A couple weeks ago, Bad Bunny was at home, watching Especial Banco Popular, a Puerto Rican show that’s been around for decades and highlights folk music and traditions from the island. The theme of the episode Bad Bunny caught, coincidentally, revolved around someone returning home after time away and getting reacquainted with the customs and sounds of Puerto Rico — something that intrigued him, because he’d been thinking about the same subject matter while making his latest album, Debí Tirar Más Fotos.
All of a sudden, a song that made him shiver came on: “Mama Borinquen Me Llama.” “I felt like I had heard it before, but at the same time, I hadn’t,” the Puerto Rican star explains. “I kept saying, ‘Cabrón, where is that song from? Because the lyrics are incredible.’ So, I went to look for it.”
He went down a rabbit hole. The song borrows lines from “Nostalgia,” a poem about someone going to New York and aching for home, written by Virgilio Davila in the early 1900s: “Mamá, Borinquen calls to me/This country isn’t mine/Borinquen is pure flame/And here the cold is killing me.”
Bad Bunny found an early version of the song by Rafael Hernandez, a composer from the northwestern city of Aguadilla in Puerto Rico. Hernandez rolled cigarettes as a child before asking his parents to send him to music school at age 12; eventually, he left the island to perform across the world, leaving a long trail of classic boleros and guarachas, including several homesick laments longing for Puerto Rico.
The song was reinterpreted decades later by Andrés Jiménez, the folk troubadour known as “El Jibaro.” Bad Bunny uncovered that one during his search, and Jiménez’s delivery blew him away: At one point, Jiménez lets out a wail of, “Nueva York!” That shout, in particular, shocked Bad Bunny: He had been working on his own song called “NUEVAYoL” and wanted the wail to be part of his track. “I said, ‘Bro, we have to add this,’” he remembers. “It goes with everything the song is saying.”
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That sample ended up being one of the very last things Bad Bunny added to the album. In fact, just two days after Christmas, when Bad Bunny played Debí Tirar Más Fotos at the Rolling Stone offices, his team was still finalizing the track. Now, the first thing listeners hear when they start the album is that wail of “Nueva York!” It’s more powerful if you think about it as a small throughline linking Davila, Hernandez, Jiménez, and so many artists who have given voice to the migration experiences of Puerto Ricans who have had to leave their home and yearn to go back.
Bad Bunny is the latest to do so on Debí Tirar Más Fotos, an album tied up in love and nostalgia for the place he grew up. He’d been living in Los Angeles and New York over the last couple of years, but the project was a return to home after getting a chance to look at things at a distance. “You see things differently when you’ve spent time away from them,” he says. “When you’re looking at them from afar, you appreciate them more.”
That’s why he began the album’s narrative arc with that first song, which kicks off the journey back to the heart of Puerto Rico. “It’s funny because it’s an album dedicated completely to Puerto Rico, but it starts in New York,” he explains. “That was kind of how the album started: Before, when a Puerto Rican would go to the U.S., they’d be like, ‘Me voy pa’ Nueva York!’ So New York would be like shorthand for ‘I went outside of the island’ back in the day. And at the same time, amazing things happened in New York when Latinos, Puerto Ricans were here — we teamed up with Cubans, with Dominicans, there was music, there was art.”
Bad Bunny says Debí Tirar Más Fotos was the album he’s enjoyed making the most, and also says it was one that flowed right out of him. “It was the easiest, and it’s also the most street. When I say it’s more street, people think I’m coming through with a gun. But street is much more than delinquency or what people think of. It’s feeling, it’s expressing yourself.”
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Part of that commitment to keeping things down to feeling explains some of his production choices. For “Voy a LLevarte Pa PR,” he opted for simplicity. “It’s basic reggaeton,” he explains. “Sometimes I think that unconsciously that’s what people like the most in Puerto Rico. Sometimes you kill yourself like, ‘I need to make this new sound and add this reverb!’ And cabrón, what people want is perreo jibaro — the most basic.” He starts to beatbox a reggaeton beat to show what he means.
But perhaps no song feels as innate and instinctive as “Baile Inolvidable,” a stunning salsa masterpiece three songs into the album. “To me, salsa is a street rhythm, and you have to feel it,” he says. Bad Bunny had the idea while working on Un Verano Sin Ti but didn’t start making it until 2024. It was a long process that involved enlisting a bunch of young musicians from Escuela Libre de Música in Puerto Rico, and it took the better part of a year to get together. But ultimately, it turned out exactly how he wanted. “I think that song has that street feeling that I like in salsa because — I think at least — everyone, when they try to make salsa, or how I picture it goes, they go looking for so-and-so who’s the best at trumpet playing, so-and-so who goes hard on the piano, so-and-so who is the legendary arranger. Those guys are out of ideas, cabrón. There are so many kids who want to make music. These kids, they’d thank me and be like, ‘You have no idea, we’re so happy.’ Even for shows in the plazas, they let them play, but the second the big guys come through, they’re like, ‘OK, that’s enough.’”
Even when it came to featured guests, Bad Bunny hand-selected a short roster of rising Puerto Rican artists: the saxophonist-turned-singer/producer RaiNao, the indie band Chuwi, the R&B crooner Omar Courtz, and the newcomer Dei V.
Courtz and Dei V lead most of the track “VeLDÁ.” When the song begins to play at the RS office playback, Bad Bunny starts grinding on a wall. Afterwards, he notes Courtz’s unique flow. (He also chose Courtz as part of Rolling Stone‘s Future 25 in 2023.) “It’s Boricua R&B…” he says, trailing off with a mischievous smile on his face. “Should I talk shit here? I’ll talk shit.” He continues: “I feel like since De La Ghetto, there hasn’t been anyone making real Boricua R&B… This song sounds almost like reggaeton, but it’s over some R&B, and I think that’s why people like [Omar Courtz] in P.R. — he has that P.R. flow, and he sounds like he’s kicking it to a girl.”
The album is loaded with more Puerto Rican rhythms. On the tender title track. Bad Bunny says he wanted to experiment with plena and a heart-swelling choir of voices. After he plays “CAFé CON RON”, he screams out, “That’s bomba, everyone.” At no point did he worry about any of these sounds being too esoteric or hard to translate for a wider audience. “You make music hoping people like it, and I hope with all my heart people like it,” he says. He’s thoughtful for a second before breaking into a smile. “It’s going to be easier for people in Puerto Rico to love it than the rest of the world,” he contends. “But my mom liked the first song.”
He’s referring to the single “PIToRRO DE COCO,” which he released on Dec. 31. The song is an ode to Puerto Rican Christmas celebrations, Bad Bunny’s favorite time of year at home. “I think this is my favorite one,” he says. “There’s something here that makes me feel free. I’ve always loved singing since I was a kid — not singing like all the right notes, but just singing brings me happiness. This song is one of those that if I was a little kid and an artist released it and I heard it on the radio, I’d be right there, belting it out.”
The day that the song came out, he continues, his mom sent him a text message. “My mom wrote to me that she cried listening to it. And I said, ‘Ay, no.’ There are a lot of songs that I said, ‘When Mami listens to this, she’s gonna cry.’ But this wasn’t one of them! So to know that she cried with this one, I was like ‘Oh my God, I need to be there when she listens to the other ones to give her a hug because she’s going to faint. Like ‘Turista,’ when she hears those guitars…”
He trails off and picks up his phone, scrolling through his texts. He finds the one his mom sent him and begins reading it out loud: “I love that music from my childhood. I’m crying, but out of happiness. This makes me so emotional. From trap to jibaro music! This fills my heart right now.”
That message is all the validation he needs right now. “I don’t care about anything anymore,” he says. “This is more valuable than any award.”
