Singer and voice actor Matt Hunter, who was born in New York but has Italian-Colombian roots, is on his way to becoming the next teen idol sensation, often dubbed as the "Latino Justin Bieber."
For years he voiced cartoon character "Diego" and was known for his signature chant "Go, Diego, Go!" but now Matt is ready to show his fans and the world another side of his artistic career. "I feel like it was very natural. When I was younger, I did Diego and I still do Diego. I feel like it grew with me [and] it made me the artist I am today," he said during an interview with Fox News Latino in 2011.
After being nominated at this year's Premios Juventud on Univision, Hunter is currently working to make his grand debut in mainstream U.S. pop music, the Huffington Post reported.
Once he was done recording the voice of Diego, the voice actor decided to start his singing career. "There's been a lot of voices of Diego. So yea, they switched me up, they took me off the show, and I started getting an interest in music, so I started writing and I started singing," Hunter told the Huffington Post.
The young artist decided to post some videos of him singing and playing the guitar on YouTube, which quickly caught producer's eye. "These producers reached out to me online and they were like, 'Hey we like the way you sing. Where do you live?' I said, 'New York.' 'Oh come back to our studio,'" the singer recalled.
That's how his first song "Mi Amor" (My Love) was written. Once his first single hit the web, his popularity starting growing. "I had like no following. I had like 2,000 followers on Twitter. I started making a song; I started posting more songs on Youtube. I just started growing and following started increasing, and I started to grow on the Internet."
Hunter is already a huge star in Latin America, and now wants to replicate his success in the U.S. "I'm in the kitchen cooking up some good new stuff," he confessed, "I think that just with the music, by myself, I could come out with a song. That would be a good crossover."
The singer, who would love to get a Teen Choice Award someday, said he's working on new songs, some of them very different from his previous hits. "I can't give any names yet. But I'm definitely doing stuff that's different that I've never really done before. Different genres, more like pop, more like my first song 'Mi Amor.'"