Fanart

Max & Lerida
Here on this page you can find covers on Shakira’s songs, which were made by me, Maxim Sobolevskiy (I play the guitar and all the rest musical instruments, and generally I make all the musical accompaniment) and my good friend Lerida Fatkhulina (she is a singer). We live in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, in the very center of Asia.

We have been fond of Shakira’s creativity for some time, and now I can’t exactly say who made who keen on it. Everything started (as it was with lots of people) in the period when Shakira released the Laundry Service” album. But “Fijación Oral Vol.1”, released in 2005, made us give much attention to her music. Shakira is our favorite female singer for the present. We think she is a great poetess, musician, and just a wonderful person. That is why, but maybe there are other reasons, it’s very interesting for us to make covers on her songs and bring something of our own to them.

The history of covers began in 2001 when we didn’t know anything about Shakira except “Whenever Wherever”, “Objection” and “Underneath Your Clothes”. I liked these songs (especially UYC) but I gave my preference mostly to heavy music. Till now, I play in metal band called Zindan, which only started its way back then. Just at that time Zindan was invited to play a live acoustic program at one of the capital’s radio stations. To show that rockers not only like heavy music, I called Lerida and we made a cover of “Underneath Your Clothes”. It was the first public performance of Zindan, and, frankly speaking, now we feel a bit awkward about this recording, you know, it was our first live experience. Much later, at the beginning of 2006, when our passion for Shakira got quite serious, Lerida and I got an idea to record, using my home PC, the way we sing Shakira’s songs to the guitar. This is how our cover of “La Pared” appeared. The further, the more: nearly at once we made “Tú”, which, it seems to me, had already become a considerable step forward. Here I tried using percussion and imitated keyboards and bass with electric guitar. The next was “Te Espero Sentada” which is an outstanding song I think, but even Shakira ignores it in her set-lists for some reason. For that one I used other instruments and tried to use drum samples. There was a good cover, but it was even a little pity, that some time later I realized that this song would be great in jazzy interpretation. I think someday I will incarnate it.

Max & Lerida
Then Shakira released “Quiero Más”, a really cool rock song, but it was very short as you know. And I got an idea to make a “full version” of it. I looped the original version and recorded the guitar solo. And you can also download here this experience. After some break we made another cover that we got such a huge response for, because the song is just a masterpiece. That’s why it was rather difficult to interpret “No”. It was being done for a pretty long time. I imitated drums again and played bass, this time during the whole song. In this song, I tried not only to exceed the limits of “an acoustic cover” but the limits of the song itself. It is for you to judge it.

But for some knotty reasons I couldn’t continue to work with Lerida. And I would like to thank her for our work together and for having been such an immense inspiration for me. Without her, this project would never have come true. So after a long time from “No” I had decided to find someone who can sing at my next cover for “Tú Serás La Historia De Mi Vida”. This song was chosen by Lerida and I began to record guitars for it as far back as in December 2006. But I could finish it only in February 2008. As for a singer, I found a girl with wonderful voice at one of the international Shakira boards and she agreed to take part. So, with the great help of Tamar van Steenbergen from Vianen (The Netherlands) I completed the latest cover. Certainly, you can also download it here. Generally I want to say, that it’s rather more interesting to cover songs like this one, because there are many good Shakira’s songs, which are not played on the shows and, may be, we are the only people who can breathe a new life into them.

Responses and opinions from the people not only from Russian-speaking fans from shakirarealms.com but fans all over the world, who could listen to my covers via internet, make us think that this, as a matter of fact, not so serious activity is interesting at least to somebody. Thank you for your support!

Max & Lerida
Max & Lerida recording 'No'

Tamar van Steenbergen

Max Sobolevskiy

Tashkent 2008