Around that same time, in the 2010s, potential collaborators started noticing her work, too. “And then I was making songs with all these producers from all around the world,” Pimienta said. “I just thought: ‘This is so fun! It’s like having a pen pal,’ not realizing that these songs were going to be in someone’s catalog, and they were monetizing from this, and I was a single mother immigrant in Canada.”
Even after the success of “Miss Colombia,” which was nominated for a Grammy Award, Pimienta still struggled financially. When she began touring the record, things started to go wrong: She entered a dispute with a member of her team, and the deal on a house she was buying in Colombia fell through. On top of that, she said, “My father, who raised me, passed away, and I couldn’t be at the burial, because I was on tour making money.”
For two years, she was clinically depressed, she said. At her lowest point, she got a call from the choreographer Andrea Miller. She asked if Pimienta would be interested in collaborating on a piece for the New York City Ballet. Working on new music helped. “I started recognizing beauty,” Pimienta said. “Why it’s worth living for, why it’s worth staying, why I’m still here.”
By the time “La Belleza” came out, Pimienta was already working on “Caribenya,” which was largely produced by Amigos Poderosos, Chancha Vía Circuito and the collective Grupo Jejeje, comprising Turbo Sonidero and Arrabalero. The Britain-based Arrabalero stayed with Pimienta during the last month of recording. One day, they were in the studio with the singer-songwriter Nelly Furtado, a friend of Pimienta’s, when they began talking about a song Pimienta was working on, “Hoy Por Tí,” a synthy, slow-burning cumbia. Furtado had always liked the track. When Pimienta suggested Furtado should sing on it, she agreed. “As she was getting ready in the booth, I wrote the lyrics,” Pimienta said.
The two met around a decade ago when Furtado reached out to Pimienta after watching one of her music videos and quickly realized they had a lot in common. For one, Furtado was pregnant at the time and Pimienta had her son. (She now has two children and is raising her nephew.)
“I hadn’t really met a mother who was doing art on that level, you know what I mean, like, who was really creating in that way,” Furtado said in an interview. “She just always felt so safe to me.” To this day, she is still in awe of Pimienta and of her “healing” voice. “It just floats,” Furtado said.
