I was introduced to Nelly Furtado’s music three times. The first time came via the 1999 prison drama Brokedown Palace, starring Claire Danes and Kate Beckinsale. The soundtrack featured an early mix of “Party,” then titled “Party’s Just Begun.” There was no face to put to the song, just that extraordinary voice—poised, seemingly seasoned, occasionally nasal, and certainly not like anything on Top 40 radio—and those unique dub-pop beats.
Flash forward a year or so later and Furtado’s sugar-pop “I’m Like a Bird” is in heavy rotation on College Television. MTV hadn’t quite latched onto the video yet, but I quickly realized that the fresh-faced Portuguese-Canadian singing was the same young woman who delivered the darker, edgier “Party.” Surely some major label suit had gotten a hold of Furtado and coaxed a Top 40 hit out of her.
A few weeks later a promotional copy of Furtado’s debut Whoa, Nelly! floated around the office of the record label where I worked at the time. I quickly discovered that, while “I’m Like a Bird” was the poppiest thing on the entire album, it was anything but a fluke. She directly confronts the issue on “Shit on the Radio (Remember the Days)” via a friend or lover who thinks she’s sold out: “It’s so much easier to stay down there guaranteeing you’re cool/Than to sit up here exposing myself trying to break through.”
Chockfull of instantly memorable hooks and lyrics beyond Furtado’s 20 years, Whoa, Nelly! was a delightful and refreshing antidote to the army of pop princesses and rap-metal bands that had taken over popular music at the turn of the millennium. Two years later, the album still sounds as fresh, opening with the sampled Kronos Quartet loop of “Hey, Man!” and cascading track by track into the trip-hop of “My Love Grows Deeper Part 1,” the trip-pop of the hit single “Turn Off the Light,” and the torchy swing of “Scared of You,” while maintaining a rare consistency.
“I’m changing my inflection and how I say the words/Maybe it will sound like something they’ve never heard,” she declares on “Party.” Furtado’s free-verse poetry flows meticulously over a Prince-esque riff on “Trynna Finda Way,” flawlessly summing up her post-rave generation ambivalence (“To see past my lethargy is hard I feign/The beauty of my youth is gone but the chemicals remain”), and her observations are like nothing you’ll hear from her pop-tart contemporaries (“Looks like I only love God when the sun shines my way,” she admits on the cartoonish “Well, Well”).
Furtado’s voice is certainly an acquired taste, but there’s no shortchanging her ability to ad lib along to a trumpet solo (“Baby Girl”) or spit rhymes like a caffeinated MC (“Legend,” “I Will Make U Cry,” in which she snidely taunts an unresponsive love interest by mawkishly weeping, “I will make you cry…boo-hoo!”). The impeccable pop-crackle production—clattering electronic percussion, turntable scratches, hip-hop beats, acoustic guitars, and string arrangements courtesy of Track & Field—never diminishes the resonance of Furtado’s voice, but you may need to read the lyric book to fully appreciate the breadth of her world.
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