Pepe Aguilar

Pepe Aguilar is one of the most resounding voices of contemporary Mexican popular music. Son of legendary ranchera icons Antonio Aguilar and Flor Silvestre, the San Antonio-born artist managed to forge a distinguished musical career in his own right, infusing new life into the ranchera and mariachi canon with lasting gems like “Por Mujeres Como Tú” (1998) and “Directo Al Corazón” (1998), while remaining unafraid of exploring new sounds. Pepe Aguilar (born José Antonio Aguilar Jiménez in 1968) began his career with the three-album series Pepe Aguilar con Tambora(1991), a traditional effort that echoed his father’s more rustic sound. By the next year, he would explore a more baroque mariachi flavour in Recuérdame Bonito (1992), which has come to characterise his style ever since. The titular song, written by Joan Sebastian, placed Aguilar at the top of the charts in various Latin American countries, jumpstarting his solo career. Aguilar would spend most of the decade hashing out his characteristically melancholic sound, propelled by his honey-coated croon that most often sang of heartbreak and surrender with unabashed vulnerability on numbers like “Me Estoy Acostumbrando A Ti” (1998). By the turn of the millennium, Aguilar mastered this aesthetic, becoming one of the prime exponents of the ranchera genre’s new generation, alongside Alejandro Fernández and Pedro Fernández. He would infuse new life into his sound with his 2014 acoustic effort, MTV Unplugged––performing alongside pop heavyweights like Miguel Bosé and Natalia Lafourcade––an album that can be seen as a bridge toward the more contemporary sound he would explore in subsequent records like No Lo Había Dicho (2016).