Not long ago, the Colombian songwriter and pop star Shakira didn’t know if she would ever make another album. “I was full of doubts, and I thought I was never going to make good music again,” she said in an interview at a Midtown Manhattan hotel suite on a busy day of promotion for yes, a new album, “El Dorado,” released on Friday.

It’s an album sung mostly in Spanish, Shakira’s original language — though she is now fluent in English — and it’s full of love songs carried by tropical rhythms. The album is named after a mythical golden city sought in the Americas by Europeans. “Finding inspiration itself and realizing it had always been there all along — that was my El Dorado,” she said. “That was a perfect state of mind.”

Her inspiration returned, she said, when she decided she didn’t have to make an album — just one song at a time: “It was like a liberation.”

Shakira Isabel Mebarak Ripoll became a superstar across Latin America in the 1990s and reached even more of the world with her 2001 album, “Laundry Service,” which had songs in English and has sold more than three million copies in the United States alone. Her globally sourced grooves, girlish smile and sinuous hips made her a music-video sensation. She went on to sell tens of millions of albums; collaborate with Beyoncé, Rihanna and Wyclef Jean (in the international hit “Hips Don’t Lie”); become a coach on “The Voice”; and record the World Cup anthem “Waka Waka (This Time for Africa),” which led to her meeting the Spanish soccer player Gerard Piqué, who is the father of her children.