Panamenian superstar Rubén Blades has a final tour to organize, a film with Bad Bunny behind him and projects with Zoe Saldaña and Antonio Banderas ahead. He also has something more basic on his unfinished business list: learning to drive.
"I don't know how to drive," he admitted during a conversation at Billboard Latin Music Weekin Miami. When friends see him driving in a movie, they shout at the screen.
For an artist whose songs have followed generations through migration, family crises, political disillusionment, and the business of staying alive, the confession offered a small surprise. Blades can inhabit someone else's life on camera. Away from the set, there are still skills to acquire.
At 78, the Panamanian singer, songwriter, actor, and lawyer is preparing to end one demanding part of his working life. He confirmed that he expects 2027 to bring his last tour, even as he described an acting schedule and musical collaborations that leave little room for inactivity.
"Next year is the last one, the last tour," he said.
The farewell comes as His conversation in Miami, however, kept moving toward work still to be done: films to shoot, songs audiences have yet to discover and things he can learn from people decades younger.Blades said he had completed his part in 'Porto Rico,' the feature directed by René Pérez Joglar, better known as Residente, with Bad Bunny in the lead. The cast also includes Viggo Mortensen and Edward Norton. The production has been announced as a Caribbean western and historical drama.
Watching Residente direct gave Blades another view of someone he already respected as a writer. He praised the filmmaker's visual choices and clarity about what he wanted.
"The learning process never ends," Blades said.
He described a similar exchange around Bad Bunny: an artist entering a different professional environment, working alongside experienced actors and learning from them. Blades included himself in that process.
A diploma, he argued, does not mean a person knows everything. Neither does a career.
His next screen appearance is in 'Campeón gabacho,' Jonás Cuarón's film about a young Mexican migrant finding his way in the United States. Blades plays the protagonist's manager in a cast that includes Juan Daniel García Treviño, Leslie Grace and Rosario Dawson. The film reaches Mexican theaters October 29.
He also spoke of a December shoot in New York and a subsequent film with Banderas, without providing enough details to identify either project. Acting still gives him the pleasure of finding himself beside someone he has long admired. He recalled working with performers including Robert De Niro, Denzel Washington, Harrison Ford and Jack Nicholson, sounding delighted by access that decades in the business have not made ordinary.
Yet asked to choose between acting and singing, he answered without hesitation: singing.
Working with Roberto Delgado and his orchestra, sharing the performance and feeling an audience respond remain central pleasures. "That makes your soul come alive again constantly," he said.
Those audiences also create a practical problem. Blades has more than half a century of material and a limited number of hours in which to perform it.
His latest album, 'País portátil,' arrived August 21 with Roberto Delgado & Orquesta. But he resisted describing the concerts simply as a tour for the new release. People come wanting songs they have carried for years. They want 'Plástico.' They want 'Amor y control.' They want the familiar stories.
At a festival, where the allotted time might be 90 minutes or two hours, choosing becomes difficult. He recalled a Puerto Rico show that lasted five and a half hours, possible because it was his event and there were no other performers waiting for their turn.
Asked whether he had ever tired of 'Pedro Navaja,' Blades said he had not. He wrote it. He believes in it. A different audience brings another encounter with the same story. "They're like family to me," he said of his songs.
That attachment looks inevitable now. His recollection of 'Siembra,' the 1978 album with Willie Colón, offered a different starting point.
Blades said three influential New York DJs listened to the album at Fania's offices and advised against releasing it, warning it would be Colón's commercial death. Its extended songs were difficult to fit into radio formats built around much shorter selections and advertising breaks.
Decades later, he recalled, one of those DJs encountered him in New York and remembered the meeting rather differently, claiming to have predicted the album's success. Blades let him have the revised memory. The anecdote gave his advice to younger musicians some weight: an audience may need time to catch up with what an artist has made.
He encouraged independent performers to learn the tools now available to them, including social media, and to recognize choices his generation lacked. When he started, he said, refusing a record contract could mean having no opportunity to record. But success alone was too narrow a goal. "Please, we have to enjoy what we do," he said.
His own measure of the work has also changed with age. Discussing 'Maestra vida,' Blades reflected on singing material recorded when he was 32 and hearing its account of time and mortality at 78.
The words come closer now. He still recognizes the person who wrote them."The worst thing that can happen to a writer is to reach my age and say that what they wrote wasn't honest," he said. "I can say that what I wrote was honest, and I still feel that way."
He credited Gabriel García Márquez with recognizing that identity: a writer who sings. Blades said he has often thought of himself as an observer and documentarian, someone trying to bring experience into a song.
For 'En la prisión,' from 'País portátil,' he pointed to knowledge acquired through working with prisoners and studying recidivism for his law thesis. His commitment to observing people also led him to question what singing about them could accomplish.
When he wrote 'Pablo Pueblo,' he said, he had little money himself. Success eventually freed him from financial difficulties his character continued to represent. That created a contradiction he could not ignore: he was earning money describing another person's hardship.
Political participation, he argued, offered a way to help change those conditions. Asked to choose among music, acting and law, he chose law for its potential to make him useful beyond the song.
He also resisted the expectation that every piece of music must carry a political argument. People need to dance, fall in love and escape. His contribution, as he described it, was expanding the subjects a song could address.
Throughout the conversation, family and friendship kept returning as sources of perspective. He spoke of friends he has known for 60 years and of laughing with Gilberto Santa Rosa the previous day.
His grandmother taught him early that life ends. His mother helped him face that knowledge without fear.
Songs now bring his parents close again. He said 'Amor y control' grew from his mother's cancer, while his father considered 'Tiempos' the best song he had written. Hearing it recently moved him. He said he does not fear death. He would prefer that it wait. "I still have a couple of things to do," Blades said.
There is a farewell tour, for one. And those driving lessons.
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