Shakira Reveals Why She Almost Didn’t Release ‘Hips Don’t Lie’ as the Iconic Song Celebrates Its 20th Anniversary
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The Colombian singer shared that she had to convince her record label to delay the release of her Oral Fixation, Vol. 2 album in order to include Hips Don’t Lie on the tracklist.
Hips Don’t Lie remains an iconic anthem, still lighting up dance floors worldwide as it celebrates its 20th anniversary. But Shakira almost didn’t release it.
The 48-year-old singer teamed up with Wyclef Jean for the hit, which topped the Billboard Hot 100 in 2005. Since then, it has racked up over 2 billion streams on Spotify alone, instantly sparking nostalgia for the early 2000s whenever it plays.
In a May 8 appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Shakira reflected on the song, calling it the track that “changed [her] story.” During the interview, she revealed to Fallon that she had to fight hard to convince her record label to include Hips Don’t Lie on her 2005 album Oral Fixation, Vol. 2. In fact, adding the song turned out to be an expensive gamble that ultimately paid off.
Shakira shared a memorable story behind the creation of Hips Don’t Lie, recalling that her album had already been distributed to stores when the idea for the track emerged. “I remember my album was already distributed and then this idea came up, and Wyclef and I met. We started working on this track,” she explained.
What made it even more surreal, she revealed, was that she had a dream about Wyclef before they even met. “The funniest thing is that I had a dream — the most random dream about Wyclef,” she continued. “Then I woke up, and my manager called me and said, ‘You know what? Wyclef wants to work with you.’ And I’m like, ‘No, no. It can’t be. I had a dream about Wyclef last night. Why would I dream about Wyclef?'”
Jimmy Fallon, 50, joked that Shakira had “manifested” the collaboration with Wyclef Jean, to which Shakira replied with a smile that she had indeed had faith in it from the start. She was so convinced of the song’s potential that she took matters into her own hands. Shakira reached out to the head of her record label at the time, Donny Ienner, and urged him to pull back the already-distributed Oral Fixation, Vol. 2 so they could repackaged it with Hips Don’t Lie included.
“I remember telling him, ‘You’ve got to believe me. You’ve got to trust me. You do that, we have a hit,'” she recalled. And it paid off—her faith in the song led to the album being repackaged, ultimately changing the trajectory of her career.
To mark the 20th anniversary of Hips Don’t Lie, Shakira and Wyclef Jean gave a special performance of the iconic hit on The Tonight Show earlier this week.
Their performance came just one day after Shakira made waves at the 2025 Met Gala. After making her Met Gala debut in 2024, she returned for a second consecutive year, stunning the red carpet in a blush pink princess gown complete with a dramatic, flowing train.