The World Is Her Beatbox

Don’t be fooled by the Top 40 radio popularity of Nelly Furtado’s trip-hop meets “The Girl From Ipanema” sound. The young Canadian singer-songwriter who’s winning raves for her debut album is all about shattering expectations, musical and otherwise.

She claims slick pop singers Mariah Carey and Mary J. Blige as her early idols, yet packs her own records with edgy, unpredictable global rhythms. On the cover of her CD, she poses like a budding teen star, but in person she exhibits a refreshing maturity--she’s sunny yet remarkably well-grounded.

More proof of her uniqueness lies in the diversity of her audience. Since its release last month, Furtado’s album, “Whoa, Nelly!,” has attracted admirers of all stripes, from the teenage acolytes who flood her with e-mail to the ultra-hip DJs who spin her vinyl singles in the underground Toronto club scene where she got her big break.

One of her songs, the profanely titled “---t on the Radio,” is a rebuke of people who assume that Furtado sold out her musical ideals to pursue mainstream stardom. At a recent show, a man old enough to be her grandfather told her he heard her via a Napster download and become an instant fan.

The 21-year-old performer’s short career path has been similarly unpredictable.

In 1999, she appeared in the lineup of the Lilith Fair, a virtual unknown alongside established artists such as Sarah McLachlan and Chrissie Hynde. Only months earlier, Furtado made plans to postpone her music career to attend college. Even before her record was out, she was spotlighted in Vanity Fair and Interview, based on advance buzz and early performances.

Hype of this sort often breeds skepticism. But “Whoa, Nelly!” delivers with a fresh bouquet of songs that perfectly capture the joy and pain of a young adult breaking free of adolescence, all set to a postmodern collage of samples and fluid Portuguese and Brazilian rhythms.

Since its release in October, critics have compared Furtado favorably to fellow Canadian Joni Mitchell, as well as to female hip-hoppers TLC and edgy pop-rock experimenters Beck and Bjork. Rolling Stone called the album “soulfully, intelligently, sensuously international.”

One usually expects praise to go straight to a young performer’s head. But Furtado seems unaffected by the torrent of attention.

On a bright fall afternoon at SoHo’s trendy Mercer Kitchen restaurant, she hardly notices her cool, metal-surfaced surroundings, instead sipping a glass of Evian and talking loudly and enthusiastically about her good fortune.

“I feel like I’ve been doing this forever,” she says. “I’m kind of one of those kids that got hold of my older brother’s Jim Carroll [books] too early. I’ve always just been very street-smart.”

“Whoa, Nelly!” has only sold about 12,400 copies so far, but her record label is unconcerned, focusing on the big picture.

Beth Halper, the executive who signed Furtado to DreamWorks Records, says she was impressed by her talent and self-confidence.

“There’s a naturalness to her, and a real primal desire to be doing what she’s doing,” Harper says. “It’s her ability to challenge herself and one-up herself to make the music better and better--there’s no barriers with her.”

“She has incredibly strong convictions for someone so young,” says DreamWorks co-head Lenny Waronker. “She really gets into a zone and goes with that. Because of that, the music is original and very much an individual’s vision.

“In a way, I think you have to be that young to do what she’s doing, because she’s less conscious about the business and much more conscious about this creative path that she’s on.”

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Dressed in a baby-blue crocheted sweater, flared jeans and silver hoop earrings, the pixie-like singer exudes a fresh, brassy attitude that starkly contrasts with the studied restraint of the black-clad crowd around her.

Punctuating her conversation with an infectious, staccato laugh, Furtado says she gained her self-confidence growing up as an ethnic minority in Victoria, British Columbia, a small, mostly white city on remote Vancouver Island. Although she was born in Canada, both of her parents are from San Miguel, a Mediterranean island that is part of Portugal.

Her father works as a landscaper and stonemason, and her mother is head of housekeeping at Victoria’s Robin Hood Motel, where Furtado sometimes helped out cleaning rooms as a child.

“As a first-generation Canadian, you stand out and you are different,” she says, her crystal-blue eyes flashing against her cafe au lait: complexion.

“You bring your bean sandwiches to school, and kids go, ‘What’s that?’ But it was a positive thing for me, because it was a source of identity, going to my Portuguese church and folk festivals.”

Almost as ingrained as her cultural identity was Furtado’s love of music. Her mother sings in a church choir, and other relatives played several instruments and composed scores in a marching band in Portugal. Furtado’s own musical journey began at age 9, when she taught herself Portuguese folk songs on the ukulele. In typically unorthodox fashion, she began playing the trombone in the school jazz band. Then she got sidetracked.

“The first real musicians I came into contact with in the city were hip-hop musicians, MCs and DJs,” she says. “So I kind of hung out with that crowd at school. We had a little hip-hop community in Victoria, even though it was a largely British colony. You find culture everywhere. Now you see Russian hip-hop groups and the Japanese hip-hop contingent.”

Not that Furtado considers herself a card-carrying member of the hip-hop crowd. “I’m not really part of a scene,” she says. “I think as a teenager I was kind of hiding in the trip-hop thing because it was cool. But now I don’t have a cool thing to hide beneath. I have to be cool on Nelly’s terms.”

Furtado cites Carey and Blige as her earliest musical obsessions. Even so, she credits the nurturing hip-hop community with giving her the gumption to pursue her own vision. Before she wrote songs, she improvised rap lyrics.

“There’d be parties in Victoria where there’d be a DJ and open mike,” she recalls. “You’d bust a rhyme on the mike or try to sing. I had friends who did graffiti, friends who choreographed. We did Janet Jackson routines at school and stuff like that. Very creative all the time.”

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The writings of Beat authors including Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg also inspired Furtado; she is a big believer in the Beats’ stream-of-consciousness approach to creativity.

It’s easy to hear that bohemian spirit in the breezy adventurousness of her album. The first track, “Hey Man,” begins with a hypnotic electronic sample of a classical string section (a snippet from “White Man’s Burden” by the Kronos Quartet) before somersaulting into a lilting, folk melody with a catchy pop chorus.

The result is a pretty good approximation of what “California Dreamin’ ” would have sounded like if the Mamas and the Papas had done it as a modern-day techno track.

Even in high school, Furtado craved diverse musical influences. Thirsting for a more urban vibe, she latched on to students at a local private school from such faraway cities as Chicago and Atlanta. It was through these friends that she got the name of a hip-hop producer in Toronto.

After high school, Furtado moved to Toronto to live with her older sister, and worked days as a customer service representative for a security company. But at night she became Nelstar, half of a duo inspired by the British group Portishead.

“I loved the idea that Portishead had urban influences and jazz influences,” she says, “but the songs were really meaningful and there was a deeper connection there.”

Convinced that she wasn’t ready to pursue a music career, she decided to return to Victoria in summer 1999 to enroll in a university creative writing program. Just before she was to leave, she performed at the Honey Jam, a Toronto talent show for aspiring hip-hop and R&B; performers.

Gerald Eaton, lead singer for a platinum-selling Canadian rock-and-soul band called the Philosopher Kings, happened to be in the audience. “She was standing very still, singing along with a tape,” he recalls. “The song wasn’t very good, but she performed it with an impressive sincerity and understatement.”

Eaton immediately offered Furtado his and his bandmate Brian West’s services. They produce records together under the name Track and Field. She accepted, and together the trio recorded a three-song demo to shop to labels.

She later signed to DreamWorks Records, which wanted her so badly that executives took her to meet label co-founder David Geffen at his home to impress her.

“She’s a very, very talented writer, especially when it comes to lyrics,” says Eaton. A good example is the way she deftly incorporates her daily experience in the words to “Party,” a sultry samba with Middle Eastern touches.

“I was cleaning rooms at the Robin Hood Motel and I would turn off the TV when I wanted to write songs,” says Furtado. “So that’s the lyric you hear: ‘I’m talking to the mirror again but it’s not listening/I’m cleaning my dirty mind like a toilet but it won’t give in.’ ”

Sometimes songs come to Furtado more spontaneously. While she was recording in a Los Angeles studio during the early months of this year, her producers urged her to write new material one night after a session.

“As usual, I was doing my homework at the last minute,” she says. “That night I wrote three songs--and the third one was ‘I’m Like a Bird,’ and that ended up being the first single.”

Since then, Furtado, who will tour the U.S. in January and February with a full band, has shattered some of her expectations, as well as an anxiety about performing live.

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During a series of 20 club dates last summer, the previously shy performer learned that she actually enjoys singing in front of an audience.

But what she really wants to do is produce. “I’ve always had that producer element of me that likes to see things happen and see the bigger picture,” says Furtado. “Even as a kid, every time I wrote out a song, I wrote down a production idea.”

Still, Furtado is wary about being pigeonholed.

“On some days I’m into hip-hop, and that kind of lends itself to a certain sort of tomboyishness. But I still love acting like I’m an R&B; diva onstage for some of those songs and dressing up with silver hoops. I’m not one thing, and I never have been.”