MIAMI BEACH


HIS has been just about the biggest name in Spanish-language pop music over the last decade, but the Colombian singer-songwriter Juanes is approaching a crossroads, and he knows it. Not only will he will turn 40 this summer, but for several years now he has been harboring reservations about the direction his career has taken.


So when Tr3s, MTV’s Spanish-language channel, approached him a year ago about doing an “Unplugged” session, Juanes, the stage name of Juan Esteban Aristizábal Vásquez, jumped at the chance. José Tillán, the channel’s general manager, had suggested the idea to him as a way of “closing one chapter so you can start another,” and the proposal came just when Juanes felt he needed a pause to take stock of his situation — personal and musical.


“From 2000 to 2010, it was like 10 years without stopping,” he said in late January, during a break from rehearsals here. “I’d go to the studio, record, head out to tour, write new songs on the road, go back and record them, do a tour again, and compose some more. A moment came when I was fried.


“Of course I was in many wonderful places, doing interesting things and meeting new people. But it’s a lot of emotion, you’re distant from your family, and your life becomes a roller coaster. I wasn’t enjoying it any more, and I had to listen to my heart.”


On Monday evening MTV Latin America and Tr3s will broadcast “Juanes: MTV Unplugged,” recorded at the New World Symphony Center, featuring Juanes’s rock-oriented band augmented on some songs by horn and string sections. A CD and DVD version of the performance follow on Tuesday, but in an indication of Juanes’s popularity, the first single from the recording, a new country-tinged song called “La Señal,” or “The Signal,” has already been released and moved quickly to the top of the Latin pop charts in the United States and throughout Latin America.


“In the Latin marketplace, there’s really nobody quite like Juanes,” who has sold more than 15 million CDs worldwide, said Leila Cobo, the executive director of Latin content and programming for Billboard magazine. “There may be other stars at his level, but not those who do this kind of music based on guitar and rock-pop. He’s got a very distinctive voice and way of playing the guitar, and he has become very commercially successful by doing something very personal.”


But Juanes was clearly looking to the “Unplugged” session for something more than just another hit, an intention he signaled by turning to the singer-songwriters Juan Luis Guerra, 54, and Joaquín Sabina, 63, as collaborators. Not coincidentally, the older men are in a position to provide Juanes with advice: both enjoyed great critical and commercial success early in their careers, withdrew for several years and then came back, recharged and as popular as ever.


“For the Hispanic market, this is a real meeting of titans, and a generational thing with massive appeal,” Mr. Tillán said. “Juan Luis Guerra knows how to get people dancing with beautiful melodies but also writes complex lyrics. Juanes is the same proposition a generation later, more from a rock world, but with deep lyrics and great craftsmanship. And then Sabina is a generation ahead of Juan Luis, a bohemian artist who has been challenging the status quo since the ’70s.”


Formally, Mr. Guerra’s role is that of producer and arranger, though he also seems to have emerged as something of an older brother figure for Juanes. Born in the Dominican Republic and trained at the Berklee College of Music, Mr. Guerra is renowned for bringing jazz and classical influences into tropical music, and Juanes, a fan since his teenage years who first met Mr. Guerra when they performed at a music festival in Spain a couple of years ago, was eager to tap into that.


“In terms of his knowledge of music, Juan Luis is right up there with the Beatles, so I totally trust him,” Juanes said. “He’s taught me a lot about jazz harmony, and watching him play guitar has made me a better guitar player.”


But Juanes acknowledged that he hoped to learn from Mr. Guerra’s life experience. Mr. Guerra was the most influential and popular singer-songwriter in Spanish-language pop in the 1990s, right up until the minute he decided to walk away from it all and take a hiatus that lasted for several years: from 1998, after he made it known that he had become a born-again Christian, to 2007, he made only one record of new material, a collection of religious songs.