Nelly Furtado

by Corey Levitan | Apr 18, 2001
Nelly Furtado The music-industry hype machine has only one setting: spew. The utmost praise is routinely heaped on third-string teen queens, gangsta rappers and Korn clones.

So, like the boy who cried wolf, no one really knows what to do on the rare occasion when an artist arrives who actually deserves to be called "original," "exciting" and "remarkable." Nelly Furtado fits all those adjectives.

Her voice possesses the ruthlessness of Macy Gray, yet is tempered by the silkiness of Portishead`s Beth Gibbons and a tinge of Rufus Wainwright`s quirkiness. The music she writes brings a hearty stew of influences (trip-hop, rock, pop and bossa nova) to a full and wholly unique boil.

And "babelicious" looks - which beg comparison to a young Courteney Cox - do not hurt her cause. "Ah, Courteney Cox," Furtado says, speaking from her Toronto home a day after launching her first headline tour.

"Actually, I`m really aware of that. I try to change my make-up so I don`t quite look like her in photos."

Industry insiders have heralded Furtado`s name since her debut album, "Whoa, Nelly!" was released last October. The 22-year-old was labeled a "next big thing" by Rolling Stone, received a full page in Vanity Fair and bested all competition at the Juno Awards (Canadian Grammys) earlier this week, winning four trophies. Even Elton John interrupted a recent concert with Billy Joel at the Great Western Forum near Los Angeles to confer props.

"What exactly did he say?" Furtado asks. His compliment was along the lines of "if you haven`t heard of her yet, you will."

"Right on!" Furtado responds, giggling. "Woo!" Discovered at age 18 performing in a primarily black Toronto talent show, Furtado is already a platinum artist in her native Canada. She`s just catching fire in the United States now with a single called "I`m Like a Bird," but her success seems virtually assured. (Steven Spielberg and David Geffen - through their DreamWorks Records - have launched an all-out promotional assault.) "It`s nice, it`s nice," Furtado says. "But people talking about you doesn`t mean you`re successful. It means people are talking about you, you know?" Furtado`s conversation actually bears more than a passing resemblance to bird song. Exotically variant in pitch, it`s slow, then fast, as if keeping time with a musical template.

Furtado grew up in Victoria, British Columbia, known officially as "the city of gardens." "Whoa! Nelly`s" cover pictures her lying in a grassy field.

"A big part of my influence is this love of nature," she says. "There`s a real pastoral energy there that really inspired me as a child - going outside and being really taken away about it."

Growing up in this port town of 300,000 - to which a diverse slew of immigrants has thronged since the Canadian gold rush of 1858 - also exposed this child of working-class Portuguese parents to a panoply of different musical styles from an early age. Her posse of childhood friends looked like a Benneton ad, and Furtado is equally at home singing in English, Portuguese and Hindi. She cites her exposure to hip-hop culture, beginning at age 12, as especially influential. "As small a city as we were, we had a hip-hop scene," Furtado says. "I guess that`s a testament to how strong the hip-hop vibe is. I loved taking elements from the rhyming, the DJ-ing, the break-dancing, the graffiti. I wrote rhymes for a while. It was a big part of my life."

Furtado says she "always knew" she would make music for a living.

"Since I was 4, I knew one day I would perform in front of thousands of people," she says. Before sweeping Canada and the rest of the world, however, Furtado had to sweep the floor. She cleaned rooms, alongside her mother, at Victoria`s Robin Hood Motel until the age of 18. A "Whoa, Nelly!" song called "Party" was born as a scribble on the back of a chambermaid`s report. "That`s how I paid for all my school band trips and a trip to Portugal," she says. "My childhood was spent at the motel, too, sitting in the playpen and watching my mom wash linen in the laundry room. Every summer I`d be back, wondering, `Is this my last summer here? I wonder when I`m gonna go away and do music.`

"Part of me still thinks that one day I`ll be cleaning rooms again."

For the moment at least, Furtado may keep her Dustbuster docked. The buzz around her music is as loud as it was just before fellow Canadian Alanis Morissette broke with "You Oughta Know" in 1995.

"But I try not to think about that stuff," Furtado says. "I really, really try to focus on the music. And this I`ve learned only in the last three weeks - that the only way I`m gonna survive in this business and have a long career is if I make everything else secondary and say no to the fantasies and the glitter.

"It`s a Catch-22 because you dream about this, but when you get here, you can`t enjoy it, because if you do, you won`t be grounded anymore. "But I don`t want to be on a VH1 special in five years."

(c) Copley News Service

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Author: Corey Levitan

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