Alejandro Sanz spent two years in Milan before releasing Más. He was studying saxophone and piano alongside guitar, searching, as he later described it, for a "true fusion" of sounds. What came out of sessions split between Excalibur Studios and Morning Studios in Milan and Plastic Studios in Rome in 1997, produced by Miguel Ángel Arenas and Emanuele Ruffinengo, was a record that sold over six million copies worldwide, became the best-selling album in Spanish history certified 22 times platinum in Spain, and stayed on the Billboard Latin Albums chart for 74 weeks. The fusion he was after turned out to be simpler and more radical than any of that suggests: he put a nylon-string guitar at the center of a pop record and refused to move it.
Sanz was born Alejandro Sánchez Pizarro in Madrid on December 18, 1968, to parents from Andalusia, and his father was a professional guitarist who had worked with Spanish stars Manolo Escobar and Lola Flores. Guitar at age seven, songs by age ten. The Andalusian flamenco tradition was a first musical language, absorbed through family summers in Cádiz and Algeciras, not a stylistic choice made later. What he did across the early 1990s, through Viviendo Deprisa (1991) and Si Tú Me Miras (1993) and 3 (1995), was figure out how to carry that language into pop without stripping it of its grammar. Flamenco's emotional logic, the duende, the way a phrase bends toward grief before resolving, survived in his ballads because the instrument that carries that logic was still in the room. By the time he made Más, he had it worked out. "Corazón Partío," released as a single on November 3, 1997, sounds like a song that grew out of the same soil as both traditions at once.
The collaborators Sanz chose across this period tell you exactly where he was listening. He worked with Paco de Lucía, the defining figure of modern flamenco guitar, during the 1990s, a relationship that confirmed his seriousness within the tradition even as his pop profile grew. For El Alma al Aire, released September 25, 2000 and recorded at The Hit Factory in Miami, he brought in Vicente Amigo, the Córdoba-born guitarist widely regarded as Paco de Lucía's most significant heir. That album, produced by Ruffinengo, won four Latin Grammy Awards in 2001: best album, best song, best male pop vocal album, and best record of the year. The track "Cuando Nadie Me Ve" carried the same structural commitment as Más: the guitar anchors the harmony, the voice moves above it, and the arrangement never overrides the intimacy of that relationship. The Hit Factory address is almost a joke. The production values are polished, but the emotional register is still a man alone with a guitar.
The influence that flows from that position is specific and traceable. When "La Tortura," Sanz's 2005 duet with Shakira, became a global hit, holding the number one spot on the Billboard Hot Latin Songs chart for 25 weeks, it worked partly because Sanz's vocal presence carried the weight of a tradition that Shakira's production was reaching toward. His voice, that Andalusian rasp, was a structural element. On El Tren de los Momentos (2006), he brought in Juanes and Shakira as collaborators, and the record showed how fluidly his framework could absorb Colombian and global pop influences without losing its Spanish spine. The Alicia Keys duet "Looking for Paradise," from Paraíso Express in 2009, pushed even further into English-language territory, but Sanz remained the gravitational center of those recordings. He has accumulated 24 Latin Grammy Awards and 4 Grammy Awards across his career, and in 2001 became the first Spanish artist to record an MTV Unplugged album, a format that suited him precisely because his songs were already built for acoustic reduction.
The downstream effect on Spanish-language singer-songwriters is harder to quantify than a sales figure but easy to hear. Pablo Alborán, David Bisbal, and the generation of Spanish male vocalists who emerged in the 2000s and 2010s all work in a space that Sanz cleared. The emotional directness, the guitar-forward arrangements, the willingness to let a ballad breathe without filling every bar with production, the sense that vulnerability is a legitimate posture for a male Latin pop artist: all of that has Sanz's fingerprints on it. His 2019 album #ElDisco topped the charts in Spain and brought in a new generation of collaborators, demonstrating that the framework he built in the 1990s remained elastic enough to hold contemporary sounds without losing its center of gravity.
What Sanz built is a posture, not a genre. The nylon string at the center of a pop arrangement is an argument about what intimacy sounds like, and about which traditions are worth carrying forward rather than sanding down for market appeal. His father played professionally in Andalusia. His son grew up to sell more records in Spain than anyone before him, and to do it without putting the guitar away. The lineage runs in both directions at once, backward into duende and forward into every Spanish-language ballad that trusts the space between the notes.
