Shakira & Ed Sheeran – Underneath your Clothes (Live from LMYNL World Tour)

A 2002 power ballad about loving someone quietly became the loudest moment of Shakira’s Brooklyn homecoming — with Ed Sheeran on guitar.

Of all the surprises Shakira had lined up for her two-night stand at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center in July 2026 — Tyla for “Hips Don’t Lie,” Burna Boy for the World Cup song “Dai Dai” — the one that spread fastest was the quietest. Ed Sheeran walked out with an acoustic guitar, and the two of them sang “Underneath Your Clothes,” a ballad Shakira first released in 2002, together for the first time. The clip on her own channel passed half a million views within days.

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The song they were reintroducing is one of Shakira’s defining crossover hits. “Underneath Your Clothes” was the second English-language single from Laundry Service, her 2001 English debut, released to radio on February 11, 2002. She wrote the lyrics herself and built the music with Lester Mendez, and she produced it with Emilio Estefan Jr. as executive producer — the same Miami-based team that engineered her leap into the American market. It was recorded across The Hit Factory Criteria and Crescent Moon in Miami and Compass Point in the Bahamas.

Commercially it did what few Spanish-language stars had managed in English. The song reached number 9 on the Billboard Hot 100 in May 2002, topped the charts in eight countries, and finished as the fifth-biggest song of the year across Europe. The original video, directed by fashion photographer Herb Ritts, framed Shakira as a lonely touring musician and opened with a reporter asking how she felt about crossing over — a question she answered, pointedly, in Spanish. It was one of the last videos Ritts directed before his death later that year.

A full circle, twenty-four years later

What made the Barclays duet more than a nostalgia spot is the working relationship behind it. Sheeran and Shakira had already been writing together: he co-wrote “Zoo,” her song for Disney’s Zootopia 2, alongside Shakira and producer Blake Slatkin, with Shakira returning as the voice of Gazelle. So the man standing beside her on that ballad in Brooklyn wasn’t a random famous guest — he was a current collaborator reaching back into her catalog. Playing guitar and trading verses, Sheeran brought a hushed, folk-leaning sweetness to a song that was already built on restraint, and their voices settled into harmony on the chorus.

The performance landed at a particular high point. Shakira had played the first FIFA World Cup Final halftime show the day before the tour rolled into Brooklyn, and she carried that momentum into a set that ran from “La Fuerte” and “TQG” through “Whenever, Wherever” and “Waka Waka.” But it was the smallest number — one woman, one man, one acoustic guitar, and a twenty-four-year-old song about loving someone for who they are underneath everything else — that traveled furthest. More than two decades after Shakira used it to introduce herself to English-speaking audiences, “Underneath Your Clothes” found a fresh life the same way it started: as a quiet song that carried further than anyone expected.