enRoute


	ENROUTE TV ENROUTE FM MEDIA KIT AIR CANADA LINKS WRITERS' GUIDELINES

FLYGIRL
It's hard to believe that Nelly Furtado was virtually unknown only a year ago. The little girl from Victoria conquered the pop charts in 2001. Now her sights are set on the future.

Text: MARK LEPAGE

When Nelly Furtado bounces into the basement of Vancouver's Commodore club for MTV and radio interviews, you think, my goodness, she’s tiny. And energetic. No matter how her day has gone, she gives every-one– the interviewers, the PR handlers, the meek hair-and-makeup duo – nothing but professional cheer and smile wattage.

In a pink top, with her dark hair pulled chastely back, Nelly chirps along with her interviewers. Two painfully zany morning radio hosts lure her into chatter about her first favourite Christmas gift, an Easy-Bake Oven. They’re goading her girlishness, and she plays along, pushing an upcoming gig with a final burst. "Buy a ticket!" she yelps. "I’ll show my boobs!" The whole room gasps, then laughs, and she’s up and out.

Furtado has more perk than a Brazilian coffee plantation. Somewhere, another 23-year-old female must be suing over the personality she was cheated of at birth when Furtado got two. She was so everywhere in 2001, it’s hard to remember Furtado did not exist in the public imagination a scant year ago. But if last year was a dream intro, 2002 may be the real business. Four Grammy Award nominations will no doubt up sales for her debut album, Whoa, Nelly!, which has sold more than 2 million copies in the U.S. The rest of the world is one hit single behind Canada, where Furtado has already charted three times. A major spring national tour and a Rolodex full of superstardom’s most important phone numbers confirm a status beyond one-hit wonder.

Few go from nowhere to unanimous acclaim with a debut hit, but then few singles were as effortlessly gamine as "I’m Like a Bird," last year’s breezy hit that nestled into endless repeat in a million mental hard drives. First her new peers lined up to praise her: Elton John led the raves, but then he often does. Then they offered work – an Elton duet at a post-Oscars bash, an invitation from Aretha Franklin’s people for the Divas Live TV special – and extreme street cred when hip hop queen Missy Elliott brought her in for a remix of "Get Ur Freak On," the rap slogan that bestrode 2001. After that, it was all Saturday Night Live, Leno, the American Music Awards, Canada Day headliner status and opening for U2 in Dublin. She was A-listed at light-speed, with no better confirmation than January’s mini-scandal, when a men’s mag allegedly altered a cover shot to digitally expose her tummy. She remains upbeat. With disarming self deprecation, she admits she "stood out" on Bono’s recent superstar remake of "What’s Going On" (with Jennifer Lopez, Fred Durst, Christina Aguilera) because "when you sing flat, you tend to stand out."

You will also stand out in a year torn between Britney Spears’ robot-virgin sex charade and an endless parade of tortured, vengeful metalheads from Slipknot to Staind. Between her tease and their rage, Furtado offered deceptively simple qualities: summery charm, loping rhythms hitched to melody, and a fierce magazine smile. Charm is one thing, and both Britney and the metal bands had their own, buts they left a certain credibility gap. Furtado’s cheer was amplified because it was believable.

Furtado springs into a Vancouver hotel restaurant in a hooded sweatshirt. This is her off-duty look, the flip side to the tightly bound cover girl pho-tos. She begins speaking with purpose. "I’m not one of those who want to do anything frivolously," she says. Fair enough. Before she can elaborate, I quote her back: "I want to be Jack Kerouac, Mona Lisa, Gandhi and Mother Teresa all at the same time." This was Nelly Furtado writing in her own Website bio at 19.

"Oh boy!" she says brightly. "A tad pretentious..." We’re sitting at a linen covered table, separated by an artfully deployed nuke-bright fruit platter. Furtado’s violet gaze is soft, but her ambitions mark an unselfconscious child of the Madonna era who accepts her ingenue status only for the moment. This is no act – this is pure confidence. Over the next hour, she will cite Michael Ondaatje’s "prose poetry" as an inspiration as well as the Beat writers. They lived their lives so recklessly. And I know I don’t..."

And she doesn’t, which is part of the charm. If anything, Furtado radiates a floral vitality in person. Fittingly, she grew up in Victoria, Canada’s botanical garden. "But very humble roots, you know?" Furtado remembers being four years old, sitting in the Robin Hood Motel laundromat while her immigrant mother Maria Manuela washed linen. "But knowing somehow that I’d be singing for thousands of people one day."

Her parents had left the fishing villages of the Azores for the American dream, "which I consider to include Canada as well." At first, Nelly kept her own dream a secret. "I knew it wasn’t plausible for a girl from Victoria, B.C., to say that I was gonna be a world-famous singer. I didn’t want the negative feedback." She understood an immigrant generation’s fear of the impractical but would not surrender to it. "So there were literally people in Victoria who turned on the TV and saw my video and had no idea I sang."

The Portuguese have a vocal tradition called the fado, a graceful, melan-choly kind of opera-blues. Furtado is enamoured with the genre. "It takes a lot of work to be a fado singer. Maybe one day I’ll be able to do it, but I’m nowhere near." Listen to a Teresa Salgueiro of Madredeus and her point is well taken. Furtado writes "Cancoes desafios (a type of fado)" in my note-book and recalls her father, Antonio José, dragging her to the fado stage in Victoria, where two male singers would be engaged in a vocal duel, exchanging put-down verses. "Just like a hip hop battle, only melodic."

By then, she was already immersed in the boil of that new culture, hip hop. From her bedroom, Furtado tuned in the Seattle hip hop stations. She watched TV’s Pump It Up and bought magazines like Rap Pages. "I had fall-en in love with the culture completely. LL Cool J, Salt-N-Pepa, Bel Biv Devoe, Sister Souljah..." She rolled in her own mall-rat B-girl crew, tagged herself "Skatz" and played rapper, "freestyling in the mall, freestyling in the park." Of course, this was no gangsta chic; this was Victoria, B.C., and "it was all very positive."

Furtado is a member of a generation born after hip hop was born for whom it has a history and even a prehistory. Hip hop’s ghetto codes, breakbeats and postures are an unquestioned musical fact of life for her in a way they could never be for a previous generation seduced out of childhood by The Rolling Stones, the backbeat and an exclusively rock ’n’ roll aesthetic.

As such, she may trust the over-30s, but they get in the way as well. "When my record came out I thought, there still are those rock critics around that [due to] a generation gap, haven’t caught up to hip hop yet. They haven’t realized the impact hip hop can have." So she waved two flags, remaining traditionally Portuguese but true to the sounds of the modern schoolyard. Today, she may be on the leading edge of a new wave of non-white and non-black ethnicity in pop charts. The fado, hip hop, trip-hop, bossa nova, reggae and the bhangra dances of her teenage years all fall into her effortless mix. The art will come later. "There’s a fine line between music that sounds like you’re in a library and music that just flows and has feeling. If you’re gonna come and play, I don’t want you to play what you think is Brazilian. I want you to actually hammer out a Brazilian rhythm on that thing. Or get the real player to come in."

Furtado is on the bill of A Miracle on Granville Street, a food bank benefit featuring a Who’s That of Canadians – some established mid-range artists (Jann Arden), some industry confetti (Sugar Jones). In her sound check, Furtado strums a big white acoustic guitar, coaxing her band through holiday arrangements, dropping the words to "Feliz Navidad" into "Shit on the Radio," the album’s old-world/new-school centrepiece.

Later in the evening, the club will fill up with girls teetering around in borrowed heels, bidding for a hoochie mama status beyond their years or fashion keen. (Seriously: Two will take modest tumbles down a short staircase; another will pout while med personnel fondle her sprained ankle.) Furtado will have her own opportunity to play dress-up the next day at a photo shoot as she’s primped and preened in a seventies Givenchy dress once worn by Catherine Deneuve. Tonight, though, she doesn’t need haute couture to seem antic yet adult. Furtado sings the Christmas wish in a minor key and runs away with the night. And she used to be so tiny.