By Jon PARELES

It was just another day in New York City for Shakira. She spent a recent morning promoting her new album, “Sale el Sol” (“The Sun Comes Out”), on the “Today Show.’’ Then it was off to the United Nations, where she joined the president of her native Colombia, Juan Manuel Santos, to announce the formation of a $25 million public-private initiative to improve early-childhood education. Asked on the TV show how she gets her hips to move the way they do, she replied, with a giggle, “A magician doesn’t reveal the tricks.” That’s about as much guile as Shakira would ever show. Her greatest trick ? if it is one ? has little to do with her famous hips .

It’s far more difficult to maintain Shakira’s air of transparency, the ease with which she leaps from culture to culture, role to role and language to language, all with bubbly girlishness and, behind it, a perfectionist’s attention to detail. “Sale el Sol” (Epic) is Shakira’s latest shift of direction. “It’s like I found myself again,” Shakira said. “You get influenced by everything you hear on the radio, or maybe by what you feel that other people’s expectations are.

But then you suddenly realize that everything you need to write about is what’s inside of you.” After last month’s United Nations speech, Shakira, 33, would preview “Sale el Sol” for the Latin press. Then she was off to “The Late Show With David Letterman,” where she and her dancers shimmied through her new single, “Loca,” a merengue with rapping.

Afterward she flew to Florida to continue her arena tour. Shakira Isabel Mebarak Ripoll emerged in Colombia as a teenage “rockera” ? she translates it as “rock chick” ? and eventually became the globe-hopping star who may well be Latin America’s most famous performer. Yet she hasn’t forgotten her origins. With sweet determination she continually mixes the local and the global. But last year’s “She Wolf” came close to homogenizing Shakira. It aimed for the kind of electronic club beats that were also powering Black Eyed Peas and Lady Gaga.

Although the album reached the Top 10 in the United States and elsewhere, it has only sold 352,000 copies in America after a string of million sellers. The new album jumps across hemispheres, at times looking back to the music Shakira loved while growing up in Barranquilla.

“Barranquilla is the cradle of Carnaval in our country,” she said. Shakira, of Lebanese, Italian and Spanish descent, grew nostalgic for merengue, from the Dominican Republic, and three songs on the album are electrified merengue fusions. Another Latin-rap hybrid, “Gordita” (“Little Fatty,” a term of affection), pairs Shakira with Rene Perez Joglar, who is the rapper Residente in the Puerto Rican alternative hip-hop group Calle 13.

The album includes English and Spanish versions of this summer’s worldwide hit “Waka Waka (Esto es Africa),” the official anthem of the World Cup.

The song is built directly on a 1986 song by the Golden Sounds, from Cameroon. Shakira wrote the lyrics to “Waka Waka” in English, but brought in Jorge Drexler, the Uruguayan who won an Oscar for Best Original Song from “The Motorcycle Diaries,” to adapt them into Spanish. In “Waka Waka” Shakira’s English lyrics compare soccer players to soldiers on the front lines. Mr. Drexler’s Spanish version demilitarized the song; it talks about walls coming down and the game being the only justifiable battle.

“Let’s use this song to talk about peace, not the war metaphor,” he recalled thinking. Shakira selected those lyrics. “I have this gift, and I try to use it as wisely as I can, you know?” she said. “I realized the weight that I carry with a song like that one, that so many people are going to make it part of their lives. So it had better send a message that is positive, that is optimistic, that brings a healthy state of mind to people’s lives.”