with that.” Now he loves it, embraces it, and thanks it.
Returning home and being with his people was key: the people who love Elvis, from the El Mangotín neighborhood, who knew him as a child and witnessed all his development. “I was born on the stages of public schools in my country, I didn’t start on social media,” he says proudly. He considers his growth organic and, for that reason, he explains, it is so easy for him to play in a “little corner store” or on a stage like the one on the program La revuelta, where he performed last Monday alongside Quevedo.
Looking at his Instagram profile, videos of concerts on the streets of Puerto Rico jump out, in a face-to-face with the audience. During 2025 he did the Bodeguita Tour, where he performed by surprise in small and free shows for iconic businesses and bodegas in the United States and Puerto Rico, “a symbol of immigrant entrepreneurship,” he explained at the time. A similar bet to that of his fellow countryman Bad Bunny, who was inspired by the aesthetics of Suavemente for the video of Neverita. Both share that desire to reclaim their roots and what is unique to their country. “I don’t allow the ego, which is a false self, to tell me: ‘But are you going to sing in that little corner store?’ I am a small-town artist.”
View this post on Instagram
