The married singer-songwriters Alejandro Rivas and María Laura Bustamante met in college but didn't start making music together as Alejandro y María Laura until five years later, in 2009. Their different interests - Rivas was in a Led Zeppelin cover band and Bustamante studied theatre - somehow combined into the sophisticated soft-pop of their 2011 debut, Paracaídas. The album went top-10 in Peru, their home country, but Rivas says that might not have been on the strength of their music alone. "Most of the press in Peru were talking about us being a couple and really cute, not about the songs, I guess, and the artwork of the album," he says in this interview. "And we thought they missed the point completely, you know."

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