Canadian singer-songwriter Nelly Furtado has taken a step away from the spotlight a few times in her career, but she always comes roaring back, usually with something new to add to her sound.
An avid songwriter (she even composes music while she’s walking into an elevator, or cleaning her house), Furtado is consistently coming up with different approaches to creating music, and loves to collaborate with other artists.
READ MORE: Kanye West cancels all remaining Saint Pablo tour dates
Interestingly, her upcoming sixth studio album The Ride, which is scheduled for release on March 3, 2017, won’t feature any collaborations; she claimed in a Twitter Q&A that The Ride is similar in style and tone to 2000 hit album Whoa, Nelly, with the focus on her own voice and lyrics. Pipe Dreams, her first single from The Ride, recently dropped to positive reviews.
“The producer I did my new album with, his name is John Congleton, he’s more of an alternative producer,” said Furtado. “It’s been a different path for me lately. I guess it’s the freedom you have when you’re this far into your career. You can lay back, look at the whole picture and figure out what brings you the most joy.”
“It was kind of cool, because I’m super pop,” Furtado told The Fader. “I really gravitate toward pop melodies when I write — but John is really interesting and might rearrange my pop song into more of a punk arrangement, nothing like what I would do.”
READ MORE: Metallica announces small, intimate last-minute show in Toronto
Furtado’s fourth album was entirely in Spanish, and her fifth, 2012’s The Spirit Indestructible, was all about her reinvigorated “faith in humankind.” At the time of its release, she had just finished working with Free the Children and had built a school in Kenya, so her spirits were high.
Furtado recently teamed up with Tide and WWF Canada’s Count for Nature Movement, an initiative in which people can personally commit to helping Canada’s environment in multiple ways; the singer says being environmentally conscious is more important to her now that she’s a mother to teenage daughter Nevis. She finds that motherhood also impacts the way she writes music.
“It’s been an arc,” she said. “When I started out, I was just this scrappy kid. Loving music, 24/7, and then of course I became a mother in 2003. The songwriting focus just shifted … the studio became a place of escape, to let loose, because my home life became a bit more structured. All of a sudden, I couldn’t stay up all night writing songs, so I’d save that for the studio. That’s how I ended up recording Loose with Timbaland in 2006. It was like, ‘Woo-hoo! Time to party! I just weaned Nevis!'”
WATCH BELOW: Nelly Furtado’s anthem rendition gets mixed reviews on social media
Furtado is also proud and happy about her fellow Canucks and the burgeoning Canadian music scene.
“I’ve been working with quite a few Canadian musicians lately, and I love the Canadian music scene right now,” she said. “In Toronto on any given day, you can still meet a really talented musician at your local coffee shop, wherever you are. I love that about Toronto, and it’s really nice when people acknowledge that I started out here when I was 17. My trip-hop group named Nelstar. These are my roots.”
Comments