“I heard my song on the radio for the first time this morning. It was, like, nine-fifteen in the morning and I was talking on the phone with my manager, telling him that the song was starting to get radio play, and I said, ‘Wait! It’s on right now!’ It was a moment. My manager told me that the first time you hear your song, it doesn’t really hit you, because you’re too tripped out. It’s true. I was thinking about stupid things like how the mix wasn’t quite right.
Typical me.
“There’s only a couple of things that are real in this business. There are the fans that listen to your music. And there are the record sales that indicate that someone has bought your record and has it sitting on their stereo. But television, radio, magazines, the whole business, those aren’t real. A lot of that is just work. A lot of it’s just stuff you have to do to get to that moment onstage where you can connect with your fans. And I think that moment overrides all the business. But the business stuff can be disheartening. It can be soul crushing.
“Musically, I’m totally a child of hip hop. I grew up in Victoria, which, believe it or not, does have a hip-hop scene. Victoria is sort of a smaller city, so there’s that suburban boredom thing where you hang out at McDonald’s and drink free coffee refills. We’d go to the mall and hang out with the hip-hop kids and you’d go to parties and there would be people rapping. I wrote rhymes for a while. So my music is infused with that hip-hop sensibility. But the music isn’t autobiographical. If I could describe it in a moment or a feeling, it’s like that moment when you’re watching a play and you really like it, but you don’t want to stand up to start the standing ovation because you’re afraid of being the first one to stand up. Well, my music is about being the first one to stand up.”
Nelly Furtado’s first album, Whoa, Nelly!, will be released 24th October on DreamWorks. She is currently touring with her band.
Saturday Night Magazine
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