When it came time to record her third album, Nelly Furtado worked on tracks with her old Track & Field production team, and she also tried out some ideas with the Neptunes and Scott Storch. But Nelly Furtado had an ace up her sleeve. Nelly Furtado also had a kid and took a break before returning, which probably didn’t help her prospects. ![]() ![]() Uplifting and genre-agnostic Y2K-era peers like Macy Gray didn’t fare much better. ![]() Many of Furtado’s ’90s singer-songwriter forebears, the Paula Coles and Meredith Brookses and Natalie Imbruglias of the world, didn’t manage more than one hit album. None of those groups, Nelstar included, were anywhere near as good as Portishead, though it’s hard not to feel some lingering affection for the many who tried.Īfter Folklore bricked, Nelly Furtado sure looked like a one-album wonder. Based on the music that’s floating around on the internet now, Nelstar fit cleanly within the wave of post-Portishead groups who popped up across the world in the late ’90s. Soon afterward, Furtado and Plains Of Fascination member Tallis Newkirk formed a trip-hop duo called Nelstar. In 1996, an 18-year-old Nelly Furtado made her on-record debut, singing backup on “Waitin’ 4 The Streets,” a track from the Toronto indie-rap group Plains Of Fascination. Plains Of Fascination: Join The Ranks by Tallisman After high school, Furtado and her sister moved to Toronto, and Furtado fell in with the local underground rap scene. In Canada, it was Donna Summer’s version of “ MacArthur Park.”) Furtado started performing early - singing in Portuguese with her mother at four, playing a few different instruments at nine, writing songs at 12. (When Furtado was born, Barbra Streisand and Neil Diamond’s “ You Don’t Bring Me Flowers” was the #1 song in America. Nelly Furtado comes from Victoria, British Columbia, and she’s the daughter of Portuguese immigrants. From where I’m sitting, selling out was the best thing that Nelly Furtado could’ve done. I like flirty lyrics and clubby aesthetics and Timbaland beats. For me, she got a whole lot better when her music became more crassly commercial. I wasn’t into Furtado’s singer-songwriter phase. Sometimes, her changes took her toward the pop center. She wrote personal lyrics and sang over acoustic guitars. But when Furtado first arrived, her music gestured toward commonplace notions of integrity. Nelly Furtado always made commercial pop music she went top-10 with her very first single. It’s probably a bit inaccurate to use the term “selling out” here, but I can’t help myself. With “Promiscuous,” Furtado streamlined and foregrounded a few elements that had existed in her music from the beginning. “Promiscuous,” Nelly Furtado’s first chart-topper, was a clear bid for the mainstream success that she’d seen slip away. A few years and one sophomore slump later, she was half-rapping about being horny over a clattering club beat. Her music was giddy and eclectic, but it seemed to have some basis in idealistic coffeehouse folk-pop. Furtado first came into the mainstream in the dying days of the whole Lilith Fair MOR singer-songwriter boom. If you weren’t paying close attention to Nelly Furtado’s whole arc, “Promiscuous” must’ve seemed like a wild, out-of-nowhere zag. You can’t just attempt to meet the mainstream where it is you also have to move the mainstream closer to where you are. That’s one of the secrets to selling out. Together, they nudged pop music in a slightly different direction. The combination might’ve seemed random, but the two of them clicked.Īt the moment that they made their first big hit together, Furtado and Timbaland were both coming out of minor career slumps, so they helped each other with the process of reinvention. Furtado and Timbaland had already worked together, which helped. In Timbaland, she found a simpatico collaborator who had some similar ideas about rhythm and playfulness. She found a sound that was still emerging, one that would colonize the pop charts over the next few years. But when Nelly Furtado sold out, she surfed the cultural wave just right. Most sellout attempts sound like they’re at least a couple of years out of date when they first arrive. And you have to understand and even anticipate the zeitgeist. You have to find a way to get excited about the prospect of becoming a centrist pop figure. People can tell when you’re faking, so you have to find a way to inject your actual personality - or, at least, some version of your actual personality - into music that’s engineered to pop off. Instead, you have to walk a delicate line. When you come from somewhere even slightly left of center, you can’t just suddenly flip a switch and start making mainstream pop music. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.
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