Carin Leon

One Liner:  Like I'm in Taco Cabana waiting for my fajita taco plate

Wikipedia Genre:  Banda, mariachi, norteño, sierreño, technobanda, grupero, country, flamenco

Home: Hermosillo, Sonora, Mexico

Poster Position: 2
Both Weekends.
Friday at 4:30. (which, why is a top 9 guy this early?)

AmEx Stage

Thoughts:  Bummer.  I know nothing about this style of Spanish-language music, and don't really care about it, so this is one of the sub-headliners just wasting an entire spot on the poster for me.  I mean, he is seriously the top artists that is not a headliner.  Lame.

Óscar Armando Díaz de León Huez, known professionally as Carín León, is from Hermosillo, Sonora, Mexico, and to me he sounds like the music you hear in a Taco Cabana.  I don't mean that to be rude, but it's just the best comparison I have.  Picked guitars, tubas, horns here and there, and his tenor/falsetto voice singing things that sound like they might be sad or hard for him to talk about.

He won a Latin Grammy in 2022, and was also the most streamed Mexican artist on Spotify that same year.  Another Latin Grammy in 2023.  He's played the Grand Ole Opry and Coachella since then.  Many of his songs appear to be him with someone else.  Like, his top song on Spotify right now is a Grupo Frontera song that he appears on, and then his third most streamed is just a Maluma song that he joined.  His top personal tune is "Primera Cita," from his 2023 album Colmillo De Leche, and has 569 million streams.

Primera Cita might mean first date.  And yes, this song is less something from Taco Cabana and more like an Ed Sheeran tune sung in Spanish.  Here is that one with the Grupo, 669.4 million streams.

I cannot deny that he has all of the streams - he is definitely massively popular among the people who want to listen to traditional music in Spanish.  But I don't it.