Karol G’s 2023 last album, “Mañana Será Bonito,” was her most revealing to date.
The first track sets a vulnerable tone, with lyrics translating to: “Give me time / Because I’m not in my best moment / But I’m getting better little by little, yes / Today I’m down, but tomorrow will be more beautiful.”
Now, the Colombian superstar is opening up even further in the new Netflix document “Mañana Fue Bonito,” which translates to “Tomorrow Was Beautiful,” a reflection of the point of her career where she found herself at her highest professionally — despite being at one of her lowest personally.
The film — which hits the streamer on May 8 — brings viewers inside the story of how the Grammy winner rose from a little girl in Medellín with dreams of singing to an international superstar.
There are plenty of tears, but there is also a lot of laughter, celebration and triumph — especially after many on Karol’s team advised her against a stadium tour, and she persisted anyway. She went on to become the first-ever Latina to headline a global stadium tour.
Directed by Cristina Costantini (who also helmed “Mucho, Mucho Amor” about the life of famed astrologer Walter Mercado, and the upcoming “Sally” about astronaut Sally Ride), “Tomorrow Was Beautiful” also touches on the singer’s personal life. After a breakup from a very public relationship, her most recent album was beloved by fans for artfully capturing the realities of heartbreak. In the document, she opens up for the first time about the experience.
“Love can make you feel like the happiest person on Earth, but at the same time it can destroy you, your dreams, your whole world… everything you are,” she says in the film.
Ultimately, though, “Mañana Será Bonito” the album, tour, and now the document are all about Karol learning to love herself again. And after initially keeping the details private, she’s also slowly opening up about learning to fall in love again, too: This time, into a “healthy relationship” with fellow Colombian superstar Feid. In the doc, she credits him as the person she’s most been able to visualize herself with. On TODAY May 6, she told the third hour anchors: “He understands what I do, I understand what he does. He is a really special soul. It is a blessing to have him.”
When asked if she was nervous about opening up about her love life for the first time in the Netflix doc, she admits in an interview with TODAY.com that it was a hard decision to make.
“I had a relationship that was like, super public, and everybody was into it … so to have that hard moment of the breakup, in front of millions of eyes, was difficult,” she says.
“But I think now it has become something that is part of my journey. I think I healed in front of my fans with my music. I understood that there’s a lot of people feeling the same, and they are not able to speak about it, or they don’t have the words, but they can with my music — with my testimony, with my journey. And I love that.”
Her love life, however, wasn’t the hardest part for Karol to open up about. That, she says, was the portion where she reveals the real reason why she almost quit music more than a decade ago. As she previously told “TODAY,” in 2012, she decided she was done with singing and moved to New York to study business and English.
But in the document, she explains that what truly led her to become “disillusioned” and take a break from music was a manager who came on to her when she was only 16 years old.
“It broke my heart, because it was like … you are putting me in a situation in which you’re using my hopes and dreams and putting this condition on achieving them,” she says in the film, before adding that she couldn’t bring herself to tell her parents what happened at the time.
She tells TODAY.com now the scene in the document was so difficult for her to record, she has still yet to watch “Tomorrow Was Beautiful” with anyone but herself. But it was important for her to share her experience in the hopes that it will help other women.
“When I started being surrounded by different women in this industry, I started noticing that there was a cycle — that a lot of us have experienced something similar,” she says. “I wanted to share this moment so women can feel OK knowing that they can say no, and they can open that door and they can leave. And to feel comfortable in that.”
With her document also comes another transition: A hair color change. Famous for rocking different shades throughout her career stages (blue for her “KG0516” album; red and then pink for “Mañana Será Bonito”), Karol G is now sporting brown.
“I just went back to my natural color of my hair, because there is so much going on right now, so much coming right now,” she says. “And I think I really wanted to be my most natural and original and authentic and genuine version of myself.”
Clearly, tomorrow really was beautiful. And the day after that will be, too.