Gloria Estefan reunites her family on her 2nd Christmas album

It has been 29 years since Gloria Estefan recorded her first Christmas album and now three generations of her family are participating in her second: “Estefan Family Christmas”.

For Estefan, the end of the year parties have a special magic. They represent union, love, hope, happiness. No matter where he is in the world, he always returns home to celebrate with his family.

They get together to eat and sing. They play the piano, the guitar, they rehearse for that private concert where everyone is, including dogs and cats. And that spirit of intimacy and joy is what Estefan now wants to share with her audience through a new Christmas album that she has just released in digital format with her daughter Emily, 27, her grandson Sasha, 10, and her Husband of 44 years, Emilio Estefan, a music industry executive who has helped launch the careers of artists like Shakira and Ricky Martin, is now recording a song for the first time.

It’s like inviting the public to spend the holidays at your house.

“That’s what we want to share with people: that family is everything,” Gloria, 65, said in a recent interview with The Associated Press at her Miami Beach offices.

Spontaneously, the idea for the album came three years ago at a family Thanksgiving dinner where Gloria, Emily and Sasha sang and passed around the microphone asking the rest of the family what they were thankful for. Thus was born what would later become the first song on the album, “Thankful”.

In 2020 Gloria fell ill with COVID-19 and they were unable to celebrate. At the end of the year parties in 2021 they sang “Thankful” again and he realized that Sasha was growing and changing his voice, so he thought that it had to be urgently recorded on a disc, before his grandson stopped being a little boy. In April they launched the project and a few months later they finished it.

“It is such a dream and a blessing that I never imagined,” said the Cuban-American superstar sitting on a sofa next to Emily, both with a smile spread between their lips. “The whole process was so nice, and I enjoyed having them around me for so long.”

“Estefan Family Christmas”, her second Christmas album after 1993’s “Christmas Through Your Eyes”, includes 17 musical classics and original compositions in English and Spanish. It was released in digital format last week and its physical version will go on sale on December 2. It is produced by Gloria Estefan herself and Shelton Berg, the dean of the Frost School of Music at the University of Miami.

Executive producer Emilio Estefan sings the Christmas classic “I Wish I Could Be Santa Claus” with his grandson Sasha. A Spanish version of the song, “Quisiera yo ser Santa Claus”, was written by Gloria Estefan.

One of the most difficult moments was the day they had to record the final voices because Gloria’s dog, Lulu, 15 years old, had died at dawn. The singer of hits like “Conga”, “Mi Tierra” and “Tufotografia”, remembers that she came to the studio crying and her grandson, seeing her so sad, hugged her crying and asked her how they were going to do it.

“We are going to take the love that Lulu has given us and we are going to pour it into what we are going to sing today,” Estafan recalled telling Sasha.

And that she believes has been one of the recipes for having a united family: always be aware of each other, calling her two children, Emily and Nayib — Sasha’s father — every day, regardless of whether they are 15 minutes away. or on the other side of the planet.

“You have to take the steps yourself to make it happen, not let things happen like that and leave everything adrift,” says the singer-songwriter and businesswoman. “You have to create.”

And that feeling of joy in having a united family is what her daughter also wants to celebrate.

“What makes me happy is that when people hear what we have on this album, it’s our family,” Emily said.

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Gloria Estefan reunites her family on her 2nd Christmas album