From eccentric, cross-cultural quirk factory to glistening pop goddess and back again, Nelly Furtado has done everything a girl can do to stay in the charts and for the most part, it’s worked a treat. 12 years after her musical debut, she’s a household name, a multiple award winner and a record label gold mine. Her songs have turned up practically everywhere; the 2004 Euro Football Championships, Christian Grey’s iPad (apologies if you thought you’d get through one article today without a 50 Shades Of Grey reference) and Colonel Gaddafi’s Italian penthouse (although, the less said of that the better).

When a 20-year-old Nelly first appeared on our screens, she looked like no-one else in showbiz, all hoop earrings and barely-there make-up, but by the time album number three rolled around, she was a sultry MTV darling with Justin Timberlake for a sidekick. Loose became one of the best-selling records of the 2000s, but, as countless whiny celebs are keen to point out, colossal fame comes at a price. Smack bang in the middle of a sell-out tour, the pressure caught up with Furtado and she lost it… in the most inconvenient place possible.
“Basically, I had a show in Amsterdam,” she tells me. “I was really tired, I’d been on tour for weeks in Europe. I had my family on the road with me and my daughter and one day she wasn’t at the venue and it was a permission pass to kind of have a breakdown!” The curtain went up, the crowd went wild and Nelly cried her way through the first two songs. Needless to say, it was time for a break.
Of course, Nelly has always appeared more human than your average pop star. The girl who exclaimed ‘Cool!’ when she bagged her first Grammy has never signed up for fashion campaigns or perfume deals and, now 33 and a wife and mother, she takes up little of the average tabloid editor’s time. She also possesses that terribly charming mix of brains and goofiness, peppering her sentences with ditzy epigrams like “for sure!” and “you kidding?”, as if to detract from the fact that she’s just said something completely brilliant.
“You can run, but you can’t hide,” she says of her mid-gig cryfest. “Chasing success and dreaming about success, no matter what you do, if you’re a business person or if you’re that girl who thinks that getting married and having five kids with the right guy is gonna make you happy, there are certain ideals of success we hold in our minds, but when you get to that place, you realise that real success is very different. Real success is about balance, making time for family, making time for friends, making time for hobbies.”
Furtado’s very public meltdown inspired a song on her experimental fifth album, although it took her a while to realise what was being said in her own lyrics.
“The weird thing about ‘High Life’ is I didn’t understand the song was about me until a month after I’d written it!” she says. “I was literally playing it for the record company and at the end I’m like, ‘Oh my God!’ We left it on the record, my reaction to it. It was a real sort of life-becoming-art-becoming-life moment!”
Half the songs on the album are the handiwork of producer Rodney Jerkins, the man responsible for some of the best-loved songs of the cooing R&B honey era.
“Isn’t that cool?” Furtado squeaks, when I list off some of his big hits, Brandy and Monica’s ‘The Boy Is Mine’ and Whitney Houston’s ‘It’s Not Right But It’s OK’ to name but two. “Ironically, Rodney said that he had wanted to work with me before and had mentioned it, like a year before we had even met. It was just one of those chance encounters.”
A few emails later, they finally came together for what Nelly calls a “musical one night stand”.
“It was like, ‘Do I call you or should you call me?’” she giggles. “I got to the studio and the first day we wrote ‘Spirit Indestructible’, which is the title track. It was exhilarating. It was really wild meeting somebody for the first time and then going into such an awesome musical place…We kind of felt like two kids in this musical playground, just throwing sand around and being very uninhibited.”
Less expected on the production credits is the name Bob Rock. A man who truly lives up to his moniker, the Winnipeg producer is best known for working with Metallica, Aerosmith and Bon Jovi.
“He actually produced Michael Bublé’s Christmas album!” Nelly adds, with a smirk. “I was at the Juno Awards one year and he won Best Producer and I won a bunch of stuff and I was at a party afterward. In my mind, I knew I wanted to work with him but I’m thinking that he saw me and then did a beeline in the opposite direction, and left the party because he didn’t want to talk to me! So, artists are very insecure! You never think anyone wants to work with you! I’m getting over the hump now where I’ve lost the shame factor. I’m like, ‘You know what? You only live once, you just gotta ask people and if they say no, what are you going to do, right?’”
Speaking of shame, Furtado says she left hers at the studio door, opting instead to embrace her corny side on The Spirit Indestructible.
“I almost have these boundaries of cheesiness that I go to and I’m very comfortable with that,” she laughs. “I find that as I get more mature, I’m more and more comfortable with really, who I am. I’ve become more comfortable with who I am and that enables me to really go places in the songs. For instance, on ‘Big Hoops’, I really did go into the 14-year-old self and I really was 14 again, in my small town feeling very liberated through hip hop and R&B, going down town with my big hoops on and my big jeans and really feeling famous already even though no-one knew who the hell I was!”
Proudly comparing it to “a punch in the face,” she’s clearly entirely smitten with her latest creation.
“It’s friendly in a way where there’s a lot of singable, hummable, catchy parts that are very like, youthful and fun. I’m coming from quite a light but reflective but energetic place, but at the same time it’s a little bit aggressive. My vocals are a bit abrasive as usual, but you know… more!” She erupts into giggles again.
“It’s a bit of a journey I guess. It really has an a-side, b-side feel. The first half of the album is really fast and the second half is more slow, but it’s still kind of impulsive. I really like things that have a love/hate appeal and that people will either totally love or totally hate. I want my music to always create that emotion in people, you know? I’m not sure why…” She trails off, as if expecting the answer to plonk itself in her lap. “I think it’s the inner cheeky self.”

The Spirit Indestructible is out now on Interscope Records.