i have a specific memory of purchasing nelly furtados debut album “whoa, nelly” many moons ago. i just got the bonneville (rip bonneville….i miss you) and for the first time ever i had a cd player in my car. a real life cd player. not a tape deck contraption discman that only played when you held it at a 23.43 degree angle only when you were going 34 miles per hour on the third sunday of the month during the year of the rat in the year 29301 on the aztec calendar. no, a real live cd player. so one of the first things i did was go to harmony house (rip harmony house too) and picked up a few cds. i had plenty of cds, but i needed some fresh ones that hadnt been tainted by the cd players of cars gone by. one was this one, and the other one was pink floyd “dark side of the moon”. what a weird combination.

so then i listened to it a bunch and liked it a bunch. then i heard her second album but once. then what i think was her third album came out and suddenly she was all r&b hip hop whatnot. she definitely tied gwen stefani/no doubt for the award for weirdest transition from one genre to another without any warning. the good thing though is that we were treated to the promiscuous girl video, in which nelly furtado looks super hot. but she also looked super hot before she went all timbaland. so i guess shes got that going for her. im glad that she was able to achieve success with a bunch of different audiences and i appreciate her versatility as an artist, but i do wonder what could have been if she stayed down the path where she began.

todays track is “hey man”, the opening track from whoa, nelly (aside: didnt she also step into the spotlight when nelly the rapper was huge, confusing people even more?). this song epitomizes what nelly furtado was back then. strong and confident, but still innocent. you know how sometimes there are those songs that can only come at the beginning of an album or theyll be completely out of place? this is one of them. it just sets a great tone for the rest of a great debut album.

nelly furtado – hey man

buy this track on itunes
buy this track on amazon