Ricardo Arjona, the Guatemalan singer and songwriter known for dozens of Latin pop ballads that became international hits over a career spanning more than 30 years, said he will stop touring, citing back problems and impending surgery.
Arjona, 59, wrote in social media posts Sunday that he would stop performing on his “Blanco y Negro” tour after a show in Santiago, Chile, though his statement was not enough to announce a withdrawal.
“I will have to disappear to invent a bigger reason than this,” he wrote in Spanish. “If I can’t find him, I’d rather not come back.”
Arjona said he has received “six spinal infiltrations,” also known as epidural injections, in the past two months to be able to stand during his concerts and to delay surgery. Before performing Saturday, Arjona said he wasn’t sure he could take a step. His “Blanco y Negro” tour, which began last year in Buenos Aires, included dozens of shows, with several stops in Mexico, Costa Rica and Guatemala. The North American leg of the tour this year included stops at Madison Square Garden in New York, as well as dozens of other cities across the United States.
“I come from dear Argentina, which gave me songs on the street and gave me a glory I didn’t deserve,” he said. “Greetings to this Chile of many stories and affections”.
The tour highlighted two of his albums: “Blanco,” released in 2020, and “Negro,” released in 2021. Over the course of a career spanning more than 30 years, Arjona has produced more than a dozen albums. studio albums, which earned him numerous awards and recognition, including Billboard’s Latin Music Lifetime Achievement Award in 2017.
In 2006, Arjona won a Grammy Award for Best Latin Pop Album and the Latin Grammy Award for Best Male Pop Vocal Album for his album “Adentro”. By December, Arjona’s music was attracting more than 8 million people a month listeners on Spotify.
Arjona began his musical career in the 1980s and, after his music initially did not attract many listeners, he taught for a short time in a public school, he said in an interview in 2011. She returned to music and his career took off in the 1990s, when she released songs like “Historia de Taxi,” the story of a taxi driver’s love affair. The song remains one of her most popular hits to this day, having been listened to more than 158 million times on Spotify. Multiple other successes followed and ranked him in the top Latin music charts for his distinctive songs with romantic lyrics and creative storytelling.
“Life and people have been immensely generous to this Guatemalan,” he wrote on social media, adding, “a public school teacher, who by playing the guitar, adding some words and rehearsing a melody, performed a miracle that I had never seen before. suspected. “