Wildlife conservationist Robert Irwin continued his red hot run on Dancing With the Stars on Tuesday night (Oct. 14) when he and dancing partner Witney Carson wowed the judges on Dedication night with a contemporary routine in honor of Irwin’s family.

Dancing to a cover of the 1990 Phil Collins ballad “You’ll Be in My Heart” from the Disney movie Tarzan, the 21-year-old began the routine seated on the floor in shadow, before looking up to the heavens as Carson approached him from behind. “Come stop your crying it will be alright/ Just take my hand, hold it tight/ I will protect you from all around you,” went the lyrics as the two joined hands and Irwin picked Carson up for a series of lifts as they spun and embraced across the floor emoting the song’s tear-jerking message through their moves.

And then, in a moment that drew gasps and whoops from the studio audience, the bright white staging and costuming dimmed as the camera swooped around Irwin to reveal a yellow palette and a new partner: Irwin’s mother, Terri. Holding hands, the mother-son duo did a twirl and ended with a long hug.

Irwin has been a season-long favorite on the show’s 34th season and on a night when there were no eliminations, his moving tribute definitely helped cement his front-runner status.

According to People, before the pair began their routine, Irwin discussed dedicating the dance to his mom in a confessional video. “I’ve never been able to capture the feeling of gratitude I feel for her. At every milestone, when I just wish, when I just wish that my dad was there, she was she was there, and that was enough,” he said, also tipping his honor hat to his late father, beloved TV personality Steve Irwin, who died at 44 in 2006 after being pierced by a stingray barb while filming his show.

“I struggle a lot with losing dad a lot,” Irwin added. “She always made sure my dad was present in our lives. I wanted to know how proud my dad would be of her.” Terri Irwin popped in for rehearsals and admitted that it was definitely an emotional week, joking, “I’m here to cry,” before adding, “After we lost Steve, it was difficult to smile again, for quite while. So for him to say, ‘You lifted me up,’ honestly, it was the opposite. Because of them, I could get up every morning, so every day I’m a proud mama.”

At the end of the routine, older sister Bindi, 27 — who won DWTS in season 21 — ran up to give her clearly emotional brother a hug before he got his scores from the judges. “[Your father is] looking at you, kid, and he’s smiling. You gave us all of your heart and soul. All I can say is this was the true expression of everlasting love,” teary judge Bruno Tonioli said. Fellow judge Carrie Ann Inaba was equally impacted, saying, “I’ve never had kids, but Terri, I have to say, if I could have had kids I would like him to be like Robert.”

Bindi’s former dance partner, judge Derek Hough, was also moved to ears, telling the Irwins, “The love I have for you family. I just have so much love you guys. I’m so proud of you. I really am. Just you become such amazing man and the world needs the Irwin family.”

In a rehearsal video posted over the weekend, Irwin said he and Carson were planning to “give this everything to make sure it’s a really special performance. Tuesday night is going to be a very meaningful moment.” That post was followed by a family pic from when the siblings were little, captioned, “My family. My everything.”

On Monday, Irwin posted a few more pics from rehearsal along with another series of throwback Irwin family photos, writing, “It has been an emotional week in rehearsals. I’ve been thinking a lot about my mum and her strength, I’ve been reminiscing on the times we’ve spent as a family and how she has kept my dad part of my life. This dance is for my mum, it’s for anyone who’s lost someone… and it’s for all the strong mothers of the world who deserve our recognition and appreciation.”

Clearly feeling all the feels this week, the conservationist dipped further into the family photo album on show day, sharing more pics from childhood through to today while dedicating that night’s dance to his mom. “Tonight I dance for my mum, the strongest person I know. My mum and dad created a legacy that I’m proud to continue,” he wrote. “I hope I can use this dance to share what she means to me, to our family, and to say thank you for always supporting me through life’s ups and downs. See you tonight.”

Mom Terri also weighed in before the big night, writing on Instagram earlier this week, “I’m incredibly honoured that Robert thought of me. Steve and I always talked about how much it meant to us to be parents. So much love. This will be a special night.”

The emotion-packed dance clearly made an impression on the judges, who gave the pair their highest scores so far this season with a 35 out of 40. Dancing With the Stars is back on Tuesday (Oct. 21) at 8 p.m. ET on ABC and Disney+, with new episodes streaming the next day on Hulu.

Watch Irwin’s emotional dance on DWTS below.

Max Martin first hit theBillboard Hot 100 dated Oct. 28, 1995, as co-writer of Backstreet Boys’ first hit, “We’ve Got It Goin’ On’,” a foretelling title for both the boy band and Martin.

The group would go on to massive success, and Martin, too. The Swedish songwriter and producer’s history includes an astounding 28 No. 1 hits as a writer on the Hot 100, a run that began in January 1999 with Britney Spears’ debut smash, “…Baby One More Time” (a title that would also prove prophetic). Among his other triumphs, he cowrote and coproduced the No. 1 hit on the Hot 100’s Greatest of All Time Songs retrospective, as announced in 2021: The Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights.”

When Martin first reached the Hot 100 as a writer, Taylor Swift was five years old. In 2012, their cowrite, also with Shellback, “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” became her first leader on the list. By 2025, the trio landed its fifth No. 1 composition, Swift’s “The Fate of Ophelia,” her 13th chart-topping song overall. The three worked on all of her LP The Life of a Showgirl during her The Eras Tour. “When I was on tour in Stockholm, I had Max Martin come out to the show, and I was talking to him, and I was like, ‘I just feel like we could knock it out of the park if we went back in’,” she shared on Instagram upon announcing the album.

“I essentially said to him, ‘I want to be as proud of it as an album as I am of the Eras Tour,” Swift mused. “And he was like, ‘Do you understand what kind of pressure that is?’ I know the pressure I’m putting on this record by saying that, but I don’t care because I love it that much. It just comes from the most infectiously joyful, wild, dramatic place I was in in my life.”

From Britney Spears to Taylor Swift and numerous pop stars in between, browse the gallery below of Max Martin’s catalog of melodic Hot 100 No. 1 hits that he’s achieved as a songwriter.

At some point during the past turbulent months, as he searched for purpose and faced the pressures of a very public divorce that engulfed both his personal and professional life, the music stopped for Raymond Ayala.

“For the first time in my life, the muse shut down,” says the man long known as Daddy Yankee. “That had never happened to me before. Ever.”

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. In 2022, Daddy Yankee — that rare artist who has garnered both vast commercial success and respect from artists and the industry alike — surprised the world when he announced his retirement from music. He released what was supposed to be his last studio album, Legendaddy, and performed what was set to be his last tour, grossing $197.8 million and selling 1.9 million tickets, then the second-highest-grossing Latin tour in Billboard Boxscore history. But Ayala was spent.

Then, on Dec. 3, 2023, at the tour’s final date at Coliseo de Puerto Rico José Miguel Agrelot in San Juan, he made yet another shocking revelation: “Tonight, I recognize, and I’m not ashamed to tell the whole world, that Jesus lives in me and I live for him,” he told the 15,000 fans that packed his hometown venue. “A story ends and a new story begins.”

Daddy Yankee will sit for his first public interview in three years on Oct. 22 as part of Billboard Latin Music Week. For tickets, go to billboardlatinmusicweek.com.

Ayala immediately started spreading the word of the Lord, in music and in deed. He released songs brimming with positivity, traveled on missions to Africa, made impromptu appearances in churches in Puerto Rico and other Latin countries and saw firsthand the reaction to his new brand of “music with a purpose,” culminating with a Latin Grammy win for best urban song for “Bonita” (Pretty), a non-album single released in 2023.

But in December 2024, Ayala’s wife of nearly 30 years filed for divorce, and an initially amicable split turned sour amid a spate of legal disputes over his many businesses and assets, including his past catalog negotiations. Making music became even more difficult.

“But it was part of the process to arrive at a total dependency on God,” Ayala now says. “He said, ‘Even if your muse is gone, remember, I am your muse. I am your inspiration.’ Today, I’m making music and I’m building a new catalog.”

I’m chatting with Ayala in a private dining room at a Brooklyn hotel — his first interview with the press since he announced his conversion to Christianity — over tea and fruit. He is 49 years old, but his trim physique (later, he’ll go to the gym with pal J Balvin) and youthful, unlined face display none of the travails of an artist who grew up in Puerto Rico’s housing projects and whose music career was jump-started by a gunshot to the leg that ended a promising baseball run.

As Daddy Yankee, Ayala is widely recognized as the man who catapulted reggaetón from underground genre to global movement, in large part thanks to his 2004 smash, “Gasolina,” and the relentless string of global hits that followed. Today, he has 105 entries — including seven No. 1s — on the Hot Latin Songs chart, among them “Despacito” alongside Luis Fonsi and his most recent, “Sonríele” (Smile), which is currently charting. At the time of publication, Daddy Yankee was the No. 37 most listened-to artist on Spotify despite the fact that he has released only a few singles in the past two years.

That is a testament to the power of the name and the man. “Without Daddy Yankee, there would be no J Balvin,” Balvin says. “He was, and continues to be, the source of inspiration that has so propelled me to elevate urban music to a global level.”

Now Ayala has embarked on a dramatically different second act, with Jesus as a centerpiece and the goal of releasing music that’s commercially successful but is “music with a purpose,” as he calls it, rather than religious music with evangelical lyrics.

“Having a life of success is different from having a life of purpose,” Ayala replies when I ask what prompted his conversion and the ensuing shift in direction. “Before, my interest was transforming the industry [through music], and that purpose had to do more with business and money, influence, success. Now my purpose is to transform lives with that same instrument. They’re very different purposes.”

But the vehicle is still the same. On Oct. 23, Ayala will perform as Daddy Yankee at the Billboard Latin Music Awards, his first televised performance in three years. And he will release Lamento En Baile (Mourning Into Dancing), his first album since 2022 — and his first since publicly converting – on Oct. 16. The title comes from Psalm 30:11, which says, “You have turned my mourning into dancing,” and dovetails with its first focus track, “Sonríele,” a peppy merengue brimming with optimism.

It’s the first track Ayala has released under DY Publishing, as well as the first step in rebuilding his catalog. In October 2024, Concord purchased key elements of his music publishing and master-recording catalog, including chart-topping hits “Gasolina,” “Con Calma” and “Despacito.” According to Concord’s website and Billboard reports, the agreement encompasses work from 2002 through 2019 and includes certain name, image and likeness rights. Prior to that acquisition, Billboard reported that parts of his catalog had been quietly acquired around 2021 by Cinq Music and a private fund that asked not to be named, which then sold those assets to Concord. (Concord, Cinq and Ayala himself decline to comment about specifics of the deals.)

“Someone like [Daddy Yankee], someone who is as prolific as he is productive, we imagine it will happen fairly quickly,” says Jorge Mejía, president/CEO of Sony Music Publishing Latin America and U.S. Latin, which continues to administer all songs written by Ayala for the world. “This is not an unusual situation for us. Artists inevitably evolve throughout their careers — growth, change and reinvention are all part of the creative journey.”

Ayala is releasing his new music on his own DY Records through a license deal with HYBE Latin America, which announced the signing in July in tandem with the release of “Sonríele” and is betting big on Daddy Yankee as its first major and established artist. “Obviously, partnering with [Daddy Yankee] is extremely important for us,” HYBE Latin America COO Juan Sebastián Arenas says. “We’re partnering with a music icon, supporting a new project. Our goal is to tell the industry we’re here to do something new. There’s no one better than [him] to accomplish that.”

Likewise, in HYBE, Ayala found a label partner that’s young (HYBE Latin America launched in 2023), inquisitive and eager to break molds. This summer, Ayala, who has a big following in Asia, went to South Korea for the first time and shot the video to his upcoming single “El Toque,” incorporating elements of Korean dance.

“I am my own manager now and I’m managing myself 100% alone, and I have good allies,” Ayala says. “HYBE is a good ally. They have a progressive mentality and they’re in constant reinvention. That’s very compatible with my new vision.”

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If you listen closely, it’s clear the seeds of Ayala’s conversion were planted in his music long ago. On 2007’s “Coraza Divina” (Divine Shield), for example, an autobiographic rap set over salsa tumbao that narrates his rise from the hood, he named a higher power: “Evil realized he was the chosen child and sought to destroy him/But you know what? I have a divine shield, the power to light my path,” he says in the chorus.

“Many people don’t know that I converted to the Lord for the first time at 19 years old,” Ayala says. “But I diverged from the path. My lyrics were clean, but I knew they belonged to the world, [not to God].”

Still, in a genre rife with sexually graphic lyrics that often glorify drugs and violence, Ayala always stood out as a rapper with a conscience who delivered mostly G-rated material, but nevertheless oozed swagger and braggadocio. The strategy let him open the door for reggaetón to find success among mainstream Latin audiences and beyond: He was the first Latin urban artist to consistently place hit songs on radio when that medium was the key driver to success.

But clearly, the content of Ayala’s music went deeper than a commercial play. On 2004’s Barrio Fino, the breakout album that includes “Gasolina,” there were tracks that referenced God and resilience. It’s a theme that appears again and again in his work — through to 2016, when, unbeknown to the public, he privately converted. He didn’t announce it, he says, “because I had many agreements I had signed and committed to” — label deals, recordings with other artists, brand deals, a major tour — “and I had to deliver.”

Ayala is known for keeping his word. He’s a man of habit and discipline: makes his bed every morning, works out, reads, eats healthy, goes to the studio, repeats. As the “Big Boss” of reggaetón and the urban movement itself, he couldn’t conceive of not fulfilling his contractual obligations. So he kept his allegiance to Christ to himself, until that 2023 show where he told the world about his new path.

“I wanted to get to where I am now and not owe anything to anyone,” he says. “I wanted to be in peace and complete liberty.”

And he was, for a while.

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Daddy Yankee’s reentry into the world of music as an artist led by faith in Jesus initially appeared seamless. He returned with the single “Bonita,” an uptempo reggaetón fused with horns and merengue that was all about positivity and happiness.

It was the first of a handful of tracks distributed through SoundOn, TikTok’s distribution and marketing platform, prior to his HYBE deal, and it benefited from TikTok support and exposure. Users have created over 1.2 million videos with “Bonita,” which generated over 1.1 billion views, and Daddy Yankee-posted content got more than 48.5 million likes, 1.7 million comments and over 3.8 million shares.

The fact was, Ayala had announced his retirement from music in 2022. “The perception was that Yankee had retired and [now] we wanted to say he hadn’t,” says Gabriel Llano, head of artist services for U.S. Latin and Latin America at SoundOn at TikTok. “When he made this musical shift, we wanted users to take those songs of his with positive messages to tell their own stories.”

After “Bonita,” Ayala released “Donante de Sangre,” a rap track where he addressed his conversion head-on for the first time. The song, which was also a metaphor for life, was used for a Red Cross blood donation campaign in Mexico, adding a dimension of social good to his new music.

Other like-minded singles trickled out, even as, in October 2024, Concord announced its purchase of parts of Daddy Yankee’s catalog. Then, on Dec. 2, 2024, Ayala made yet another surprise announcement.

“After more than two decades of marriage and after many months of trying to save my marriage, which my wife and I share, today my lawyers respond to the divorce petition received [from] Mireddys,” he wrote in a letter shared to Instagram, referring to Mireddys González, his longtime wife and high school sweetheart. “I’m grateful for the time we shared, full of blessings and values, of love and with a beautiful family that will continue to be our priority.”

González was not only Ayala’s wife but also the president of his label, El Cartel Records, and a member of its board of directors. Within weeks of the divorce announcement, on Dec. 17, Ayala filed two legal motions seeking an injunction against González and her sister Ayeicha González-Castellanos (El Cartel’s secretary/treasurer), alleging they withdrew tens of millions of dollars from his business bank accounts without authorization, according to court documents.

It was the first of a series of back-and-forth complaints, some of which are still in litigation, that have been reported widely by the press and touch many aspects of Ayala’s career and assets, including information surrounding the initial sale of catalog assets in 2021.

Although the cases are public, Ayala has not spoken about them — save for perfunctory comments as he’s gone in and out of court in Puerto Rico — and he declined to answer questions now. But he has definitely learned some things.

“Be on top of everything, even if you have lawyers and accountants,” Ayala says. “Now I’m alone, so I have to be 100% [involved]. Things I used to delegate, I don’t delegate anymore. It’s my responsibility, and I feel good and I feel I’ve learned so much more. You think you know everything about the music business and the rules keep changing. The smallest things can make a great difference.”

And, he cautions new artists, male and female: “Even if you’re not famous or successful and your career is only beginning, get married with a prenup. Music is unpredictable.”

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Whatever challenges Ayala has faced over the course of his lengthy career, they’ve been impossible to discern from the outside. Through the years he’s been unflappable, even-keeled, scandal-free. He has never even been attacked on social media — a feat in this day and age. But the past year shook him up.

“I’ve always taken good care of myself, [but now] I’ve learned to give myself more self-love,” he muses when I ask what he has taken from this experience. “It’s very important to be clear on what self-love is and establish limits. All kinds of healthy limits. Learn how to say no. I learned that we sacrifice ourselves for many people, and you do it so much that you normalize it. And that’s not the way it should be. You need to set limits. I’ve learned to be more assertive.”

When I point out I always found him assertive, he nods. “I’ve always been assertive with those outside my close circle. But you also need to set limits on those close to you.”

And eventually, Ayala learned how to make music again.

“I never thought I’d be in this situation, but I found myself in it,” he says. “And the strength I found to record an album full of joy in the most unexpected moment of my life is what helped me regain my strength. When we’re in the middle of a crisis, one of our biggest fortitudes lies in adoring and praising the Lord because it brings joy.”

Despite the change in content and the change in purpose, Ayala intends to tackle the marketing and promotion of his “music with a purpose” with every tool at his disposal, something that has proved tricky in the Latin world for religious artists who previously made secular music. Many Latin acts, particularly from Puerto Rico, are devout Christians but don’t share their beliefs in their music. And many others have publicly announced their conversions and released evangelical music with mixed results.

“From a programming perspective … it will all depend on the lyrics,” iHeartLatino senior vp of programming Pedro Javier González says. “Yankee is being smart in how he’s handling it. He knows he has global impact and is looking for the best way to take the message without alienating anyone. Up to now, it’s been positive lyrics that don’t sound religious. A lot of people are looking for this kind of content.”

HYBE’s Arenas agrees. “HYBE likes to send positive messages to the world, and I do see a trend coming with inspirational music, music that has undertones of faith,” he says. “We’ve seen it in the Anglo world, and we’re starting to see it in Latin as well. I think there’s an audience for these fans, but the right platform for the music hasn’t existed before.”

For Ayala, it’s simply part of who he is now.

“Everyone who’s inside the faith has to go to the world and preach the gospel,” he says, an obligation that applies to all, not just pastors or evangelizers. “I can’t simply convert and stay silent, you know? This isn’t simply making Christian music; the challenge is to make the kingdom part of pop culture. My vision [in the past] was to transform the industry when they told me I couldn’t. Now I’m in the same situation with a different purpose: revolutionize and reinvent.”

This story appears in the Oct. 11, 2025, issue of Billboard.