Inside Track: Shakira ‘Dai Dai’

Shakira’s globe‑conquering World Cup anthem began life as an experimental loop on producer A.C Vasquez’s laptop.

Shakira’s ‘Dai Dai’ is the most successful official FIFA World Cup song in history. At the time of writing, it had spent four weeks at the top of the Billboard Global 200 chart and reached number one in close to two dozen countries. Behind these impressive achievements is a back story that is the ultimate journey from sofa noodling at home to world domination. To begin at the beginning, one morning late last year Alexander Castillo Vasquez went into a music shop, bought an electric guitar and took it back to his apartment in Montreal, Canada.

Shakira’s ‘Dai Dai’ is the most successful official FIFA World Cup song in history.

“The guitar I bought was a Fender American Ultra II Stratocaster,” explains Vasquez. “It was like a new toy, so of course I wanted to try it immediately. I had been invited for a session that afternoon, and thought it’d be nice to come in with some ideas. Sitting on my couch, I had the guitar plugged DI into my portable Universal Audio Arrow soundcard, going into my laptop with Ableton, and was vibing and playing some chords. My younger sister Vanesa was also there. She’s a singer, and we are both in the group KAARIBE, so we work together all the time. She has a great ear, and made some suggestions for the chord progression. I played for maybe seven minutes, just freestyling licks, and she helped me pick the best ones, which I recorded, with a guitar part that has influences from Africa and Dominican bachata guitar.

A.C Vasquez in the studio.Photo: Erick Quituizaca“After that I went to my studio, and added drums. I have collected many samples over the last 20 years, and use them to build my drums from scratch. When I use loops, they are my loops. I have my own loop library that I worked really hard on. I’m often sound designing, and this eventually turns into loops and beats. In this case I spent half an hour building a drum loop, with a kick, a sub kick, a snare and some claps. I also added a second guitar part, a very simple bass that was purely playing root notes, and vinyl crackling, just to get the vibe. That first version of ‘Dai Dai’ had just six tracks. One artist declined it, and it’s crazy to think that it later with Shakira grew to 200 tracks, 60 different versions and became a worldwide hit!”

Fun Time

Castillo’s studio in Montreal is the typical modern producer’s facility, with high‑quality but minimalist studio gear: PMC8‑2, Genelec 8020D and Avantone MixCube monitors, Universal Audio Apollo x8 interface, Chandler TG2 mic pre, Universal Audio 1176 compressor and a Neumann U87 microphone. More unusual is the fact that Castillo’s studio contains 25 guitars and 12 synths, including the Roland Juno‑60, Moog Muse and Matriarch, Groove Synthesis 3rd Wave, Yamaha DX7, Waldorf Quantum and more. These instruments are testimony to how Castillo has developed since his early teenage days in Montreal, when he started making beats on Fruity Loops just using his mouse and a computer keyboard.

“Working with just a laptop and headphones means I can go anywhere in the world and be able to deliver, so sometimes I put all my instruments in storage, to practice working just on my computer. But then I’m like, ‘It’s fun to play around on the floor with a synth or a guitar.’ Nowadays you can make great sounds on the computer that are warm and analogue. But I love the tactile side of holding knobs. I’ll put a synth on the floor, connect it, hit record, and spend hours playing. It’s inspiring, and you don’t get that with a computer. These instruments are part of my creative process, and bring ideas out of me that I wouldn’t have on a computer. When I’m at my computer, I’m at a desk and feel I’m about to do serious stuff. I prefer to keep the playful element.

“I was talking about this with my girlfriend yesterday, and the fact that most of the big songs I’ve done started in a not very serious way, with me on the couch at my apartment or at my Dad’s house with a keyboard or a guitar. It’s always in a relaxed environment that I get cool ideas. Then I’ll bring them here in the studio and I’ll finish them properly. Sometimes I might do some really cool stuff sitting at my desk. But when I grab a guitar, hit record, and play, cool stuff happens far more often than when I’m sitting in front of a blank Ableton screen.”

Choose Your Moment

The big songs Castillo has (co‑)written and/or (co‑)produced over his career include tracks by Becky G, Selena Gomez, Justin Bieber, Britney Spears, Sean Paul, Shakira and many others. He’s worked with Shakira since 2016, and their collaboration has evolved to the point that Castillo now spends, “98 percent of my time working with her”.

“I do everything musically in the studio, and I also work as her music director since her last tour [the Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran World Tour, lasting from February 2025 to February 2026]. Shakira and I did all the musical arrangements for the songs in Ableton, the transitions, the interludes, and all the sound design for the visual stuff. Because I have all the song projects, I can give the original samples and presets to the drummer, keyboardist, bassist and guitarist, so they can use them, and mix them in with their live stuff. She has a full live band, and I liaise with guitarist Tim Mitchell, who has been her musical director for 30 years. Shakira invited me along for the first show to make sure everything sounded fine, but I ended up going along on the tour for five months, helping to tweak stuff until it all sounded exactly like the demos she and I did.”

On December 15th, 2025, Castillo found himself accompanying Shakira for the final date of the tour that year, in Cordoba, Argentina. “[The idea of] Shakira doing the World Cup song was in the air, and she was thinking about it, listening to stuff being sent to her to see if it was suitable. While driving to the stadium we were talking about it. She was a little late for the soundcheck, and when we got out of the car, she was walking fast down the hallway, going to the stage. We were still talking about it. I never push my beats on her, I normally let things flow and wait until she asks for something, before I’ll play her...