Medicine
by Shakira (featuring Blake Shelton)

Album: Shakira (2014)
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Songfacts®:

  • This song is a duet with Shakira's fellow The Voice coach, Country star Blake Shelton. "That was awesome," the songstress told Ryan Seacrest. "We just [recorded it] — it's a country, folk song … I kind of directed him. I wrote the song with some people from Nashville and I sent it to him and I was super-nervous. I was like, 'Oh my god. What's he going to think?' And he loved it. He said, 'Wow! This is exactly what you were talking about. I love this song.'"
  • Shakira recalled to Billboard magazine how she approached Shelton after deciding that she wanted to get a little bit Country on her self-titled album. "I told him I wanted to work with Nashville people," she said. "I was a little tired of L.A. I wanted people with another point of view, real people with roots with whom I feel comfortable working in the same room. And I told Blake I wanted to do a song that had the narrative of a country song, that was picturesque, that was a real song. But it also needed to suit me, because after all, I'm Colombian."

    "I think I have real folk roots in my previous albums," she added. "The acoustic guitars, that type of narrative, songs that have a traditional structure. And I said to [Shelton], 'I want to do that type of song.' When I wrote the song I didn't know what direction to go in and I did like eight versions. Dance, pop…but I said no, this is a country song."
  • Shakira enlisted Nashville writer Hillary Lindsey and producer Mark Bright to help her with the song. "I think she did a hell of a job," Shelton told Billboard magazine. "One thing is for someone like her to say she's going to do something and another is to do it. And I'll be damned, a month and a half ago she wrote me and said, 'I wrote the song, and I want you to tell me what you think.' And I said: 'Gosh dang, you did exactly what you said you'd do. It sounds like a hit song.'"

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