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
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