Watch the complete exclusive interview with Don Omar in “Reflections with Don Francisco” this Sunday at 10 pm Miami time
(CNN Spanish) — Reggaeton singer and producer Don Omar, one of the greatest exponents of the genre, reflected on CNN about his life before fame, his vices, his spirituality and the importance of friendship with Mario Kreutzberger, Don Francisco, who interviewed him in an intimate and personal talk that for the urban artist “will make history“.
“I lived by selling drugs,” said Don Omar. “That was my job. 14 years. 15 years. I worked in drugs. I sold drugs. I worked an eight-hour shift every day.”
Around that time he was also drunk “all night”.
“But there is something that changes you,” said Don Francisco. “Because when you see that they kill your two companions, who were also drug dealers, I don’t know. And you stay alive, that’s when you turn to God.”
Don Omar confirmed it: “I turned to God at that moment because I feared for my life.”
The Puerto Rican artist confessed to Don Francisco that when he entered the world of professional music he relapsed into a situation that he thought he had already overcome after having experienced it as a teenager.
“From arriving from a healthy, clean world, I begin to enter a world where the healthy and the clean are very few. I fell into the trap again. I fell into the trap of wanting to create a character, of wanting to create a shell” Don Omar said.
“And I thought I was doing well. I thought that now, as I was more of an adult and as everyone did, I no longer felt so judged. Everything fell apart. I can assure you. As a person, as a man, as a being spiritual. It all came crashing down.”
Don Omar reminded Don Francisco of how they met and forged their great friendship over the years.
“I remember that the first time I attended your show I was super nervous, super nervous, and I think you realized that. You could read in my physique that I wasn’t well, that I wasn’t, that I didn’t feel calm. And I remember that the first connection I had with you was because you realized what was happening with me and you took me out to your office. You told me: ‘Sit down. I don’t want you to be a person that you are not here.’ “.
“That day I was trying to see how faith is the word in English, how I fit in with that world of television and you told me that ‘you’ and from that day that you told me that ‘you’, I think that that marked your friendship and mine,” explained Don Omar, whose first name is William Omar Landrón Rivera.
“It came to the moment that I had the honor of having you as best man at my wedding and I always felt that you were different. That with you it was different. That perhaps it could be William with you.”
Mr. Francisco ensures that it was “a sincere and transparent conversation where Don Omar tells us what his life was like before he became the great music icon he is today.”
Don Omar in an interview with Don Francisco: “I lived by selling drugs”