Nelly Furtado's first album was a playful mix of hip hop, dance, funk and soul. Her second explores her Portuguese roots. She tells Brian Boyd why she has changed direction.
'It was on a trip back to the Azores, back to the small village where my parents are from, and I just saw this very simple rustic scene of a man coming down a hill back from the fields. When I saw that I just thought, that's my album, that's what I want."
Nelly Furtado is explaining, as best she can, why she has decided to follow Whoa, Nelly!, her multi-platinum-selling début, with a very simple album of folk and world music. Whoa, Nelly! was representative of Furtado's upbringing - she grew up in Canada of Portuguese parents - with touches of fado behind the dominant mix of hip hop, dance, funk and soul. Highly melodic and inventively rhythmic, the album yielded the hit single I'm Like A Bird, picked up a few Grammys and, two years on, is still in the lower reaches of the album charts.
"It's not that I've totally turned my back against the modern sound," says the 22-year-old singer-songwriter, "but when I came to tour the last album I found it very frustrating to perform on stage. Because there was so much hip hop on it I had to use a lot of samples, and after a while I found myself being a slave to the samples. With this new one we've just used a lot of traditional instruments - there's a lot of banjo on there - so we should be able to more or less recreate it on tour."
Furtado's record company warned her not to bank on selling as many copies of the new album, which is called Folklore, especially given the new direction. "It that's old thing about having all your life to make your first record and then just a few months to make the second one, but really I don't have any problems with inspiration. I come from a working-class family - my mother used to work as a housekeeper in a hotel, and whenever I was off school I used to work with her as a chambermaid - and having that duel background also helps.
"I was basically just a Canadian kid, but all the rest of my family were Portuguese. I grew up hearing music with a very open mind, whether it was Portuguese church music around my house or whether it listening to hip hop on sound systems on the street corner with my friends. I didn't have any bias in what I listened to, which is different to not having any taste in what you listen to."
She's as comfortable teaming up with Missy Elliott to rerecord the urban classic Get Ur Freak On as she is duetting with the acclaimed South American singer-guitarist Juanes - the song they recorded in Spanish (Furtado speaks fluent Spanish as well as Portuguese) went to number one in the Latin charts. And her new album features both Bela Fleck and the Kronos Quartet.
"I wanted musicians like that because it's in keeping with the feel of the work," she says. "I've called the album Folklore because I think of that word as meaning a belief in origin. It's people's stories, basically, and a lot of it was inspired by going back to see my relations in the Azores, about me connecting up my Portuguese parents arriving in Canada and me growing up with that duality.
"Because of the music that surrounded me when I was growing up - all very urban - I began writing songs like that, and remember I was still a teenager when I wrote Whoa, Nelly! I sort of had this thing that I had to record energetic music; I didn't want to go out on stage and have to stand behind melancholic songs.
"But even with, say, I'm Like A Bird, that was written on an acoustic guitar. I know it doesn't sound like that, but that's what modern technology can do. Stepping out from behind that technology meant that on this album I could move that sound to one side and include instruments like banjo and accordion instead. I prefer to call the new sound post-folk, in that it plays on folk themes but is very modern at the same time.
"There's tablas on there, there's a really famous Brazilian singer called Caetano Veloso and even some bluesy guitar riffs. And I think my voice sounds a lot different now: it's less R & B and a lot deeper and warmer."
It's a voice she puts to good use on the first single, Powerless. She wrote it after FHM, the British lad mag, allegedly altered a photograph of her for its cover. Furtado was enraged that the image it used seemed to airbrush out her Portuguese features. She sings: "Paint my face in your magazine, make it look whiter than it seems, shove away my ethnicity, burn every notion I have."
"A lot of that song is about fame also: what happens to you when you get to do all these amazing things yet realise there is a downside also," she says. "So there is, for want of a better word, a bit more wisdom on this one. I'm not the bouncy girl aged 20 with her first album.
"And I really did worry about coming back. I felt I had to come back different - all the artists I've respected have done that - so I needed to move into this new sound, mainly because it's important to prove that you're not a one-trick pony and you are able to mature musically.
"Even at this close remove, I find the first album very playful; there's almost a cartoon-like quality to it. It was that pop and street crossover sound which really is what I was like when I was that age, but Folklore is a more complete picture. I'm so excited about doing these songs live, because I will be able to do them properly without loads of samples. The last time I played in Ireland was at Slane Castle, with U2, but for this album I'd like to do the Olympia or somewhere like that."
Folklore is on Universal
