.Although Vives' popular music is vallenato-adjacent, he still thinks his tunes spiritually hook up to folkloric vallenato. Correct vallenatos, he says, knew stories that would certainly travel from pueblo to pueblo. La Gota Fru00eda, a 1938 vallenato through Emiliano Zuleta that Vives famously covered, records a duel in between two widely known accordion players. Likewise, Vives and Shakira told a story of two good friends meeting to use their bikes from Santa Marta (Vives' home town) to La Arenosa (or Barranquilla, where Shakira is actually from) in "La Bicicleta." Through recording a small part of life in Colombia, Vives maintains the conventional storytelling of vallenato through his modern tunes..