Chris Perez and Selena | Photo: Facebook/Chris Perez
Saying goodbye to Selena Quintanilla-Pérez was one of the hardest things for her husband, Chris Perez, then he had to finish mixing her English album. The Grammy-winning musician recounts her “traumatic” death and details of recording her final album in a preview for an episode of E! True Hollywood Story.
The 2021 episode, titled “Death of Innocence,” explored the tragic losses of talented stars within the entertainment industry. The late Tejano singer was shot and killed by her friend and former fan club manager Yolanda Saldivar on March 31, 1995, though her legacy lives on to this day 28 years later to the day.
In the THS interview, Perez recounts her tragic loss.
“It was traumatic. It was the hardest thing up until that point that I had ever had to go through,” Perez shared. “I miss her face, her laughter. She was just an amazing soul, an amazing spirit. I heard fans that were like, ‘How could we let that happen?’ Come on now. You think that I would let anything happen to her? Like seriously? None of us thought that that was even a possibility.”
Perez continued, “On the road we had security, so I never really feared for her safety. You know, especially the way it happened to her, the fact that one of her friends did that, it’s just unbelievable.”
Following her murder, Selena’s team made it a mission to complete her last album Dreaming of You. “It felt like we had to finish it,” Perez said.
But it was a painful endeavor for everyone involved. “Them pushing play for me to record the guitar tracks and to hear her voice come out of the speakers in the studio, it was just painful,” Perez recalled. “To have to go in and create parts and make them sound a certain way when inside you’re just dying.”
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