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Nelly Furtado

 

Biography by MacKenzie Wilson

 

Singer/songwriter Nelly Furtado heavily credits her ethnic background and childhood for spawning her creativity as a female and as an inspiring musician. Born and raised in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, Furtado's working-class parents, who are of Portuguese decent, instilled a hardcore work ethic during her upbringing. She spent eight summers working as a chambermaid with her housekeeping mother, quickly realizing what it meant to work for a living.

 

She turned to music for enjoyment, learning to play the guitar and the ukulele, and listened to mainstream R&B like Mariah Carey, TLC, Jodeci, Salt-N-Pepa, and Bell Biv DeVoe. Later, she delved into her older brother's collection of Radiohead, Pulp, Oasis, Portishead, the Verve, and U2, pushing Furtado to fully embrace different musical genres, specifically Brazilian music and material by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Amalia Rodrigues. Hip-hop was also a big catalyst in shaping Furtado's musical appreciation. After high school, she headed to Toronto where she worked at an alarm company by day and experienced the music scene by night. She joined a hip-hop duo, Nelstar, and this opportunity led Furtado back to her hip-hop influences of De La Soul and Digable Planets. This allowed her to get comfortable with writing her own melodies and freestyle rhymes.

 

When Furtado started cutting loose at a local Toronto club during the week, her musical aspirations began to swirl. Brian West and Gerald Eaton, of Canadian funk-pop group the Philosopher Kings, were instantly impressed by her strong sense of performing and asked to produce her demo. During those sessions, Furtado created some of the moving work that landed on her debut for Dreamworks, Whoa, Nelly!, released in fall 2000. A headlining tour of the U.S. in spring 2001 sparked more interest from fans and critics, and a spot on Moby's Area:One summer tour allowed singles "I'm Like a Bird" and "Turn Off the Light" to receive bigger praise. Furtado's greatest achievement followed a year later when she earned four Grammy nods, including Song of the Year for "I'm Like a Bird."

 

Folklore appeared in November 2003, nearly two months after Furtado gave birth to her first child, a daughter named Nevis. The record was a general disappointment, failing to capitalize on the success of her previous work. She didn't return to limelight until summer 2006, with her third record, Loose. Produced almost entirely by Timbaland and boasting a much more appealing and timely style, the album earned significant attention, putting Furtado's career back on the fast track. Lead track "Promiscuous" became an instant hit, earning her a number one spot on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Loose also topped the Billboard Top 200 album chart during its first week of release in later June 2006, becoming Furtado's first-ever number one album.

 

 

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Whoa, Nelly! (Oct 24, 2000)

4 Stars

 

Review by Stephen Thomas Erlewine

 

Nelly Furtado's Whoa, Nelly! is one of those albums that's designed to be a surprising, precocious debut — the kind of record that's meant to make a listener exclaim, well, "whoa nelly" upon the first spin. From that first play, it's evident that Furtado is indeed an audacious songwriter, not at all hesitant to bare her emotions, tackle winding melodies, and bend boundaries to the point that much of the record sounds like folk-pop tinged with bossa nova and backed by a production designed for TLC. Clearly, this is a musician with big, serious ambitions, a notion that is supported not only by her naked lyrics but especially by her singing. Furtado is a restless vocalist, skitting and scatting with abandon, spitting out rapid repetitions, bending notes, and frequently indulging in melismas. This, more than anything, makes her a bit of an acquired taste, since her relentless vocalizing can obscure hooks that are nevertheless there. Once you appreciate (or grow to understand) her quirks, Whoa, Nelly! unfolds as a rewarding, promising debut, albeit one with its flaws. True, most of those flaws arise from its naïveté: a tendency to push too hard, whether it's in piecing together genres in attempt to create something original or lyrics that can sound a little sophomoric in their soul searching. These don't arrive in isolated instances, either — they're wound into the songs themselves. You either choose to be annoyed by these quirks or become charmed by them, realizing it's a first album, and savoring the talent that's apparent on much of the album. Many of her blends of pop, folk, dance, and Latin are beguiling; she has a knack for strong pop hooks (particularly on "On the Radio," "Well, Well," and "Turn off the Light"); her lyrical imagery can be evocative; she has a sly sense of humor; and, when she doesn't get carried away, she's an inventive, endearingly eccentric vocalist. These are the things that endure after that first slightly bewildering spin of Whoa, Nelly! and those are the things that make you wonder where she goes from here.

 

 

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Folklore (Nov 25, 2003)

3 Stars :(

 

Review by Stephen Thomas Erlewine

 

Unlike some of her modern-day neo-singer/songwriter peers, Nelly Furtado never hid her ambition or her desire to be an "important" artist, which was part of the charm of her debut, Whoa, Nelly! Despite (or perhaps because of) her youth, she was willing to try anything, blending a number of sounds and styles, all of which were tied together by her sincerity and audacious desire to say something grand, or at least say everything grandly. Her musical restlessness was underpinned by a sensibility that was fundamentally serious but leavened by sly humor, all of which made Whoa, Nelly! a bracing listen. Her second album, Folklore, is a bit of a different situation. Released three years after her debut, it picks up where the first record leaves off, but it's a much more serious affair, a situation telegraphed by the album covers. Whoa, Nelly! and Folklore mirror each other — both bear the same Nelly Furtado logo and both feature a reclining Furtado, but where the debut was bright, girlish, and rather innocent, finding her lying to the right in a field, she's now bathed in warm, dark colors, looking rather sultry as she lies to the left among a bunch of leaves. The artwork implies she's more mature, and it's a sentiment that's mirrored in the album titles, since the plainspoken Folklore lacks the humor of Whoa, Nelly! and suggests she'd rather play it straight than play around. And that's the problem with Folklore: though it surely has impressive moments, the album is a self-conscious, somber affair that takes itself far too seriously. At this point, Furtado's Achilles' heel is that she doesn't see a world outside herself. While there's a certain truth to the old axiom "write what you know," she, like many of her peers, takes this credo to extremes, believing that every emotional fluctuation she had in the aftermath of her mild stardom can make for a captivating album. While some have made great art from a similar viewpoint, the key is depersonalizing the situation and turning it toward the universal; for instance, on Nirvana's In Utero, Kurt Cobain turned his agony into poetry by alluding to it, not chronicling it, thereby making it resonate to anyone who felt disillusioned and despairing.

 

In contrast, Furtado's songs play like entries in a diary, so consumed with the particulars of her world that they can be suffocating in their solipsism. To a certain extent, this was true on Whoa, Nelly!, but since she had yet to reach stardom, she was writing about more universal subjects. Plus, her thrill in making her first album was palpable, giving the album a naïve, exciting charm. While there are some interesting musical moments on Folklore — enough to make it worth a listen — the dogged seriousness and didactic worldview become a bit overbearing not long before the album is a quarter of the way finished, particularly since the fusion of worldbeat and adult alternative pop often seems heavy-handed. Furtado does have skills and ambition, which makes her music interesting, but that's not the same thing as compelling or memorable. Much of Folklore resides in the "interesting" category, never reaching the effortlessly catchy heights of "I'm Like a Bird" or "Turn Out the Lights," and given the po-faced soberness of the record, that lack of catchiness can't help but be seen as her bid to be taken as a serious, important artist. And Furtado could very well be the serious, important artist she desires to be, but she'll need to regain some of the guileless, loose spirit of Whoa, Nelly! and temper the quirks that make Folklore an awkward transitional album.

 

 

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Loose (Jun 20, 2006)

4 Stars

 

Review by Stephen Thomas Erlewine

 

If Nelly Furtado's nearly impenetrable 2003 sophomore effort, Folklore, proved anything, it was that this modern-day singer/songwriter is smart and ambitious yet doesn't quite have a handle on those very qualities. Dabbling in worldbeat and chronicling the perils of immediate success, she indulged herself without a care for the audience — and the audience responded in kind, as the album barely cracked the Billboard Top 40, spawned no hits, and sold about a quarter of what her Grammy-winning debut did. Clearly a rethink of some sort was in order for her next album, and 2006's Loose, delivered about three years later, certainly does present a different Nelly Furtado: one who is glammed up, sexed up, and ready for the dancefloor. Borrowing liberally from Gwen Stefani's ghetto fabulous makeover and a little bit from Justin Timberlake's sleek retro-'80s moves on Justified, Furtado now has a sound that's straight 2006; with hooks that feel as comfortable as bumper music on MTV as they do as background on cell phone commercials or as ringtones, she can blend into the hyper-saturated media culture of 2006, a move that may alienate fans who were won over by how her debut, Whoa, Nelly!, sounded like nothing else in 2000. No matter how club-friendly Loose is — even its quieter moments, like the closing "All Good Things (Come to an End)" (co-written in part by Coldplay's Chris Martin), feel like ideal soundtracks to chill-out moments — ultimately Furtado did not get a swan-styled makeover, where her original personality has been chiseled and chipped away so only a vestige of her remains. Remember, Furtado is nothing if not smart, and she smartly picked Timbaland, one of the very best producers in modern music, as her main collaborator for Loose.

 

Timbaland helmed all but two of the 12 main tracks here — the album weighs in at 13 songs, but one is a Spanish version of the Juanes duet "Te Busque" — and he gives much of this music a bracing feel, dense with old-school synths, subtle sample collages, bone-crunching bass, cascading vocal hooks, and beats that sound so heavy it takes careful listening to realize how nimble they are. Nowhere is this more evident than on the killer opening triptych of "Afraid," "Maneater," and "Promiscuous," three songs that trumpet Furtado's makeover and make it seem pretty convincing, too — particularly on "Maneater" with its circular, minor-key bass and "Promiscuous" with its chorus that sounds like vintage Prince. This is Timbaland at his best, and the only weak link is Furtado; no matter how she growls on "Maneater" or murmurs on "Promiscuous" — no matter how much she sings about sex, period — she just doesn't sound sexy. She sounds as if she's striving to be sexy, which doesn't generate much carnal heat, but it ultimately doesn't matter much since on all the heavy dance songs, of which there are a bunch, she's mixed into the background on Timbaland's production, functioning as another instrument, which helps the music work as just a stylish wall of sound. Furtado doesn't fight against Timbaland's mix, which proves her smarts more than anything on the showy Folklore; there's a reason why she chose Timbaland as a collaborator, and she lets him shine for the first half of the record, as they get the party rolling. Then on the second half of the record, the old Nelly starts to show through. She gets to play the world traveler with "No Hay Igual," where she deftly blends reggaeton and M.I.A., along with the smooth Latin pop ballad "Te Busque." Her words gradually come to the forefront, as on "Say It Right" — a dark meditative piece that would have fit on her previous records if it didn't have a Timbaland production — or on the sweetly ruminative "In God's Hands," and then on "Wait for You," which has Indian-influenced hooks and a melody reminiscent of "I'm Like a Bird," both strands are pulled together in a haunting fashion.

 

It's on this final stretch of the album that the Furtado and Timbaland pairing seems like a genuine collaboration, staying true to the Nelly of her first two albums, but given an adventurous production that helps open her songs up. Unlike the music on Folklore, the idiosyncrasies intrigue instead of frustrate, and deliver on the promise of her debut, when it seemed like Furtado could do anything. That said, the music on the second half isn't nearly as immediate or addictive as "Maneater" and "Promiscuous," two singles that were already deserved hits (in the U.K. and U.S., respectively) when Loose was released. The genius on these two songs is down to Timbaland, who not only crafts the sound but vocally overshadows Nelly's mumbled raps on the latter. But Furtado is smart enough to let him dominate here, since she knows that Timbaland has revitalized Nelly Furtado both creatively and commercially with Loose, so it's only appropriate that he hogs the spotlight on its two best moments.

 

 

 

 

Wow Thanks For The Reviews!

 

Folklore 3!?!?!?!?!?!?! Nah:

 

Mine would be:

Folklore: 4.5/5

Whoa Nelly 3.5/5

Loose 4/5