Nelly Furtado: Always To Be Loose Posted by admin , Monday, March 9, 2009 at 6:03 PM, in Labels: Music, Nelly Furtado

Nelly Kim Furtado (born December 2, 1978) is a Canadian singer-songwriter, instrumentalist, and record producer.

Furtado came to fame in 2000 with the release of her debut album Whoa, Nelly! , which featured the Grammy Award-winning single "I'm like a Bird". After giving birth to daughter Nevis and releasing the less commercially successful Folklore (2003), she returned to prominence in 2006 with the release of Loose and its hit singles "Promiscuous" and "Maneater".


Furtado, a first-generation Portuguese Canadian, was born as one of three children to Maria Manuela and Antonio Jose Furtado, Portuguese immigrants from Sao Miguel Island in the Azores. She was named after Soviet gymnast Nellie Kim.

Nelly first sang at the age of four when she performed a duet with her mother at church on Portugal Day. She began playing instruments at the age of nine, learning the trombone, ukulele and, in later years, the guitar and keyboard. She began writing songs at the age of twelve and, as a teenager, she played in a Portuguese marching band.

During these early years, Furtado embraced many musical genres, listening heavily to mainstream R&B, hip hop, alternative rock, New Wave, alternative hip hop, trip hop, world music (including Portuguese fado, Brazilian bossa nova, and Indian music), and a variety of others. Her influences have included Jeff Buckley, Caetano Veloso, Amalia Rodrigues, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Cornershop, TLC, Mary J. Blige, Mariah Carey, Digable Planets, De La Soul, Radiohead, Oasis, The Smashing Pumpkins, The Verve, U2, and Beck.
The first musicians Furtado interacted with were underground rappers and DJs. During a visit to Toronto, after the summer of eleventh grade, she met Tallis Newkirk, member of hip hop group Plains of Fascination and contributed vocals to their 1996 album Join the Ranks on the track "Waitin' 4 the Streets". She spent the rest of that summer in Portugal, opening her mind to native rock acts and then returned to British Columbia. After graduating from Mount Douglas Secondary School in 1996, she moved to Toronto where she eventually formed the trip hop duo Nelstar in 1997 with Newkirk. The experience led her back to her hip-hop influences and allowed her to become more comfortable with writing her own melodies and rhymes. But feeling that she couldnТt showcase her vocal ability she left the group and decided to move back home.

Before moving, she performed at the 1997 Honey Jam, a female, mostly-black talent show at Toronto nightclub Lee's Palace. She performed to a Digital Audio Tape in jeans and a t-shirt. At the club, The Philosopher Kings singer Gerald Eaton (aka Jarvis Church) was impressed with her performance and approached her to write with him. Eaton and fellow Kings member Brian West, collectively known as Track and Field, helped Furtado produce a demo, but she already had plans to backpack through Europe and return home to take creative writing courses at Camosun College. Then she eventually returned for two weeks; the material recorded during those sessions led to her record deal with DreamWorks Records in 1999.

Furtado continued to collaborate with Eaton and West, who co-produced her debut album, Whoa, Nelly! The album saw major success all over the globe supported by its singles, "I'm like a Bird", "Turn off the Light", "...On the Radio", and "Hey, Man!". It received four Grammy nominations in 2002, and her debut single won for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance. Furthermore, Furtado was critically acclaimed for her innovative mixture of various genres and sounds.

Before the release of her sophomore album, Folklore, Furtado gave birth to her first child, daughter Nevis. On September 20, 2003 in Toronto, she had a home birth with midwives. Nevis's father is Furtado's then boyfriend, DJ/producer Jasper Gahunia aka Lil' Jaz. Furtado and Gahunia, who broke up in 2005, were together for four years and friends for several years before that.

Furtado's second album, Folklore, was released in November 2003. The title was influenced by her parents immigration to Canada. The album also displayed a diverse sound but with a more rock-oriented, acoustic approach. As she focused more on the songwriting rather "than on frenetically switching genres five times in one song", BBC felt that it had "twice the originality" of her debut. Furtado attributed the mellowness of the album to the fact that she was pregnant during most of its recording. The final track on the album, "Childhood Dreams", is dedicated to her daughter.

The album was not as successful as her debut, partly due to troubles at DreamWorks Records and the less poppy sound. It lacked promotion because DreamWorks was sold to Universal Music Group at the time of Folkore'srelease. In 2005, DreamWorks Records was shut down, and many of its artists, including Furtado, were absorbed into Geffen Records.
Furtado's third album, Loose, was released in June 2006. It was named after the spontaneous, creative decisions she faced while creating the album. Four lead singles were released in different regions of the world: the Spanish reggaeton-influenced "No Hay Igual" (featuring Calle 13), the hip-hop "Promiscuous" (featuring Timbaland), for which she won a 2006 Billboard Music Award for Pop Single of the Year, the latin "Te Busque" (featuring Juanes) and the pop "Maneater". For the first time, Furtado worked with a variety of record producers and followed a more collaborative approach in creating the album. She has categorized the album's sound as punk-hop, which she describes as "this modern, poppy, spooky music".

Nelly is also an actress. She began acting in school plays in middle school. She formally began studying acting after she planned to appear in a Hindi film which never came to fruition Acting courses taught her to "let go of [her] ego and feel really grounded"; this influenced the theme and creation of her third album Loose. She prepared for a role in a second film, the independent drama Nobody's Hero (2006), but plans fell through as filming conflicted with the promotion of Loose.