Congratulations are in order to Chart magazine’s November lovely Stylin’ model.
Nelly Furtado’s debut album, Whoa Nelly!, has been certified gold in Canada. That means 50,000 of you own the critically acclaimed disc which has been out for just over a month.
The golden girl has been keeping herself busy. You might have caught her 20th October appearance on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno, just days before Whoa, Nelly! was released. Earlier this month she was given the Outstanding Youth Accomplishment Award from the Federation of Portuguese Canadian Business and Professionals.
You can also catch “Christina Aguliera’s nerdy twin sister who reads too much” performing her globally influenced pop on the Foster Parents Plan special, Voice Of A Child on 16th December at 8 p.m. EST on Global Television Network.
Those of you looking to see this sexy singer in the flesh won’t have to wait much longer as a Canadian tour is presently in the works.

Chart Attack 

Nelly Furtado was a free-spirited teenager, suspicious of the music industry and continually blowing off anyone who offered tohelp launch her singing career until a family gathering kicked her in the butt.

After performing one of her original songs, “Onde Estas” which appears on her DreamWorks debut, Whoa, Nelly! at her grandmother’s birthday party for about 60 relatives, her mother, who had always been supportive but never interfered with her daughter’s come-and- go decisions, said, “You know, if you want to do this, you should go for it.”

Maria Furtado was aware that Gerald Eaton, lead singer of The Philosopher Kings, had been phoning Nelly in Victoria, B.C., to come to Toronto to work with him. And as a member of a multi-platinum Canadian group that composed soulful-pop for Sony Music Canada, Maria felt comfortable giving her blessing.

Nelly was a D.I.Y. kinda gal who wasn’t afraid of success, but rather uncomfortable losing control of her art. “When you make independent music for so long, you’re just scared of all the paperwork and the music industry. I didn’t even want to sign SOCAN forms,” she chuckled.

“I didn’t really know what I was talking about. It took someone with the leadership and guidance of Gerald. I probably owe it all to him, pretty much, in deciding to do music professionally.”

Furtado, 21, said she always found singing to be as natural as breathing. Her first performance was at age 4, singing a Portuguese-language duet with her mother at a Portuguese church hall for an audience of 400. At 9, she picked up the ukulele at school and a year later, the trombone. Throughout her teens, she was drawn to traditional and contemporary music forms, playing in a Portuguese marching band and developing a “religious” infatuation with hip-hop.

Meanwhile, she kept books of original song ideas and for Christmas, received “kiddy recording gear,” she said laughing.

The first musicians she met were underground MCs and DJs who hung out in local parks and malls. She even wrote rhymes for a while. As grade 11 came to a close, she planned a visit to Portugal. During a stopover in Toronto, she hooked up with Tallis Newkirk of hip-hop group Plains of Fascination and ended up singing back-up on his Join The Ranks album.

After her summer vacation in Portugal, where she opened her mind to native rock acts like Os Del Fins, San Tose E Pecadores, and Pedro Abrunhosa, she finished high school in Victoria then returned to Toronto, forming a trip-hop outfit with Newkirk.

The recording project, called Nelstar, was validated when VideoFACT awarded the duo a grant for “Like,” but Furtado didn’t showcase the material live. She felt the whole trip-hop style was “too segregated,” she revealed. “I don’t know if it represented my personality enough and vocally, it wasn’t showcasing what I could do with my voice.”

She decided to move back home and registered for creative writing at Camosun College. But before she left, she performed at the 1997 Honey Jam, an all-female talent showcase held at Lee’s Palace.

“I had to perform to a DAT, which was not that exciting but I guess I blew everybody away because I looked unassuming. I was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, and burned into my song,” she remembered.

Little did Furtado know that Eaton and his manager, Chris Smith, had been invited to the showcase by her friend. Eaton immediately approached her to write with him. “I decided to cooperate because I knew he’d be a really good connection,” she said. They went to Sony Music Canada’s writer’s room and co-wrote a duet and an R&B song. She recalled she was “overcome with this happiness of working with a professional musician.”

Once back in Victoria, she bought a guitar and started writing and performing at open mics around the city while attending school. The Philosopher Kings came through town several times. With some downtime ahead, Eaton, who had formed Track and Field Productions with bandmate/guitarist Brian West, insisted she book a flight.

Hooking up at West’s home studio, the trio wrote “My Love Grows Deeper Part I” also on Whoa, Nelly! and she knew this was the right partnership.

With a handful of Furtado’s world-influenced pop songs, including the current hit, “I’m Like A Bird,” and Smith as her manager, attorney Chris Taylor started shopping the striking young woman in late 1998. By spring, after meeting numerous labels in New York and Los Angeles, she signed with DreamWorks and continued making the album with Track and Field.

Still, Furtado hadn’t tested out the material live until she met with Jeff Craib at S.L. Feldman & Associates and insisted he get her on a few Lilith Fair dates in 1999 just herself with a guitarist. Marty Diamond of Little Big Man Booking obliged. In the summer of 2000, she held auditions for her band.

“I didn’t want the pop singer in the front and the band 10 meters in the back,” she said. “That’s not what I’m about. I’m inspired by bands like Beck’s, where everybody plays a role and they almost become caricatures and everybody feeds off each other.”

Furtado played a few quiet Canadian gigs before launching a full-scale American club tour in advance of the album. She has just wrapped up a promo trip in Portugal and Milan with the band. She plays a handful of radio shows in the U.S., then returns to the U.K. in the new year. A U.S. club tour kicks off 19th January in Seattle.
Pollstar.com 

Nelly Furtado throws a little bit of everything into her hip-hop melange — including a measure of self-confidence.

Don’t be fooled by the Top 40 radio popularity of Nelly Furtado’s trip-hop meets “The Girl From Ipanema” sound. The young Canadian singer-songwriter who’s winning raves for her debut album is all about shattering expectations, musical and otherwise.

She claims slick pop singers Mariah Carey and Mary J. Blige as her early idols, yet packs her own records with edgy, unpredictable global rhythms. On the cover of her CD, she poses like a budding teen star, but in person she exhibits a refreshing maturity–she’s sunny yet remarkably well-grounded.

More proof of her uniqueness lies in the diversity of her audience. Since its release last month, Furtado’s album, “Whoa, Nelly!,” has attracted admirers of all stripes, from the teenage acolytes who flood her with e-mail to the ultra-hip DJs who spin her vinyl singles in the underground Toronto club scene where she got her big break.

One of her songs, the profanely titled “—t on the Radio,” is a rebuke of people who assume that Furtado sold out her musical ideals to pursue mainstream stardom. At a recent show, a man old enough to be her grandfather told her he heard her via a Napster download and become an instant fan.

The 21-year-old performer’s short career path has been similarly unpredictable.

In 1999, she appeared in the lineup of the Lilith Fair, a virtual unknown alongside established artists such as Sarah McLachlan and Chrissie Hynde. Only months earlier, Furtado made plans to postpone her music career to attend college. Even before her record was out, she was spotlighted in Vanity Fair and Interview, based on advance buzz and early performances.

Hype of this sort often breeds skepticism. But “Whoa, Nelly!” delivers with a fresh bouquet of songs that perfectly capture the joy and pain of a young adult breaking free of adolescence, all set to a postmodern collage of samples and fluid Portuguese and Brazilian rhythms.

Since its release in October, critics have compared Furtado favourably to fellow Canadian Joni Mitchell, as well as to female hip-hoppers TLC and edgy pop-rock experimenters Beck and Björk. Rolling Stone called the album “soulfully, intelligently, sensuously international.”

One usually expects praise to go straight to a young performer’s head. But Furtado seems unaffected by the torrent of attention.

On a bright Autumn afternoon at SoHo’s trendy Mercer Kitchen restaurant, she hardly notices her cool, metal-surfaced surroundings, instead sipping a glass of Evian and talking loudly and enthusiastically about her good fortune.

“I feel like I’ve been doing this forever,” she says. “I’m kind of one of those kids that got hold of my older brother’s Jim Carroll [books] too early. I’ve always just been very street-smart.”

“Whoa, Nelly!” has only sold about 12,400 copies so far, but her record label is unconcerned, focusing on the big picture.

Beth Halper, the executive who signed Furtado to DreamWorks Records, says she was impressed by her talent and self-confidence.

“There’s a naturalness to her, and a real primal desire to be doing what she’s doing,” Harper says. “It’s her ability to challenge herself and one-up herself to make the music better and better–there’s no barriers with her.”

“She has incredibly strong convictions for someone so young,” says DreamWorks co-head Lenny Waronker. “She really gets into a zone and goes with that. Because of that, the music is original and very much an individual’s vision.

“In a way, I think you have to be that young to do what she’s doing, because she’s less conscious about the business and much more conscious about this creative path that she’s on.”

Dressed in a baby-blue crocheted sweater, flared jeans and silver hoop earrings, the pixie-like singer exudes a fresh, brassy attitude that starkly contrasts with the studied restraint of the black-clad crowd around her.

Punctuating her conversation with an infectious, staccato laugh, Furtado says she gained her self-confidence growing up as an ethnic minority in Victoria, British Columbia, a small, mostly white city on remote Vancouver Island. Although she was born in Canada, both of her parents are from San Miguel, a Mediterranean island that is part of Portugal.

Her father works as a landscaper and stonemason, and her mother is head of housekeeping at Victoria’s Robin Hood Motel, where Furtado sometimes helped out cleaning rooms as a child.

“As a first-generation Canadian, you stand out and you are different,” she says, her crystal-blue eyes flashing against her café au lait: complexion.

“You bring your bean sandwiches to school, and kids go, ‘What’s that?’ But it was a positive thing for me, because it was a source of identity, going to my Portuguese church and folk festivals.”

Almost as ingrained as her cultural identity was Furtado’s love of music. Her mother sings in a church choir, and other relatives played several instruments and composed scores in a marching band in Portugal. Furtado’s own musical journey began at age 9, when she taught herself Portuguese folk songs on the ukulele. In typically unorthodox fashion, she began playing the trombone in the school jazz band. Then she got sidetracked.

“The first real musicians I came into contact with in the city were hip-hop musicians, MCs and DJs,” she says. “So I kind of hung out with that crowd at school. We had a little hip-hop community in Victoria, even though it was a largely “I feel like I’ve been doing this forever. I’m kind of one of those kids that got hold of my older brother’s Jim Carroll [books] too early. I’ve always just been very street-smart.”

British colony. You find culture everywhere. Now you see Russian hip-hop groups and the Japanese hip-hop contingent.”

Not that Furtado considers herself a card-carrying member of the hip-hop crowd. “I’m not really part of a scene,” she says. “I think as a teenager I was kind of hiding in the trip-hop thing because it was cool. But now I don’t have a cool thing to hide beneath. I have to be cool on Nelly’s terms.”

Furtado cites Carey and Blige as her earliest musical obsessions. Even so, she credits the nurturing hip-hop community with giving her the gumption to pursue her own vision. Before she wrote songs, she improvised rap lyrics.

“There’d be parties in Victoria where there’d be a DJ and open mike,” she recalls. “You’d bust a rhyme on the mike or try to sing. I had friends who did graffiti, friends who choreographed. We did Janet Jackson routines at school and stuff like that. Very creative all the time.” The writings of Beat authors including Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg also inspired Furtado; she is a big believer in the Beats’ stream-of-consciousness approach to creativity.

It’s easy to hear that bohemian spirit in the breezy adventurousness of her album. The first track, “Hey Man,” begins with a hypnotic electronic sample of a classical string section (a snippet from “White Man’s Burden” by the Kronos Quartet) before somersaulting into a lilting, folk melody with a catchy pop chorus.

The result is a pretty good approximation of what “California Dreamin’ ” would have sounded like if the Mamas and the Papas had done it as a modern-day techno track.

Even in high school, Furtado craved diverse musical influences. Thirsting for a more urban vibe, she latched on to students at a local private school from such faraway cities as Chicago and Atlanta. It was through these friends that she got the name of a hip-hop producer in Toronto.

After high school, Furtado moved to Toronto to live with her older sister, and worked days as a customer service representative for a security company. But at night she became Nelstar, half of a duo inspired by the British group Portishead.

“I loved the idea that Portishead had urban influences and jazz influences,” she says, “but the songs were really meaningful and there was a deeper connection there.”

Convinced that she wasn’t ready to pursue a music career, she decided to return to Victoria in summer 1999 to enroll in a university creative writing programme. Just before she was to leave, she performed at the Honey Jam, a Toronto talent show for aspiring hip-hop and R&B performers.

Gerald Eaton, lead singer for a platinum-selling Canadian rock-and-soul band called the Philosopher Kings, happened to be in the audience. “She was standing very still, singing along with a tape,” he recalls. “The song wasn’t very good, but she performed it with an impressive sincerity and understatement.”

Eaton immediately offered Furtado his and his bandmate Brian West’s services. They produce records together under the name Track and Field. She accepted, and together the trio recorded a three-song demo to shop to labels.

She later signed to DreamWorks Records, which wanted her so badly that executives took her to meet label co-founder David Geffen at his home to impress her.

“She’s a very, very talented writer, especially when it comes to lyrics,” says Eaton. A good example is the way she deftly incorporates her daily experience in the words to “Party,” a sultry samba with Middle Eastern touches.

“I was cleaning rooms at the Robin Hood Motel and I would turn off the TV when I wanted to write songs,” says Furtado. “So that’s the lyric you hear: ‘I’m talking to the mirror again but it’s not listening/I’m cleaning my dirty mind like a toilet but it won’t give in.’ ”

Sometimes songs come to Furtado more spontaneously. While she was recording in a Los Angeles studio during the early months of this year, her producers urged her to write new material one night after a session.

“As usual, I was doing my homework at the last minute,” she says. “That night I wrote three songs–and the third one was ‘I’m Like a Bird,’ and that ended up being the first single.”

Since then, Furtado, who will tour the U.S. in January and February with a full band, has shattered some of her expectations, as well as an anxiety about performing live.

During a series of 20 club dates last summer, the previously shy performer learned that she actually enjoys singing in front of an audience.

But what she really wants to do is produce. “I’ve always had that producer element of me that likes to see things happen and see the bigger picture,” says Furtado. “Even as a kid, every time I wrote out a song, I wrote down a production idea.”

Still, Furtado is wary about being pigeonholed.

“On some days I’m into hip-hop, and that kind of lends itself to a certain sort of tomboyishness. But I still love acting like I’m an R&B diva onstage for some of those songs and dressing up with silver hoops. I’m not one thing, and I never have been.”

By Alec Foege, LA Times 

In a word, singer/songwriter Nelly Furtado is eclectic. Her energy and interests lie everywhere; she’s a writer and art lover, she’s a traveller and nature enthusiast, Nelly is all these things but at the moment she’s tomorrow’s big pop star.It is finally becoming apparent in this ever-changing industry that we are tired of groups that don’t write or co-write their own songs. Because of this apathy, Nelly Furtado is arriving at the right time; she’s here to spark new interest in the pop star that is a musical artist. Nelly is vibrant, she’s hip-hop and she’s pop, she’s reflective and she’s sassy. She’s interesting because she’s interested.

“I’ve been dreaming about this since I was a child,” Nelly tells me. She’s calling from Toronto while waiting for room service to bring her lunch. She talks fast, as though her thoughts are fighting for position on the tip of her tongue. Nelly’s excited, she recently released her debut album, “Whoa, Nelly” drawing interest across the music industry.

“I knew at the age of four, when I walked out onstage and performed a duet in Portuguese with my mother, that I loved (music),” continues Nelly. “I grew up in an artistic household, there was always an organic love of music around the house.”

Nelly Furtado grew up in Victoria, British Columbia, a Pacific Northwest rainforest away from anything ‘pop star.’ Her childhood was about nature and creativity, and, obviously, it was about music. But the girl couldn’t stay on her island paradise forever and after studying creative writing at University, Nelly left for Toronto, center of the Canadian universe, to become a musician.

As Nelly says, “Toronto is the best city in the world for music. That’s why I can’t leave. I miss the ocean, I miss nature and the West Coast, but I can’t leave Toronto. I’m glued here. I know too many great musicians here. There’s a great scene, eclectic and international, fresh and modern and growing and bursting at the seams waiting to explode.”

Nelly Furtado moved to Toronto when she was 18 to write and record with Philosopher Kings’ Gerald Eaton and Brian West. The resulting sessions were promising but Nelly had other plans and briefly returned to Victoria to study creative writing.

The writing came but Nelly soon realised that it was a record and not a novel that held her muse within its grasp. So she returned to Toronto to make the album that would become “Whoa, Nelly.” Her creative world was soon filled with titles like “On the Radio” and “Like a Bird,” pop songs combining hip-hop and world beat rhythms to create a unique sound that is Nelly Furtado.

“The record is pop but it’s presented in a way that a pop record usually isn’t,” says Nelly. “You’re hearing sounds that you don’t usually hear in the mainstream at all. There’s a lot of world rhythms and there’s a hip-hop element running through it and sometimes even the language I use and the way I flow with my singing.”

These songs find a voice in the inspiration of what Nelly terms a ‘real’ situation.

“I’m very inspired by the city. People, real people inspire me. I grew up in a working class background and a real situation excites me. Sometimes I’ll be on the subway and a song will come to me. And when something really hits you emotionally it’s good.”

So how does this ‘nature girl meets the big city’ handle her success?

“At times I can savor the moment but other times I have to be practical and trucking along. I’m always trying to get better because I think that if you keep a strong work ethic it helps you stay grounded.”

To savour the moment as Nelly Furtado must be a pleasing experience. She performed on the Tonight Show last October, and her album is making headway both in Canada and in the United States. A tour is underway, taking the young woman to clubs around the two nations. Isn’t it funny then, considering the success Nelly is having, that she almost decided against a career in music because of her fear of the music industry?

“I think when you make your own music in an independent sort of way, you become a little scared of the music business,” she says. “I never grew up as a ’show kid’ or anything, the love of music was very organic in my house. I wasn’t a singer, I was an artist and the music industry represents a certain thing to you, so you have to really think it out before you do it. But then I realized that it just felt right.”

Whether music continues to hold out professionally for Nelly Furtado has yet to be seen. She is talented and she enjoys her work and for the moment that’s enough. The rest will be left to her fate and the Billboard charts. But for Nelly, despite the magazine articles and record sales, music exists for one person, herself.

“I’m always going to be making music because I’m always going to be making music for me. It was never for any outside force or anything. I just kind of do it.”

At the hotel room, Nelly’s food has arrived. The room noises can be heard through the phone receiver and there are undoubtedly several other journalists waiting their turn to interview Nelly, thereforeI sense that my time has come. Nelly laughs a friendly goodbye and the interview is almost over. “But whoa, Nelly,” (I had to put that pun in here somewhere) “A final question, what’s the best decision you’ve made in the past two years?”

“Probably the decision to make professional music,” she says. “To go for it, because I was confused for a long time. I was closed minded to the possibilities of the music business and now I’ve learned that knowledge is power. The more you learn the better off you are. That was the best decision, to make “Whoa, Nelly.”

‘Nuff said

By Chris Lamb, TeenHollywood.com

Nelly Furtado played her first real shows affer signing a record deal last year at the tender age of 20. “I did four Lilith Fair dates, and for the encore, everyone who performed that day would get onstage and sing [Bob Dylan’s] ‘I Shall Be Released.’ I was singing with Chrissie Hynde and Sarah Mclachlan and Beth Orton,” she says, still incredulous. “It was like a dream. I just kept thinking, ‘What am I doing here with all these seasoned pros?’”

It’s a reasonable question for an untested artist who grew up in remote Victoria, British Columbia, a first-generation Canadian, the daughter of workingclass Portuguese parents. Furtado has indeed taken only the first few steps along her path, but her wide-ranging taste suggests an artist who has sampled much that music has to offer. Further evidence of her eclecticism is found in the instruments she plays (guitar, ukulele, trombone), the languages in which she sings (English, Portuguese, Hindi) and the debut album that represents another dream fulfilled. To be sure, Whoa Nelly! (released on DreamWorks Records 24th October 2000) boasts a hybrid sound that is uniquely her own.

The most recent chapter in Furtado’s story began when, at 18, she leapt onstage to sing at a Toronto talent show for mostly black, female performers. It was there that she met her manager, who also represents multiplatinum Canadian act The Philosopher Kings. Shortly thereaffer, the Kings’ Gerald Eaton and Brian West produced a demo for Furtado. The results were adequate, but the well-rounded teenager already had plans to go backpacking in Europe, then head home to study creative writing.

She nonetheless stayed in touch with Eaton and West, who kept insisting she retum to Toronto. Furtado recalls: “I went to see The Philosopher Kings both times they played in Victoria, and both times they said, ‘You gotta come to Toronto and do some more demos.’ I was, like, ‘l don’t know. I’m in school, I want to write, I’m learning to play guitar - blah blah blah.’ Then one day Gerald just called and said, ‘You’re coming to Toronto.’ So I went for two weeks and it was awesome. The three of us totally clicked. Gerald and Brian are amazing - smart and charismatic and wonderful to work with. They created the most positive creative environment you could imagine.

The material they recorded during those sessions ultimately led to Furtado’s deal with DreamWorks Records (where she was signed by A&R exec Beth Halper). Eaton and West (known collectively as Track and Field) came on board as production partners.

Among other things, Whoa Nelly! is a melding of Furtado’s accumulated musical inspiration. The singer-songwriter grew up with plenty of mainstream pop - Abba, Lionel Ritchie, Madonna, Paula Abdul but in her formative years, she became fixated on its urban incarnation. An infatuation with youngsters Kris Kross led to an embrace of early ’90s R&B like New Edition, Bel Biv Devoe, Salt-N-Pepa and Jodeci. Furtado informs: “On my 12th birthday one of my friends bought me a Mariah Carey tape.”

The first tape she bought for herself was by TLC, which foreshadowed her development into a hiphop fan. De La Soul, Ice-T, Digable Planets, P.M. Dawn - these artists consumed Furtado until her senior year of high school, when she started listening to her older brother’s CD collection. There she discovered Radiohead, Oasis, Pulp, Garbage, U2 and The Verve. That summer a friend from London upped the ante by making her a mix tape of music by classic artists like Simon and Garfunkel and modem standard-bearers like Prodigy and Portishead. “I got into The Beatles then, too, and Smashing Pumpkins,” she says. (Furtado’s sponge-like nature can be partially attributed to what she calls her “obsession” with pop culture. “I love it” she says. “I can’t help it - I love awards shows, magazines, movies. I’m totally star-struck”).

This panoply of influences is matched by the music of Furtado’s ancestral homeland. When she was 16, she took a giant step toward securing her own creative voice while on a trip to Portugal, where she uncovered the local equivalent of an MC battle “l went to this club and just got up onstage and started singing, making up lyrics off the top of my head. That’s what hip-hop’s all about - freestyling. The fado tradition in Portugal has a similar thing called cancoes desafios, which is basically spontaneous singing. You try to show up the other person onstage with you - you dis their mother or say they’re lazy or something. There are a lot of colloquialisms involved and you’ve got to know the language of the land pretty well to get it right.”

The realisation of this cultural convergence gave way to another epiphany when Furtado went to London to visit the friend who’d given her that all-important mix tape. “One night, my friend’s dad played a Brazilian compilation CD and I was hooked,” she declares. “It was African and Portuguese music coming together. The emotion and the romanticism comes from the Portuguese side; the rhythm and groove and energy come from the African side.” Someday she wants to make an album of Brazilian music, sung entirely in Portuguese.

And though her love for these sounds may have been foreseen considering her Portuguese heritage and gravitation toward R&B and hip-hop, Furtado’s career in the rarefied world of professional music is something of a surprise. “My mum has always worked in housekeeping at this place called The Robin Hood Motel,” she reports. “My dad does stone masonry and had a small landscaping business. I worked with my mum as a chambermaid every summer for eight years, so I know what it’s like to work for money. I vividly remember getting my first paycheck - I spent it on clothes.”

The origins of Furtado’s work ethic and down-to-earth disposition, then, are clear; the font of her artistic leanings is perhaps more elusive. “It may sound strange,” she says, “but I think my creativity has always been connected to the outdoors, to when I was a kid and I’d go outside and sing.” She elaborates: “My parents are from the Azores, a Portuguese island group in the mid-Atlantic. They have farmland there, about 50 acres, with cows and everything. It’s very beautiful. I think that’s why my parents moved to Vancouver lsland [where Victoria is located], which is also beautiful and similar in other ways as well.”

“My earliest memory is of camping, and then being in a boat,” she reminisces. “I was always on my bike, always in the creek. My friends and I would build forts and play all day. Growing up surrounded by that kind of beauty has a lot to do with how a person feels - it just makes you a certain way. Apparently, it made Furtado creative, and that creativity found its natural outlet in song.

Furtado’s mother, who sang in church, was an early inducement in this direction. “I remember hiding behind the couch and listening to my mother and some other ladies from the church practicing for big festivals like Portugal Day. When I was four years old, I sang a duet with my mother for about 300 people. Even at that age, I knew I loved performing,” Furtado reveals.

Secular music also made its presence known at home. “We had a pretty dope stereo in the living room when I was growing up,” she says, “but there was this other record player in my parents’ bedroom. I’d go in there and sit by myself and listen to that Billy Joel album Glass Houses over and over. The thing that intrigued me the most was the sound of breaking glass on the record. I vaguely remember trying to sample it onto a tape recorder. Unfortunately, I tripped over that record player one day and broke it - the speaker fell off.”

The sound of breaking glass was a bit of an omen as Nelly grew into adolescence. “I was hanging out with the naughty circle in school,” she confides. “These kids’ parents let them stay out all night and sleep over wherever they wanted to. I wasn’t allowed to do those things, but I’d break my curfew all the time and get in trouble. Then I went through my little girl-gang thing; we called ourselves the Portuguese Mafia. We’d crash parties, and if someone pissed us off we would go back and let them know it. But the worst thing we ever did was throw rocks at the windows of school buses parked in abandoned lots.”

Those years were not all vandalism, however. Furtado also played trombone in her school’s marching, jazz and concert bands and recreated Janet Jackson’s video dance routines with friends who shared her love of urban pop. Hearing her discuss this music with obvious knowledge and passion, one might think she grew up in big-city America. But her community had an even more diverse makeup. “I bonded with other first-generation Canadians,” she illuminates. “Their parents were from all over - China, India, Africa, Latin America. I experienced many different cultures, which enriched my musical knowledge.”

This enrichment in tum spurred her evolution as an artist. “Not long ago, I was just making music for music’s sake - I made music with anyone I could, every chance I got,” she says. “But it was very self-involved; it was just for me. My first recording experience came when I was 16, when I sang backup vocals for my friend’s hip-hop group.”

Furtado’s next creative milestone came the following year, when she moved cross-country. “After high-school, I went to Toronto,” she narrates. “I got a job at an alarm company and started working my way into the music scene. I was part of an experimental trip-hop duo called Nelstar. It was me writing melodies and a hip-hop-style producer coming up with the beats. We made lots of tracks and even filmed a video.”

Despite this progress, Furtado recognized a key skill she had yet to master: “At the time, I didn’t feel ready to take the next step with my music, which would have been recording and getting a complete release out,” she says. “I was writing solid melodies and coming up with arrangements, but it really bugged me that I couldn’t write proper songs with a guitar - I knew that was the final frontier. “Actually,” Furtado continues, “I always had this goal to learn guitar. I played ukulele at school, so I knew those four strings - two more couldn’t be that much harder, right? And I already knew the strumming action. But it takes a while before you get your own identity on guitar; when you start, your songs sound pretty straight-up folk.”

Still, playing this traditional instrument did not discourage Furtado’s interest in progressive music. “I’m attracted to the roots of anything fresh and cutting-edge,” she confirms. Her enduring absorption of other artists’ work reflected this penchant. “I love Jeff Buckley,” she says. “Grace - that changed my life. He totally influenced my singing and songwriting and performing, everything.” She also began to soak up the music of intemational artists like Amalia Rodrigues and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Of course, all of this was brought to bear on Whoa Nelly!, but it was the artists who traversed cultures that left the deepest impression on Furtado’s debut.

“I made this record because I was inspired by Cornershop’s When I Was Born For The Seventh Time,” she states. “It was pop music, but it was a mixture of pop and lndian music, which I found totally exciting. [Beck’s] Odelay had a similar effect on me. It was supercreative, wonderful-sounding, full of integrity - and not melancholy. Sometimes it seemed that everything I liked was sad, so hearing that was very meaningful for me. Those two records made me realise I wanted to make a pop album, something with the edge of the Portuguese and Brazilian music I love, but also something happy. I liked the challenge of making heartfelt, emotional music that’s upbeat and hopeful - like Cornershop and Beck and Bob Marley have been able to do.

Furtado extends this philosophy to her live show. “I don’t want to be on the road every night dwelling on the negative stuff and getting depressed over it,” she says. “I’ve gone to see some of my favourite bands, like Radiohead, and was, like, how can they do this every night? How can they torture themselves like this? That’s why Beck’s show was such a big deal. He made me feel like I can groove every night, like I can party onstage. Some of the music I write can put me in a difficult emotional space and I need to balance that. I want to spread the love; I don’t want people to cry affer my show - unless they’re tears of joy.

Furtado is eager to put this commitment into practice. “I can’t wait to get on the road,” she says. “That’s what I’ve been waiting to do my whole life, you know? It’s always been my dream to have my own band. I’ve always imagined siting on the bus, reading for hours until we get to the next city. That might seem weird to some people, but I’ve always been a nomad at heart; I love to wander.

Furtado’s focus on a future of such dreams-come-true does not prohibit her from living in the moment. She particulariy savoured her time in the studio. “I could feel how special that was the whole time we were doing it,” she affirms. “I know I’m going to look back on it with very sentimental feelings. Toward the end, when we’d be sitting around sipping Coronas, I began to feel sad. I’d been making music with Gerald and Brian for a year and a half and it was almost over. It was a little like the end of high school - we needed some yearbooks to sign.” But Nelly understands that there are other musical avenues yet to explore. “I’m ready to move on,” she says. “I want to grow and develop. I’m just gonna keep on writing and see where it takes me.”

Point Magazine

If you could buy stock in Nelly Furtado, you’d want to mortgage the house and dump the kids’ college tuition savings into her.

If you could bet on her like a football team, she’d be the closest thing to a mortal lock for long’term greatness among young musicians today.

Furtado, a 21′year’old Portuguese Canadian who has just released her debut album on the DreamWorks Records label, says she wants to be Jack Kerouac, Mona Lisa, Gandhi and Mother Teresa all at the same time.

She may fall short of that, but she’s pretty sure to sell millions and millions of albums over the next two decades.

Her first album, released 24th Oct and titled “Whoa, Nelly,” can be best defined as a fusion of bossa nova and urban trip hop. Rolling Stone, which gave “Whoa, Nelly!” 3* stars out of four, describes the music as “wild’ass pop go’go.”

Furtado is being compared to Fiona Apple, Bjork and Macy Gray, but the truth is that she is like no one else.

Certainly, no one else in the new generation is as innovative and imaginative.

And, among young songwriters, only Apple can compare.

Furtado was given her first tape recorder at age 8 and immediately began recording her own songs. At 11, she was given a keyboard with a built’in scratch effect and by 14 had become fascinated with sampling. By 16, she had made her first studio recording and was fronting her own trip’hop band in Toronto called Nelstar.

Rock groups like Radiohead became equal influences with folkies like Sarah Maclaughlin. Then came her discovery of Portishead, whose style she says had a significant impact on her writing and production. Bossa Nova, Hindu music, techno and drum & bass all became influences.

So when it came time to make “Whoa, Nelly!” Furtado, who co’produced the album, was far from overwhelmed.

“I’ve always been comfortable in the studio,” she said in a recent telephone interview with The Free Lance-Star.

She knew what she wanted to do: “Use everything I’d learned.”

Furtado said there was no arm’wrestling with label execs, no efforts to remake her.

“The cool thing about DreamWorks is they said “We like your demo tape’we want you to do exactly that.’ Every single song from my demo tape is on my album. They gave me a lot of freedom.”

She said Cornershop’s music taught her to use her Portuguese cultural heritage and bring it under a pop/hip hop umbrella.
She said she realised musical influences like Portishead, Tricky and Radiohead were melancholy, so she consciously used the upbeat Beck to balance that out and as a role model for live performances.

“I thought I wouldn’t be able to handle sad songs every night,” Furtado said. “So I set out to write a record a bit more uplifting. In writing every single song, I had in mind “What’s this going to look like live?’”

She said the end result is a live show that, like Beck’s is “just very funky and fun.

“I’m 21 now,” Furtado said. “Still young. I gotta tour a fun record. If I want to retreat into myself and get all melancholy” that can come later.

Furtado said she does have an inclination towards depression and she wanted to guard against that when she was on the road for long periods in strange places.

“It’s bad in a way’it’s almost a repression of that element of my music,” she said. “But I discovered that good music doesn’t have to be sad. So let’s try making happy music for a while.”

By Michael Zitz, The Free Lance Star