Fly Girl

By high school, she had also discovered love. "My high school sweetheart was the only real love I've ever had," she says. "It was unconditional and artistic, the kind of love where you're inspired by each other. When you're a passionate person, love is so addicting. How can playing cards or going to the gym seem as good as hanging out with your loved one? But you have to be very careful, because love can tear you apart."

When it ended, she channeled her heartbreak into her own songs; by then her musical tastes had shifted yet again to the Smashing Pumpkins, Tricky and the Verve: "I thought rock was devil's music until I turned seventeen. I was all about wearing my fake Timberland boots and plaid shirt and my big hoop earrings."

At seventeen, Furtado moved to Toronto. "The first day I got there, my sister took me to a big club, and I had to use some fake ID to get in. And I remember going to a rave and being so mad that we had to leave, and then running through downtown Toronto all by myself, feeling the raw energy of the city." She achieved this ecstasy without Ecstasy: "I was a drug-free raver. People free up, get a little animalistic, and the dancing can get shamanistic and modern. So I'd get in these really great states just by dancing. It becomes spiritual. That's why I'm into Jeff Buckley and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. They reach other levels of consciousness when they sing."

Furtado's other consciousness was subsistence, living with relatives and working in customer service at an alarm company, where people yelled at her over the phone all day. At night, she listened to Hole and made demos with local producers for a Portishead-style group she called Nelstar. "Trip-hop stuff," she says, "that went hand in hand with my post-high school depression, when the real world comes crashing down."

People were interested in her music, but Furtado had a little tape recorder in her head that played messages, telling her that something didn't feel right, that she should enjoy being a teenager a little longer. She went backpacking through Europe with friends, falling in love with a native Portuguese musical style called fado. "It's very melancholy," she says. "The themes are dark: death, longing, unrequited love, and it's like a meditation in a way."

She moved back to Victoria, enrolled in creative-writing courses at college and learned how to play guitar by teaching herself "Wonderwall" by Oasis. She started playing open mikes and earned money, as she had since she was twelve, chambermaiding with her mother at the Robin Hood Motel. "It was hard," Furtado sighs. "Especially if you went out the night before. It would be me and my brother all hungover in the laundry room with our coffee, stacking towels up." When Furtado was twenty, she sat her parents down and made an announcement: You know I can do this music thing on my own, but I would prefer to have your blessing. "At that point," Maria Furtado recalls, "we had been nagging her about college too much and too often, so we just said OK. It's a difficult life, but she is hardworking and talented, and as long as she keeps her clothes on, I'm fine with it."

Whoa, Nelly! recently went platinum, and Furtado has found that this success only makes her want more. "I'm not interested in being abstract with a major record deal," she declares. "Otherwise, I would have just gone to university and made music on the side. But there's this pull inside that makes you want to connect with more people." Furtado has spent most of the last year making those connections on tour, sleeping, shopping and eating in the same places we all do, even though she's afraid of doing such mundane things and sometimes has to leave a mall because "it's just too ordinary. Still, there's something so beautiful about how uncultured, how naive and patriotic everything is. There's a real purity beneath all that."

We meet again at a rehearsal studio in Burbank, where Furtado and Missy Elliott get their freak on before performing a remix of Elliott's single "Get Ur Freak On," from the Tomb Raider soundtrack, for The Tonight Show. "I saw her video and had to have her on the remix," Elliott says. It is a mutual-admiration society: Furtado is as complimentary about Elliott's manicure and bling-bling personal style as she is about Elliott's business acumen.

Furtado puts down her fruit smoothie and her bottle of water, picks up a mike and starts freestyling with Elliott's crew. She thrives on this kind of multicultural mix; it reminds her of the Toronto music scene she came up in, where a large Caribbean population makes the local hip-hop distinctively melodic. Skanking around the room, she seems completely unintimidated by the athletic moves of Elliott's four dancers. "I think they were scared," Furtado says, putting up a little front. "Because I showed up in my track pants." A few days later, Furtado turns up at the rooftop pool of her L.A. hotel in jeans and a T-shirt with rainbow detailing. "Fucking hell," she says. "I need sunglasses." She's worn glasses since she was nine, and her icy blue-green eyes are extremely sensitive. Even squinting and with a few post-adolescent blemishes, she is beautiful. She wears a little makeup but is otherwise unadorned. "I'm an earth angel," she declares. "No piercings, no tattoos." Her skin is tawny, perhaps as a result of filming a video for the electro swamp-blues tune "Turn Off the Light," in which she wallows around in "a mud stew made from crushed walnut shells. I still had, like, brown coming off on my towel, like, a week later."

The video was directed by Sophie Mueller, who has made icons out of Annie Lennox and Gwen Stefani. "The cool thing about it," says Furtado, "is that I'm the only girl in it, and I'm always looking at the guys. I don't think I'm objectifying the males in the video, but I think there's a really cute, playful energy to it. It's a fucking music video," she raves on, "but it's still art. We saw something in our heads, and we made it come alive rather than just the stagnant aestheticism of 'Wow! Her eyes look so blue.'"

Talk turns to life in Los Angeles — Furtado hopes to live here one day, when she stops touring long enough to pack — and to the life of celebrity: "I met John Travolta and didn't know what to say at all. I felt like such a dork. And then I met Penny Marshall, and I got to tell her how much I loved Laverne and Shirley 'cause they worked in a factory, and my mom, you know, worked in the laundry room of a hotel, so we bonded." Furtado is a fan of My So-Called Life and of Canadian actress Sarah Polley. She hopes to do a little acting herself one day, maybe after her second album. Asked to give a title to the cinematic version of her life, she quickly replies, "Dazed and Confused." Then she thinks for a minute and comes up with something better: "Bare Feet, Dirty Hands, Open Fire."

A bit long for a marquee, perhaps, but provocative. One wonders what a psychiatrist would make of that. "I haven't been to one," she confesses. "Not yet. Soon, hopefully."

As she gets up to leave, Furtado grabs a bottle of water. She is rarely without one, though she has learned to travel light. "Sometimes I don't even wear underwear," she admits. Wherever she goes, whatever she does, Furtado always has gum and lipstick at the ready. She uses M.A.C's Rebel, a fuchsia so bright and lively that it could easily have been called Nelly. The very idea of such a thing sends a shiver through her. "That's the story of my life," she says. "Fear of bliss! I'm always afraid of frivolity. I'm always like, 'Oh, my God, I can't have people think that I want a lipstick named after me, how frivolous!' I've always got to be deep. But you know what would be cool?" she adds, giggling. "Having a street named after me."

Would it be a Nelly Furtado Drive, Avenue or Boulevard?

None of the above, she replies. "It would be a cul-de-sac."

[From Issue 875 — August 16, 2001]