About Nelly Furtado a.k.a. Nelstar!
Nelly Furtado
Nelly Kim Furtado was born on December 2, 1978 in Victoria BC, Canada. She is one of 3 children of her Portuguese parents that live in Canada. Now Nelly is living in Toronto and might move to California. Nelly is first-generation Portuguese-Canadian in her family. Her parents immigrated to Canada from S. Miguel, Azores in Portugal. As a child Nelly has always been a singer. When she was four she already was performing Portuguese and English. Nelly always knew that she was going to be a singer since she was 4. Nelly says "I always remember the first time I walked on that stage it was for about 300 people and I knew right away that I loved connecting with people on a stage and that one day, I'd be singing for thousands of people. I knew when I was four years old." When she was eight she received her first tape recorder. She sang and recorded songs herself. Around age nine she learned to play a Ukulele and Trombone. At 11 she got a keyboard and to scratch. Around age 14 she started to write rhymes and write songs. Also during those years Nelly was in a jazz band, concert band, marching band and danced and sang in musicals. At age 16 she was into pop, r&b, rock and hip-hop music and started going to clubs in Portugal and be on stage and be freestyling. That was a big step for Nelly when she went to Portugal for a trip. Nelly says I went to this club and just got up onstage and started singing, making up lyrics off the top of my head. That what hip-hops all about- freestyling. The fado tradition in Portugal has a similar thing call cancoes desafios, which is basically spontaneous singing. You try to show up the other person onstage with you- you dis their mother or say they are lazy of something. There are a lot of colloquialisms involved and you got to know the language of the land pretty well to get it right. After that she made a trip-hop group called Nelstar. And Nelly is still trying to learn new instruments and other things like she learned from a friend father to sing in Hindi. Like she wanted to learn to play guitar and use a lot of guitar playing in her debut CD Whoa Nelly!
Nelly was discover...
Nelly was discover while performing at age 18 at Honey Jam at Lees Palace in Toronto. That when Gerald Eaton, Brian West and a band call The Philosopher Kings. Brian and Gerald for Nelly they also want to come back to Toronto and do more demos. But she was not sure because she wanted to stay in school. And she was going to be backpacking in Europe then head home to study creative writing. Then they told to go for two weeks and she loved it. Gerald, Brian and Nelly creative real good material for Nellys demos. After that it led Nelly tow have a recorded deal with DreamWorks Records and was sing. She named her debut CD Whoa Nelly! Nelly called her CD that because she said it was a musical inspiration. It took months for Nelly writing songs for her album and was completed in April 2000. Then the CD came out 6 months later in Oct 24 2000. The first week only sold 4,087 copies. Then radio station were putting her song on and saying positive things about Nelly. After that she sold about 12,000 copies a week. Then was in television appearances and magazine articles and by the end of year 2000 she was selling copies 55,000 week. Then got platinum by selling more than 2 million copies of her CD Whoa Nelly! Nelly says "The record is pop but it's presented in a way that a pop record usually isn't. You're hearing sounds that you don't usually hear in the mainstream at all. There's a lot of world rhythms and there's a hip-hop element running through it and sometimes even the language I use and the way I flow with my singing."
For more Information on Nelly Furtado go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelly_Furtado
