Ruben Blades

Tango was very popular in Panama at the time when I was growing up. In the Fifties in Panama, the radio stations played all types of music.

Rock is young music, it is youth oriented. It just speaks for a generation.

So that in 1974, when I graduated as a lawyer, I figured I'm not going to be a lawyer under a military regime.

I'm planning to retire from salsa. I'm planning to do a farewell tour.

I think in New York we had respect and we would pretty much fill up the places where we went, but I never got the sense that we really were Number 1 here in New York among the Latin crowds.

It doesn't make sense for me to be a lawyer in a place where there is no law.

I was the first person to come into New York with a Latin American point of view which was also very much influenced by political happenings in Latin America.

In those days the big U.S. labels didn't have any particular interest in the Latin market.

I was a kid, and I remember my mother singing. She was also a radio soap opera actress, but my mother sang.

They're making a ton of money, and no one is getting a nickel.

I was always interested in trying to find how different genres would affect the lyrics that I'd written. Salsa is where most of my songs have been recorded, the genre of salsa. It's very frenetic, fast-paced. And I felt that the lyrics sometimes were being lost.

I really think that music itself, being one of the greatest possible vehicles for mass communication, should be probed to its extremes, to see how effective it can actually become, which is one of the reasons why I became also interested in presenting political points of view.