After her split from Gerard Pique, Colombian singer Shakira says it’s good to be single and that she’s regained her appetite for work, even though she’s raising two children on her own, Business Insider reports.

The 47-year-old opened up about the struggles she faced during her relationship with the Spanish footballer and after the break-up in an interview with Zane Lowe’s Apple Music podcast, saying she feels her music has blossomed again since being single.

“In a way, it’s good not to have a husband. I don’t know why, it dragged me down,” she said. “Sometimes it was a love-hate relationship because I failed every time I was dragged into the studio to do my work,” Shakira explained.

“It seemed to me that I was leaving my family alone. There were times when I honestly didn’t like it. You know, I felt guilty. I felt torn,” the singer said.

But she says that after breaking up with Pique and moving to Miami with her two sons, things are “completely different.” “Now I feel like I want to work. I feel like I want to write songs. I feel like I want to make music. This is my obsessive need, which I did not feel before,” said Shakira.

However, the singer admitted that at first everything was not easy.

Shakira says music is the “glue” that helped her get through the breakup

“I had to pick up the pieces that had torn me apart and put it all back together and music was the glue for that, although now it’s more of a challenge because now I’m responsible for these two children, these two little ones who depend on me so much for a long time. And I’m a single mother, I don’t have a husband who would help me with anything,” the singer said.

They have two children with Pique, 11-year-old Milan and 9-year-old Sasha. The Spanish singer and footballer reached a custody agreement in April last year following a scandal in 2022 when Shakira publicly accused Pique of infidelity in a new post-split song.

They were a couple for 11 years without marriage, although Shakira seems to refer to the footballer as her ex-husband.

Last November, the Colombian singer avoided legal trouble in Spain, where the tax office accused her of tax evasion. She took a plea deal with prosecutors before the trial and paid a fine to avoid criminal charges.