When darkness falls and the moon rises overhead, pint-size Latin songstress Shakira can get dangerous. At least, that's what happens in the fantastical world of her upcoming electronica-heavy album, She Wolf, a title that captures the volatility, vivacity and don't-mess-with-me vision with which she's infused her new music.

"She-wolf is the woman at daytime and the animal at night," the singer explained to MTV News. "She is a woman who knows what she wants and she goes for it. She's in touch with her most subconscious desires and she satisfies them — and she defends her freedom and her liberties and she does it with her teeth and claws, like a wild animal."

On the set of the music video for the "She Wolf" single, helmed by in-demand director Jake Nava, Shakira had to keep her composure while real-life wolves circled and sniffed at her heels. "One of these wolves wasn't amicable at all," she said. "He was a little bit of an antisocial wolf. The other one was a little bit manageable. But it was all fine. I think I was the most dangerous wolf of all of them!"

The video is Shakira's attempt to imagine and showcase what it might feel like to be a she-wolf trapped in a cage, unable to escape and raging — with killer dance moves, of course — against her imprisonment. "I just wanted to express what it feels like for a she-wolf to be in captivity, to be in a golden cage," she explained. "I think I've been in a golden cage most of my life — and now not anymore."

In the midst of filming, Shakira admitted that she felt herself slipping into that dangerous, animalistic territory exemplified by the she-wolf metaphor. "I'm in the cage and I'm going a little bit wild and I get a little carried away and start doing all kinds of outrageous stuff and hanging upside down and doing stuff that wasn't planned," she said. "But it was kind of an improvisation. I just got caught in the moment."