Songfacts®:

• By the time she wrote this song, Shakira had vastly improved her writing skills in English (although there are some curious turns of phrase: "She's the greatest cook and she's fat free"). The song tells the story of Shakira not wanting forgiveness from her ex, who left her to marry another. She tells him not to bother if he hurt her feelings, because she will not be crying for him. Instead, she will move on with her own life. >>

  Suggestion credit:
  Donovan Berry - El Dorado, AR
• While promoting Oral Fixation Vol. 2, Shakira spoke with Gavin Martin about the challenges of writing in English, and how her skills evolved since the release of her first English-language album, 2001's Laundry Service: "When I wrote my first English songs, I was standing in front of this huge challenge of trying to maintain my own style and aesthetics in the way I wrote lyrics. Stylistically, I tried to defend what I represented for so long in the Hispanic world, but it was a struggle because my command of the English language was very limited back then. But this time, it's been so much more of a natural process, more spontaneous. I found myself writing in English without even planning or thinking about it. With this album, lyrically, it's more representative of the way I write in Spanish, so it's much closer to my true style.
  
  It was an intellectual challenge to me to build metaphors and construct ideas, while taking into consideration the grammar. Because every language offer you different resources: There are things I can say in Spanish I can never say in English.
  
  But Bob Dylan, he's the master, so I tried to understand his words."
• "I think 'Don't Bother' has a lot of pain in it as a song, but also a lot of humor and sarcasm," Shakira told Songwriter Universe. "Yes, it is a way of exorcising all of these feelings, a form of catharsis, getting rid of all of those emotions that torture us women at some point in our lives."
• Shakira performed this on Saturday Night Live on December 10, 2005.
• Shakira wrote this with actress/musician Leisha Hailey (of The Murmurs and Uh Huh Her) and the production trio The Matrix, known for their work with Avril Lavigne, Britney Spears, and Korn, among others.
• The video, directed by Jaume de Laiguana, features the singer demolishing her boyfriend's beloved sports car, It seems to have a visceral effect on the man, who spasms as the vehicle is crushed. "A man's car is like an extension of their ego and their manhood," Shakira told The New York Times. "I thought this would be a video that would make women say, 'Yeah, yeah!' and it would make men feel."
• While the cover of Oral Fixation Vol. 1 depicts Shakira as a maternal figure cradling an infant, the album art for Vol. 2 portrays the almost-nude singer as the biblical Eve about to take a bite from the forbidden fruit. Nearby, the baby is perched in a tree, reaching for the apple Shakira holds. "I want to attribute to Eve one more reason to bite the forbidden fruit, and that would be her oral fixation," she's quoted in The New York Times. "I've always felt that I've been a very oral person. It's my biggest source of pleasure."
  
  "From a psychoanalytical point of view, we start discovering the world through our mouths in the very first stage of our lives, when we're just born," she continued. "The first album cover is more Freudian, and the second one more resembles Jung, because Eve is a universal archetype. I tried to keep a unity between the two album covers, and I chose to use some Renaissance iconography. Mother and child and original sin are recurrent concepts of the Renaissance period, and I wanted the historical character."