Nelly Furtado Poses For ‘Cosmo,’ Talks ‘The Ride’ & ‘Loose’

Mike Wass | February 23, 2017 2:57 pm
Nelly Furtado's "Cold Hard Truth"
Nelly Furtado's creative rebirth continues with new single "Cold Hard Truth."

Nelly Furtado is on the brink of one of pop music’s most unlikely comebacks. The Canadian’s seemed to fade from view when The Spirit Indestructible failed to find an audience, but she came back swinging late last year with a fresh indie-pop sound and a string of impeccable singles. “I came [into the studio] broken,” she tells Cosmopolitan. “I came there really empty. As cliche as it is, when you’re really going through it, it can be so good for songwriting… I’m hands down more proud of these lyrics than any lyrics I’ve ever written.”

The 38-year-old gives producer John Congleton a lot of the credit for her creative rebirth. “John is like this no-bullshit type of person, so I felt very challenged,” she remembers. “I felt like, ‘I have to impress him. I have to bring my A-game.’ That’s what you want. You want somebody to challenge you. You want to feel pressure. The first day together, we wrote ‘Flatline.’ I remember working on it and he was like, ‘The lyrics are OK, but I think you could do better, you could dig a little deeper.’ Sometimes you need that.”

Interestingly, Nelly also reflects on ’00s-defining pop opus, Loose. “When [it] blew up way bigger than anything I’d ever done, I felt swept into this weird pop cyclone,” she reveals. “I was like, ‘Oh, I guess this means I’m supposed to do this, and have a stage that looks like this and costume changes and the whole thing.’ I wanted to do it, because I wanted to try that hat on and prove to myself I could do it… but then it happened and I was like, ‘This is a lot. I don’t think this organically suits my personality.’” Read the full interview here and click through the cute and colorful shoot up top.

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