Andres Cepeda

A piano at five, a band at seventeen

Andrés Cepeda was born in Bogotá on 7 July 1973, the youngest of five children. He started at the piano at five and wrote his first piece at twelve, which is the sort of detail that usually gets smoothed into myth but in his case simply preceded a long apprenticeship in a city that had little music industry to speak of.

The band was Poligamia, which he founded in 1990 while still in his teens. They played pop-rock about heartbreak and ordinary Bogotá life and put out four albums between 1993 and 1998 before splitting. For a generation of Colombians who were at school in the mid-1990s, Poligamia songs are a fixed point, and Cepeda's later career as a romantic balladeer has always sat slightly oddly against them.

His solo debut, Sé Morir, came in 1999. The follow-up, El Carpintero, in 2001, went quadruple platinum in Colombia and established the pattern he has worked ever since: carefully built songs for a large, loyal, mostly Spanish-speaking audience, delivered without much fuss.

Fifteen albums and a habit of winning the same prize

The run of studio records from Sé Morir through Siempre Queda Una Canción, Canción Rota, Para Amarte Mejor, Día Tras Día, Lo Mejor Que Hay En Mi Vida, Mil Ciudades, TRECE, Me Estás Haciendo Falta and Décimo Cuarto is a career built album by album rather than by single. He spent 1999 to 2013 on FM Discos & Cintas and then moved to Sony.

The Latin Recording Academy has handed him the Best Traditional Pop Album award four times: for Lo Mejor Que Hay En Mi Vida in 2013, for Compadres with Fonseca in 2020, for Décimo Cuarto in 2023 and for Bogotá in 2025. He also took a nomination in the same category for Mil Ciudades in 2016. No one else has won or been nominated in that category more often.

Television widened the audience considerably. He sat as a coach on La Voz Colombia for its second, third and fourth seasons, from 2012 to 2014, which put a songwriter known for boleros and ballads into living rooms every week.

Bogotá, the record that paid off

Bogotá, his fifteenth studio album, arrived in April 2025, with Andrés Obregón and Manuel Medrano among the guests and songs including Prométeme, El Café and Una Flor. It is explicitly a record about the city he comes from, and it has done more for him commercially and critically than anything in years.

It took him to the Latin Grammys at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas on 14 November 2025 with three nominations, and he left with Best Traditional Pop Album. The deluxe edition, which added work with Morat, Ha*Ash, Luis Fonsi and a reading of Cariñito with Los Ángeles Azules, then earned a nomination for Best Latin Pop Album at the 2026 Grammy Awards, in a field with Rauw Alejandro, Karol G and Alejandro Sanz. Natalia Lafourcade won it for Cancionera.

Going independent, and a big band of thirty

On 5 August 2026, after more than three decades signed to major labels including Warner and Sony, Cepeda relaunched his own imprint, Andrés Cepeda Música, with FM Entretenimiento handling distribution. His reasoning was blunt: the industry has changed a great deal, labels now ask for a lot while providing fewer of the services artists used to get, and an independent artist has to assemble the whole team themselves.

The first release under it was Andrés Cepeda Big Band 2, recorded live across twelve sold-out nights in June 2025 at the Teatro Mayor Julio Mario Santo Domingo in Bogotá with an orchestra of more than thirty players. It follows the first Big Band from 2019 and works through the bolero and tropical repertoire of the last century: Quién Será, Y Hoy Como Ayer, Pachito E'ché, Lamento Borincano, El Merecumbé, and Rayito de Luna with the Mexican singer Lila Downs. The album also carries a restored recording of Celia Cruz on Las Pilanderas, taken from an original tape and cleaned up without any use of artificial intelligence, which closes off an ambition Cepeda had held for years.

His own account of the project is about scale rather than nostalgia. A bolero, as he puts it, is an intimate story told into someone's ear, and telling that story with more than twenty musicians, with the brightness of the percussion and the harmony of the piano underneath it, turns it into something monumental.

Where he is right now

The album launch was a concert in its own right, at the Movistar Arena in Bogotá on the evening of 5 August 2026. He opened with Quién Será and Los 40, moved into Negrura, then Rayito de Luna and Lamento Borincano, folded his own catalogue in with Besos Usados, Embrujo, El Carpintero, Me Voy and Sé Morir, ran a long tropical stretch through Pachito E'ché, Cariñito, Merecumbé, Momposina, El Año Viejo and Colombia Tierra Querida, and finished with Tengo Ganas and Piel Canela. Eighteen songs, crossing Puerto Rico, Mexico, Argentina and Colombia. Embrujo, he explained, was the song his father used to sing to settle his mother's temper. Negrura went to Luis Miguel Olivar, his manager of thirty years.

Before that he had taken Bogotá: La Gira through fourteen cities in the United States in May 2026 — Boston's Lynn Auditorium on 12 May, the Beacon Theatre in New York on 13 May, the Ritz in Elizabeth, New Jersey on 15 May, the Lincoln Theatre in Washington on 16 May, the Variety Playhouse in Atlanta on 18 May and the James L. Knight Center in Miami on 22 May among them. Those dates were a reschedule: the original November 2025 run was postponed and existing tickets were honoured.

The most interesting thing he has done this year was at Festival Cordillera in Bogotá's Parque Simón Bolívar. He played the Sunday, 13 September 2026, in a slot running from six until quarter past seven, and brought Poligamia back on stage for the first time in 28 years. Juan Gabriel Turbay was among the original members alongside him. They played Capitalino, Desvanecer and Mi Generación to a crowd that sang the lot. Cepeda introduced them as the lifelong friends he learned to make music with.

Autumn has kept him in the region — Quito, Guayaquil and Cuenca across 17 to 19 September, Cartagena on 26 September, Villavicencio on 28 November — with a short Australian run in early November. As of now there is one date on sale.

What the show is

Two parallel shows exist at the moment and they are not the same thing. The Big Band production needs an orchestra of thirty-plus and a hall that can hold it, and it is built around repertoire that mostly is not his. Bogotá: La Gira is the touring version: his full band, the Bogotá material, and a back catalogue stretching to 1999.

Reviews and audience accounts of the touring show consistently pick out the same two things — the voice holding up across a long set, and how much he talks to the room between songs. It is a theatre show rather than an arena spectacle, and the staging is built around the band rather than production effects.