Nelly Furtado on her return to music: “Something told me I needed to get back in”

Nelly Furtado has a failsafe barometer for making her music Gen Z-relevant: her 20-year-old daughter Nevis, who helped to A&R the singer’s upcoming album ‘7’. “She was discovering her passion for music as I was rediscovering my passion for music, so she kind of kept me in check,” Furtado says when we meet at her record label’s glossy London offices.

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The Toronto-based star flew in the night before from Malta, where she performed all her signature hits including 2000’s ‘I’m Like A Bird’ and 2006’s ‘Promiscuous’ at a festival, but shows no signs of tiredness today. She’s warm and strikes up an immediate rapport with lots of eye contact and the odd brush of NME’s wrist.

“I hadn’t set foot in a studio in about three years, but something told me I needed to get back in,” Furtado continues. After the release of her last album, 2017’s synthy indie-pop collection ‘The Ride’, parenthood kept her busy as she welcomed another daughter and a son. “I knew I wanted to make an album that reminded me of the vibes and energy you get at a soundcheck when you hear your voice coming back at you loud from the speakers.”

“When I look at my career, I feel most like the person who made ‘Whoa, Nelly!’ again now”

Before we begin, Furtado asks if we mind her chewing gum – well, of course not, and it hardly prevents her from offering long, thoughtful answers that take unexpected tangents before they arrive at their final destination. Nevis’s role on the album comes up during a question about what sparked her return to recording.

“She’d literally be like, ‘Mom, why are you using Auto-Tune on this song?’ You think it sounds cool but it doesn’t,” Furtado says, letting out a laugh that’s part self-deprecation, part an expression of maternal pride. “She also reminded me that people love my music because it’s three-dimensional, which made me dig even deeper.”

So far, Furtado has dropped two songs from the album, which is due on September 20. First in May came ‘Love Bites’, an electro-house collaboration with club disruptors Tove Lo and SG Lewis, on which Furtado channels the vampish confidence of her seminal, Timbaland-produced hit ‘Maneater’. “You should know that I can turn on a dime,” she warns in a sultry spoken-word section.

“SG Lewis reached out to me – we started collaborating online and then we met at [2022]’s Beyond the Valley festival in Australia,” Furtado says. Many months later, Lewis sent Furtado an unfinished track they had started together and said: “Would you mind if I got a friend to redo the chorus?” Furtado fired back with “only if it’s Tove Lo”, which led to a three-way meeting of minds. “Tove just blew me away with the quality of her voice,” she adds.

Furtado’s Beyond the Valley appearance in December 2022 was a key step in what we might call her “Nellaisance”. It was her first full live set in five years, and she was joined on stage by Dom Dolla, the house producer with whom she made her self-referential comeback single, 2023’s ‘Eat Your Man’. Lewis and Dolla have each produced another track on her new album, Furtado says today, but she’s not ready to reveal the titles.

‘Love Bites’ was followed earlier this month by ‘Corazón’, another club-ready collaboration, this time with psychedelic Colombian duo Bomba Estéreo. Furtado says it’s the only song on the album to include Spanish lyrics, but she’s already recorded another “amazing song” with Bomba Estéreo, so there’s potential for “an entirely Spanish project” further down the line.

Of course, Furtado has recorded an entire album in Spanish before: 2009’s cohesive Latin rock collection ‘Mi Plan’. At the time, it was perceived in the Anglosphere as an unlikely follow-up to her Timbaland-produced third album, 2006’s dance-pop blockbuster ‘Loose’, which sold 10 million copies globally after spawning the era-defining hits ‘Maneater’, ‘Promiscuous’ and ‘Say It Right’.

The latter, a glimmering, rhythmic ballad inspired by ’80s duo Eurythmics, went viral on TikTok in 2022 thanks to a dance trend where creators threw shapes to a sped-up version of the song. It was Nevis who alerted Furtado to its newfound popularity with Gen Z fans.

If Furtado is tired of talking about ‘Loose’, a dazzling blend of dance, pop, R&B and reggaeton that has become a mid-2000s cultural touchstone, she doesn’t show it. “I think it would be really fun for Timbaland and I to do a Vegas residency of ‘Loose’,” she says, prompting NME‘s eyes to widen excitedly. “We could play the album from beginning to end, because I do think it captures the world we were in at the time.”

She believes ‘Loose’ was incredibly influential because it represented a sonic “shift” from the more polished pop of the Y2K era. “We didn’t want it to sound perfect. We wanted it to sound real,” she says. “The idea was [to lay] my trippy, melancholic, bittersweet melodies and lyrics over Tim’s heavy beats and make a dreamy type of mix within that.”

Though Furtado re-teamed with Timbaland for the 2007 chart-topper ‘Give It To Me’, which also featured Justin Timberlake, there would be no full-length sequel to ‘Loose’. Instead, she followed her most successful LP to date with 2009’s ‘Mi Plan’, a more subdued album of “simple love songs” performed in Spanish.

“It’s hard to get back to that kind of creative space, but this is where my long breaks really pay off”

At the time, ‘Mi Plan’ looked like a leftfield move because it arrived a few years before the ongoing Latin music boom fuelled by global superstars like Bad Bunny. The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) said in December 2023 that “Latin music in the US has increased in popularity and value over the last eight years, outpacing overall recorded music each year across this period”.

Today, Furtado notes that ‘Loose’ contained two tracks with Spanish lyrics – the reggaeton bop ‘No Hay Igual’ and ‘Te Busqué’, a bilingual duet with Colombian singer Juanes – that reflected the fact she was already “immersing” herself in the Latin music world.

“I’m really just a sponge,” says Furtado, the daughter of Portuguese parents who emigrated to Victoria, Canada in the late ’60s. “It’s very easy to learn Spanish if you already know Portuguese, if you ask me,” she continues. “But with ‘Mi Plan’, I really focused on getting my Spanish absolutely correct. I even did several interviews in Spanish for that album.”

Looking at her entire body of work, including her upcoming album ‘7’, Furtado calls herself a “chameleon” who doesn’t “really believe in genre”. Since she was diagnosed with inattentive ADHD in 2022, she understands her creative restlessness a lot better. “I think it’s really informed my career,” she says. “I get that ‘been there, done that’ thing where I’m like: ‘What’s the next challenge? What’s gonna make this unique from the last experience?’”

While promoting ‘7’, Furtado is also readying a vinyl reissue of her 2000 debut ‘Whoa, Nelly!’, which is due on August 9. Home to the soaring folk-pop hit ‘I’m Like A Bird’ and trip-hop influenced banger ‘Turn Off The Light’, it introduced Furtado as a febrile talent with a rare gift for blending genres.

“When I look at my career, I feel most like the person who made ‘Whoa, Nelly!’ again now,” she says. “It’s hard to get back to that kind of creative space, but this is where my long breaks [between albums] really pay off. You get to step away, live your life and remember why you do this again.”

At this point, Furtado knows exactly how to feed her creative impulse. “A lot of my new album was made by jamming and inviting more people to the party,” she says. “I’ve learned to just keep the mic on – don’t turn it off – because the jam always has the best stuff in it.”

‘7’ by Nelly Furtado is out on September 20.

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