Nelly Furtado Ringtones

Nelly Furtado Early years and influences
Nelly Furtado, a first-generation Portuguese Canadian, was born as one of three children to Maria Manuela and António José Furtado, Portuguese immigrants from São Miguel Island in the Azores. Nelly Furtado was named after Soviet gymnast Nellie Kim. On a faux-interview on MADtv, Nelly Furtado stated that her last name means "stolen" in Portuguese.

Nelly Furtado's parents emigrated from Portugal to Canada in the late 1970s. Nelly Furtado has stated that visiting her parents' birthplace, the Azores islands, as a child experiencing its culture and learning the Portuguese language has made her an open-minded person. This has strongly influenced her artistry as Nelly Furtado has incorporated many cross-cultural sounds into her music. It is also evident in her multilingualism as Nelly Furtado can speak English, Portuguese, Spanish and Hindi. Nelly Furtado has acknowledged her parents as the source of her strong work ethic; Nelly Furtado spent eight summers working as a chambermaid with her mother, who was a housekeeper in Victoria. Nelly Furtado has stated that coming from a working class background has shaped her identity in a positive way. Nelly Furtado has also said that her Roman Catholic background and attending church was "a big part of [her] life".

Nelly Furtado first sang at the age of four when she performed a duet with her mother at church. Nelly Furtado began playing instruments at the age of nine, learning the trombone, ukulele and, in later years, the guitar and keyboard. Nelly Furtado began writing songs at the age of twelve and, as a teenager, Nelly Furtado played in a Portuguese marching band.

During these early years, Nelly Furtado embraced many musical genres, listening heavily to mainstream R&B, hip hop, alternative rock, New Wave, alternative hip hop, trip hop, world music (including Portuguese fado, Brazilian bossa nova, and Indian music), and a variety of others. Her influences have included Jeff Buckley, Caetano Veloso, Amalia Rodrigues, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Cornershop, TLC, Mary J. Blige, Mariah Carey, Digable Planets, De La Soul, Radiohead, Oasis, The Smashing Pumpkins, The Verve, U2, and Beck.

Nelly Furtado's music has also been influenced by her current residence, Toronto, which Nelly Furtado calls "the most multicultural city in the entire world" and a place where she "can be any culture". Growing up in Canada and experiencing Toronto's cultural diversity, Nelly Furtado has said that she did not have to wait for the Internet revolution to learn about world music. On a 2006 Rolling Stone issue, Nelly Furtado commented about her diverse taste.

The first musicians Nelly Furtado interacted with were underground rappers and DJs. During a visit to Toronto, after the summer of eleventh grade, Nelly Furtado met Tallis Newkirk, member of hip hop group Plains of Fascination and contributed vocals to their 1996 album Join the Ranks on the track "Waitin' 4 the Streets". Nelly Furtado spent the rest of that summer in Portugal, opening her mind to native rock acts and then returned to British Columbia. After graduating from Mount Douglas Secondary School in 1996, she moved to Toronto where she eventually formed the trip hop duo Nelstar in 1997 with Newkirk. The experience led her back to her hip-hop influences and allowed Nelly Furtado to become more comfortable with writing her own melodies and rhymes.

Although, "Like", one of the songs Nelstar recorded, received a VideoFACT grant to cover for the production of a music video, Nelly Furtado felt the trip-hop style of the duo was "too segregated" and believed it did not represent her personality or allow her to showcase her vocal ability. She left the group and decided to move back home.

Before moving, Nelly Furtado performed at the 1997 Honey Jam, a female, mostly-black talent show at Toronto nightclub Lee's Palace. Nelly Furtado performed to a Digital Audio Tape in jeans and a t-shirt. At the club, The Philosopher Kings singer Gerald Eaton (aka Jarvis Church) was impressed with her performance and approached her to write with him. Eaton and fellow Kings member Brian West, collectively known as Track and Field, helped Nelly Furtado produce a demo, but Nelly Furtado already had plans to backpack through Europe and return home to take creative writing courses at Camosun College. Nelly Furtado stayed in touch with Eaton and West who insisted that Nelly Furtado return to Toronto to record more material. Nelly Furtado eventually returned for two weeks; the material recorded during those sessions led to her record deal with DreamWorks Records in 1999.

Nelly Furtado continued to collaborate with Eaton and West, who co-produced her debut album, Whoa, Nelly!, which was released in October 2000. The album saw major success all over the globe supported by its singles, "I'm like a Bird", "Turn off the Light", "...On the Radio (Remember the Days)", and "Hey, Man!".

It received four Grammy nominations in 2002, and her debut single won for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance. Furthermore, Nelly Furtado was critically acclaimed for her innovative mixture of various genres and sounds. Slant magazine called the album "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". The sound of the album was strongly influenced by musicians who had traversed cultures and "the challenge of making heartfelt, emotional music that's upbeat and hopeful". Following the release of the album, Nelly Furtado headlined the Burn in the Spotlight tour and also appeared on Moby's Area:One tour.

Before the release of her sophomore album, Folklore, Nelly Furtado gave birth to her first child, daughter Nevis. On September 20, 2003 in Toronto, Nelly Furtado had a home birth with midwives. Nelly Furtado has said about motherhood, "It's actually pretty incredible. It's a lot more instinctual than I thought".

Nevis's father is Nelly Furtado's then boyfriend, DJ/producer Jasper Gahunia aka Lil' Jaz. Nelly Furtado and Gahunia, who broke up in 2005, were together for four years and friends for several years before that. Nelly Furtado has stated, "We're fully active co-parents and really close friends, so things are irie".

Nevis is ethnically a quarter Filipino, a quarter Indian, and half Portuguese. Nelly Furtado has chosen to raise her in Toronto due to the city's cultural diversity, open-mindedness, and grassroots political activism.

Nelly Furtado's second album, Folklore, was released in November 2003. The title was influenced by her parents immigration to Canada. When you have that in your blood, you never really part with it-it becomes your own personal folklore." The album also displayed a diverse sound but with a more rock-oriented, acoustic approach. As Nelly Furtado focused more on the songwriting rather "than on frenetically switching genres five times in one song", BBC felt that it had "twice the originality" of her debut. Nelly Furtado attributed the mellowness of the album to the fact that Nelly Furtado was pregnant during most of its recording. The final track on the album, "Childhood Dreams", is dedicated to her daughter.

The album includes the single "Força", which was written as the official anthem of the 2004 European Football Championship. Nelly Furtado performed the song at the championship's final in Lisbon, Portugal in July 2004. Other singles included the ballad "Try" and "Powerless (Say What You Want)", in which Nelly Furtado embraces her Portuguese heritage; the song deals with "the idea that you can still feel like a minority inside, even if you don't look like one on the outside".

The album was not as successful as her debut, partly due to troubles at DreamWorks Records and the less poppy sound. It lacked promotion because DreamWorks was sold to Universal Music Group at the time of Folkore's release. In 2005, DreamWorks Records was shut down, and many of its artists, including Nelly Furtado, were absorbed into Geffen Records.

Nelly Furtado's third album, Loose, was released in June 2006. It was named after the spontaneous, creative decisions Nelly Furtado faced while creating the album Four lead singles were released in different regions of the world: the Spanish reggaeton-influenced "No Hay Igual" (featuring Calle 13), the hip-hop "Promiscuous" (featuring Timbaland), for which Nelly Furtado won a 2006 Billboard Music Award for Pop Single of the Year, the latin "Te Busqué" (featuring Juanes) and the pop "Maneater". For the first time, Nelly Furtado worked with a variety of record producers and followed a more collaborative approach in creating the album. The album, mostly produced by Timbaland, showed her experimenting with a more R&B-hip hop sound and the "surreal, theatrical elements of '80s music". Nelly Furtado has categorized the album's sound as punk-hop, which Nelly Furtado describes as "this modern, poppy, spooky music" and stated that "there's a mysterious, after-midnight vibe to [it] that's extremely visceral". Nelly Furtado attributed the youthful sound of the album to the presence of her two-year old daughter.

Nelly Furtado also wanted the album to sound more like her demo tapes which Nelly Furtado prefers over her finished albums. Nelly Furtado recalls, "The cool thing is we did the mixes as we went. The whole album is a board mix theoretically. We didn't bring in the fancy mixer at the end". During the album's creation, Nelly Furtado listened to several electro and hard rock musicians including System of a Down and Death from Above 1979 who influenced the rock sounds present on the album and the "coughing, laughing, distorted bass lines" which were kept in the songs deliberately.

Loose became the most successful album of Nelly Furtado's career, reaching number-one in several countries including the United States and Canada and
producing the hit singles "Promiscuous", "Maneater", "Say It Right" and "All Good Things (Come to an End)", the first two of which have become the most successful songs of her career, reaching number-one on several charts worldwide. The album received generally positive reviews from critics, with some citing the "revitalising" effect of Timbaland on Nelly Furtado's music, and others calling it "slick, smart and surprising."

In June 2006, in an interview with Genre magazine, when asked if Nelly Furtado had "ever felt an attraction to women", Nelly Furtado replied "Absolutely.

Women are beautiful and sexy." Nelly Furtado also said the idea that everyone was inherently bisexual made sense to her and agreed with Kurt Cobain's statement that "everyone is gay" from Nirvana's "All Apologies". Some considered this an announcement of bisexuality, but in August 2006, Nelly Furtado confirmed that she was "straight, but very open-minded". Nelly Furtado commented that she was slightly embarrassed by the quotes and stated, "I guess I was humouring the journalist a little and I was reading a book about Chinese medicine, and we went off on a tangent."

In November 2006, Nelly Furtado announced that her world tour will begin in Canada on January 31, 2007. The first date is in London, Ontario, and she will tour five continents. Furtado and Justin Timberlake are featured on Timbaland's upcoming single "Give It to Me".

In late November, Nelly Furtado said that she turned down US $500,000 to pose nude in Playboy.

Nelly Furtado announced in December that she would be recording an all-Spanish album. Nelly Furtado plans to include her previous Spanish songs, translations of her older tracks, and some new, original songs.

Nelly Furtado began acting in school plays in middle school. Nelly Furtado formally began studying acting after she planned to appear in a Hindi film which never came to fruition. Acting courses taught her to "let go of [her] ego and feel really grounded"; this influenced the theme and creation of her third album Loose. Nelly Furtado prepared for a role in a second film, the independent drama Nobody's Hero (2006), but plans fell through as filming conflicted with the promotion of Loose.

Whoa, Nelly! (2000)
Hey, Man!
... On The Radio (Remember The Days)
Baby Girl
Legend
I'm Like A Bird
Turn Off The Light
Trynna Finda Way
Party
Well, Well
My Love Grows Deeper (Part 1)
I Will Make U Cry
Scared Of You

Folklore (2003)
One-Trick Pony
Powerless (also known as Say What You Want)
Explode
Try
Fresh Off The Boat
Forca
Saturdays
Picture Perfect
The Grass Is Green
Build You Up
Island Of Wonder
Childhood Dreams

Loose (2006)
Afraid
Maneater
Promiscuous Girl
Glow
Showtime
No Hay Igual
Te Busque
Say It Right
Do It
In God's Hand
What I Wanted
Wait For You
All Good Things
Let My Hair Down
Somebody To Love