Fans of the Texan pop star Selena Quintanilla-Pérez got a treat this week.
Twenty years after her shooting death, and after years of requests from fans, the singer's family released an early demo of the previously unheard song, "Oh No (I'll Never Fall in Love Again)."
Diana Padilla loves Selena so much, she helped organize a Selena sing-along earlier this year. Now, she and the scores of fans that joined her at a March event on UT’s campus have a new song to learn.
“It’ll definitely be a new song to do as a finale,” Padilla says. “It’s a brand new song, everybody’s super excited about it.”
Selena’s family said they recently found a rough recording of the song and decided to release it to fans.
Padilla says the track, which was recorded in English, captures a moment in the singer’s career in which she was going for crossover success in American pop.
“So, this song definitely channels that. It channels a whole different side of her that people who weren’t fans of Selena before, they listen to this and they’re like, ‘Oh, wow, this is completely different. Who’s that?’”
Selena ultimately achieved crossover success on her only album released in English, "Dreaming of You." The posthumous album sold 175,000 copies on its first day of sales, but Padilla says the “Queen of Tejano” also changed the landscape of the genre early on in her career.
“Tejano music has always been a sort of male-dominated industry, and Selena kind of broke through and changed everybody’s expectations and what people thought Tejano music should be,” Padilla says. “Whenever she started getting bigger and bigger, she was just a huge influence for girls that wanted to be singers or dancers or whatever, and sort of gave them that hope.”
But the song's release is just one way fans and marketers are keeping the late singer’s memory alive. Plans for a Selena cosmetics collection are in the works, and Selena’s family also recently partnered with a Nevada-based tech company to create a sort of digital hologram of the singer that will go on tour in 2018.
