Sex-charged Nelly Furtado cuts loose

Nelly Furtado

Nelly Furtado is in cheerful mode. "You can't take life so seriously," she says, her chirpy rapid-fire delivery at odds with her elegant looks. But the 27-year-old Canadian singer has reason to be happy.

Her third album, Loose, is in the Top 30 and poised to be a global smash. In Britain, the single Maneater is a ferocious pop beast that shot to the top of the charts, giving Furtado her first British number-one hit.

Meanwhile across the Atlantic, Promiscuous - a heaving, rapping duet with Timbaland - has yielded her biggest hit in the United States.

Helmed largely by Timbaland, who is Missy Elliott's producer of choice, Furtado's album is adorned by rhythms that gyrate their way through edgy pop-R'n'B.

It's a heady, sexed-up world away from the primary-coloured innocence of her multimillion-selling 2001 debut Whoa, Nelly! and its pastoral and serious 2003 follow-up, Folklore.

After the success of her debut, with its Grammy-winning breakthrough hit, I'm Like a Bird, Furtado was desperate to prove she was more than a pop puppet, especially as rumours that she was stepping out with a pre-Paltrow Chris Martin made her tabloid fodder.

Jaded with what she felt was a shallow music industry, she responded with an album that eschewed its predecessor's carefree, mainstream pop in favour of more mature singer-songwriter-accented numbers, grown-up explorations of her Portuguese roots (her parents are working-class Portuguese immigrants from the Azores who moved to Canada before she was born), and defiant assertions of her identity.

"It was a very serious album," Furtado says, with a big grin. "It was like that person at a party who sits down next to you and tries to get you into deep conversations when all you feel like doing is chilling with your martini."

Whereas Whoa, Nelly! sold more than seven million copies worldwide, Folklore struggled to sell a quarter of that. "I thought it would have sold a lot more than it did," Furtado says, before trying to blame the dissolution of her previous label - Dreamworks - for the record's poor US sales.

But she has no regrets. "That album was something intimate that I had to do for myself," she says.

"When I started making music I dreamed of being like Ani DiFranco. I wanted to have my own label, and be all independent.

"So when my first album was so straight-down-the-middle pop I felt pressured to be unique on the second album. I wanted to cement myself as somebody with range."

When we last spoke - about the time Folklore came out - Furtado, in her machine-gun-syllable way, eulogised about the life-changing power of true love and gushed earnestly about her desire for artistic credibility and recognition.

But now she couldn't seem less concerned with what anyone else thinks of her. She rattles off her replies - sometimes so flippantly you can't help but question her sincerity.

The birth two years ago of Nevis, Furtado's daughter with former boyfriend Lil Jaz, the DJ in her band, was the catalyst for change. Becoming a mother shifted her perspective. "When you have a child, all of a sudden you're really accountable," she says.

"You're responsible for somebody's life. I guess that's why I have such a casual attitude to everything else.

"It made me tally up all I had going for me and it forced me to smarten up and not be so cheeky.

"I thought, 'Stop being a diva. You've got a good job here, why not own it a bit more?' "

Furtado stopped resisting the return to pop.

"I'd already proved I could write songs," she says. "I wanted to do something people could shake their booty to."

Loose achieves exactly that. There are some mid-tempo numbers, such as the sweeping All Good Things (Come to an End), penned with and originally featuring Chris Martin (his label asked for his vocals to be taken off).

But essentially, Loose is an exhilarating release of energy.

Furtado's songs crackle with intensity, from the Spanish-language No Hay Igual to the sultry groove of Say It Right.

With the sexually charged Loose, Furtado has abandoned her inhibitions. "I'm a lot more comfortable with myself now," she says

"I was pregnant for nine months and breast-feeding for two years. My body was completely hijacked - for all the best reasons - but for that time it wasn't mine. So once that was all over I rediscovered my body. I had all these new curves and I loved them."

Furtado flourished recording the album in the sultry heat of Miami. "I felt really sexy there," she says.

"A lot of the people are Latin, and I'm Latin. I could be the Portuguese-Canadian girl and let go of my inhibitions - the sexiness just poured out of me."

She acknowledges that her new image could do a great deal for record sales but emphasises that she is the driving force behind it.

"I'd still never wear a bikini in a music video because I just don't do that," she says.

"In photo-shoots, if I like something I'll wear it. If I don't, I won't. Since having Nevis, I've become much more assertive and direct with people. If I don't like something, I say so."

- INDEPENDENT