Julio Iglesias

Featured Playlist

Artist Playlists

About Julio Iglesias

Julio Iglesias couldn’t have seemed any more suave when he joined Willie Nelson for “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before”, a surprise global smash in 1984. The unlikely duet between the Madrid-born balladeer and the earthy country crooner made an international star out of an artist who was already the most popular singer in the Spanish-speaking world. Indeed, Iglesias found fame even before he began singing love songs, starting out as a football player in the mid-‘60s before an injury prematurely ended his career. As Spain’s representative in the 1970 Eurovision Song Contest, the young Iglesias excelled at this early opportunity to show his charisma, his uncommon control as a vocalist and his ability to transcend music’s territorial borders. Throughout the ‘70s, he scored hits in French, Italian and Portuguese, though 1972’s “Un Canto A Galicia”—sung in his father’s native tongue of Galician—may feature his most keenly felt performance. After his breakthrough in the U.S. with 1984’s 1100 Bel Air Place—on which his duet partners included not just Nelson but Diana Ross and The Beach Boys—he consolidated his success with a string of lushly produced albums that became the scores for passionate love affairs both real and imagined. He ventured beyond his tasteful take on Latin pop and jazz styles with 1990’s Starry Night, an engaging set of covers by The Beatles, Buck Owens and others, and 2003’s Divorcio, a vivid demonstration of his undimmed powers of seduction.

HOMETOWN
Madrid, Spain
BORN
23 September 1943
GENRE
Pop in Spanish

Select a country or region

Africa, Middle East, and India

Asia Pacific

Europe

Latin America and the Caribbean

The United States and Canada