Bustin’ Loose

Navel gazing: Nelly Furtado in her new guise. Courtesy Universal Music Canada.

A few months ago, the notion that Nelly Furtado would have a lock on the top of the charts was no sure thing. If not exactly cold, the temperature of the singer’s career had dropped to tepid at best. Yet Loose, her third album, arrives in stores today with Promiscuous, her innuendo-laden duet with rapper-producer Timbaland, already at No. 2 on Billboard's Hot 100 and the lascivious Maneater topping the chart in the UK. Loose looks set to be the summer’s hottest disc.

The new sizzle is at least partially due to the bumping and grinding in the video for Promiscuous. Furtado had the chance to show off her hot-mama makeover during a performance with Timbaland at the MuchMusic Video Awards on Sunday in Toronto. Cynics may connect the reversal of fortune with Furtado’s amped-up sex appeal, but that tactic’s hardly foolproof; Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction didn’t save her last album from tanking. Besides, Furtado is still demure compared to many of her competitors; in the videos for Promiscuous and Maneater, she exposes much midriff but stays away from lingerie, opting for more dignified club wear. As for her dance moves, she sticks with some basic hip swiveling rather than any Christina Aguilera-style gyrations or calisthenics.

Despite its dramatic arrival on TV and magazine covers, Furtado’s new image doesn’t feel calculated. The Victoria-bred singer, always so careful with her career moves, seems to be thinking less and feeling more, to the benefit of her music. Loose boasts a strident, even avant-garde blend of electronic beats, hip-hop muscle, pop smarts and rock energy. By taking risks rather than staying in her safety zone, the album exudes a power and confidence that marks Furtado as a full-blown pop star for the first time.

Taking the safe way was what led Furtado to her last major international hit, Forca, a rousing singalong with lyrics in English and Portuguese. (Furtado is the proud daughter of Portuguese Canadians, though due to her look and occasional Spanish-language singles, some still take her for a Latina.) The official anthem of the 2004 European Football Championship, Forca was an example of her music’s international appeal. Though it was bound to find favour in stadiums somewhere in the world, it wasn’t the kind of song that got people talking like Promiscuous. Forca’s low profile with non-footie fans was a sign of Furtado’s sophomore slump.

An earlier incarnation: a promotional image of Nelly Furtado for the release of Folklore. Courtesy Universal Music Canada.

The cooling-off period may have also been a result of the speed at which Furtado grew up in public. Discovered in 1997 at Honey Jam, a Toronto showcase for new female R&B and hip-hop acts, Furtado was 18 when she caught the attention of the music production team Track and Field (Gerald Eaton and Brian West of soul-pop band the Philosopher Kings). Over the next few years, they groomed her for a record deal, eventually landing one with DreamWorks in 1999. Furtado’s career was launched in 2000 with a carefully orchestrated campaign that included a story in Vanity Fair before Furtado had even put out a single. Though sales of her debut, Whoa, Nelly!, were slow out of the gate, success soon matched the pre-release hype. Whoa, Nelly! racked up platinum figures all over the world based on a run of hits that established Furtado as a lithe, limber-voiced pop singer whose PG appeal was bolstered by some genuine R&B cred. She established the latter on a remix of Missy Elliott’s Get Ur Freak On, her first encounter with Timbaland.

When she re-emerged in 2003 with the album Folklore, Furtado was transformed from a sprightly ingenue to a worldly, slightly sombre single mom. She attributed the album’s mellow mood to the fact she was pregnant with daughter Nevis during the recording; talk of the changes wrought by motherhood dominated interviews at the time of Folklore’s release. With prestigious guest appearances by the Kronos Quartet and Brazilian legend Caetano Veloso, the music was richly textured, worthy and many miles removed from the radio-friendly pop of I’m Like a Bird. The new songs furthered earlier lyrical themes about self-determination, but beyond the stirring hit Powerless (Say What You Want), the music had become overly safe and more than a little dull.

Furtado says that she knew something was up when she learned that the country that most embraced Folklore was not the U.S. or Canada, but Germany. “Why do Germans love this album?” she asks with a laugh in a recent interview. “I think I figured it out: It’s so cerebral. It’s great in its own way, but that’s a different side.”

Furtado says she always knew her third album had to express her love of R&B and hip hop; she’d settled on the title five years ago. But Furtado — who turns 28 in December — still had trouble convincing herself to go through with it. “My problem with hip hop was that, even though I’d do collaborations with other people on singles, I thought it can’t possibly be good enough for a whole album for me. Then I realized, ‘Why am I being so pretentious?’”

Getting loose: Nelly Furtado, left, and Timbaland perform her song Promiscuous during the taping of the television show CD USA. AP Photo/Chris Pizzello.

Loose, she says, “is me breaking free from those ideas and jumping in the deep end of the pool – ‘Ahh, screw it, this is fun!’ When I play certain songs, I get so into it, it’s like I’m listening to my favourite song when I was 16.”

Finding the collaborator who would get her to this place wasn’t easy — working without Track and Field for the first time, Furtado auditioned producer-remixer Nellee Hooper (Björk, Madonna), Scott Storch (Beyoncé, Jadakiss) and the Neptunes (Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake) before ending up at the Miami studio of Timbaland. Famed for minimalist, bass-heavy grooves that incorporate everything from ‘80s-style synths to East Indian percussion, Virginia native Tim Mosley is responsible for hip hop and R&B hits by Missy Elliott, the late Aaliyah and many others. Yet one of the reasons he and Furtado hit it off is because they were both excited not about what was happening in hip hop, but in rock.

“Rock music is rhythmic again,” says Furtado, who professes much love for Bloc Party and Death From Above 1979. “It got so churning and boring. I think hip hop’s really influenced the new rock sound.” Tough, terse rhythms dominate Loose; in fact, Maneater could’ve been pounded out on a trashcan. On Afraid and Glow, doomy synthesizer chords and Furtado’s multi-tracked vocals are set against urgent beats with highly compelling results. The most frenetic track on the album is No Hay Igual, a wild, skittering take on the Latin hip-hop style known as reggaeton.

Furtado also had the good luck to be in the middle of the mutual appreciation society that exists between Timbaland and Coldplay’s Chris Martin, each of whom has publicly praised the other’s genius. After seeing Martin at the MTV Video Music Awards in Miami last August, Furtado invited him to Timbaland’s studio the next night. The product of their summit is All Good Things Come to an End, a hazy piece of beat-laden psychedelic pop.

The non-Timbaland tracks on Loose — the stately ballad In God‘s Hands and Te Busque, a duet with Colombian star Juanes — suggest Furtado isn’t ready to abandon her other musical interests. But on the whole, the music here is not just loose but refreshingly raw, especially coming from an artist whose past recordings often seemed meticulous to the point of being sterile. Animated by Timbaland’s rhythms, Furtado responds with joyful vocal performances.

“The things that feel the best and the most natural, we run away from,” says Furtado. “And the things that seem like good ideas in our brains or on paper, we stick with because they seem safe.” For the time being, what’s safe has lost out to what’s fun, flirty and bold. The victory is ours to enjoy.

Jason Anderson is a Toronto writer

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