“I’m like a bird, I’ll only fly away.” Almost everyone knows the song and accompanying the tune. The song catapulted Nelly Furtado (40) immediately to the top positions in the charts in 2000. But where is the singer today? Furtado has been out of the spotlight for months, is no longer bringing new music to the market, and has erased all messages on its social media channels.
When Nelly Furtado released her debut album ‘Whoa, Nelly!’ 18 years ago. She was released to the world, she immediately became a popular singer. The album was sold six million times worldwide and the lead ‘I’m Like A Bird’ won a Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance.
‘Folklore’, Nelly Furtado’s second album, came out in November 2003. Another recollection, because almost every released single became a hit on the radio. The song Forca was even chosen as the official special issue of the European Championship 2004 in Portugal. During the final of the European Championships, Nelly also released the song herself in the stadium.
The success story only lasted. In April 2006 she released ‘Say It Right’ in Europe, the most successful song of Furtado in her entire career. Later Nelly came up with ‘Loose’, which soon became her best-selling album ever.
She skimmed high peaks in Mexico and other parts of Latin America. The song ‘Promiscuous’ with Timbaland could be heard everywhere in the United States and the single ‘Maneater’ conquered Europe and Asia. More than eight million copies of the plate were sold worldwide.
Nelly Furtado Completely disappeared
So there seemed to be a long and glorious career ahead of Nelly. But it became increasingly silent around the singer, to the extent that she seemed to have disappeared completely from the globe. She omitted all interviews, thanked for photoshoots, removed all content from her Instagram profile, and finally did not show up anymore. But where did it all go wrong?
Nelly admitted to the British Daily Mail that she never knew how to handle celebrity and wealth. The fact that she was bombed into a superstar when she was barely 20 had a huge mental impact. She suddenly had to bear all that responsibility, which made her mature in a short time.
“I took some time to pursue some personal passions. I did everything from pottery classes to sewing classes. I took a playwriting class at the University of Toronto to pursue a few ideas I had. It was a time of self-development,” she told Billboard this year.
“I was in no way prepared for what would happen to me. If I had only been 16, it was guaranteed to have gone wrong with me. Then I would be so on guard to make mistakes, that I would be destroyed by the age of 25,” Nelly Furtado said. “I should not only be a musician, but I also have to look like a model. I was raised with confidence, but still, I always thought: ‘Damn, I look so fat in this dress.’
It also took its toll on Nelly Furtado. The singer got a nervous breakdown on stage. “I was on tour and was alone with my daughter. I was completely exhausted. One day I went on stage and realized how upset I was. I then burst into tears”, says Nelly. She immediately took a break and went home again. “I spent days at home. I felt like a failure and started to doubt everything. I would prefer to be a hermit. I longed for solitude.”
Family life
After Nelly Furtado had recovered from her collapse, she decided it was enough. She retreated from the media for good. And announced that she would focus entirely on her own happiness and that of her daughter Nevis, which she received together with her ex-boyfriend Jasper ‘Lil Jaz’ Gahunia. The couple separated in 2005 after a four-year relationship.
Nelly Furtado later stepped into the marriage boat with sound engineer Demacio Castellon, but the couple requested the divorce in 2016. Since then, Nelly has remained single.
Nelly Furtado divorced for almost years
In 2017, Nelly Furtado disclosed that she was a single woman for months. The singer’s wedding broke up last summer, she said in the British talk show Loose Women today.
“I went through a difficult period last summer. I wrote and sang songs to get myself through that,” Nelly revealed. The ‘I’m Like A Bird’ singer married sound engineer Demacio Castellon in July 2008, who she met in 2006. The then 38-year-old singer, who has a thirteen-year-old daughter from a previous relationship, is open to love again. “Someone needs to update my Wikipedia page because it doesn’t help to date,” she quipped.
She does not think of music anymore. But Furtado did find new challenges along the way: they followed lessons in ceramics and playwriting, sat down at her daughter’s school to sort books in the library, and she was also behind the cash register of a record store.
“All those things reminded me of who I really was,” Nelly Furtado said. “It’s great to have a career that gets off the ground. But if you just keep giving and giving, then you crash. I had to stay strong mentally, physically, and emotionally for my daughter. But I really had to escape from that nonsense.”
From there, Furtado took five years out from the music business, parting ways with her record company and making frequent visits to Kenya as part of her work with the non-profit organization Free The Children.
In 2011, the Canadian pop singer Nelly Furtado made it clear on Twitter that she wants to donate the 1 million dollars she received in 2007 for a concert from Libyan leader Mouammar Gaddafi to charities.
“In 2007, I received a million dollars from the Gaddafi clan for a 45-minute concert for a few guests in an Italian hotel,” the singer tweeted. The singer now wants to donate that money. To whom she will give the money, the singer of ‘I’m like a bird’ has not yet announced.
Nelly Furtado is not the only famous singer or singer who has received large sums from Gaddafi, for example, Beyonce, Usher, Mariah Carey, and Lionel Richie have given private concerts in the past for Gaddafi and his loved ones. These concerts usually took place on New Year’s Day on the French island of Saint Barthelemy.
In 2012, The makers of ‘90210’ had again given a celebrity a role in the popular remake of ‘Beverly Hills, 90210’. After swimmer Ryan Lochte, singer Nelly Furtado also appears in the series.
The role of Furtado is not going to be difficult. She plays herself, and will also sing one of her hits. Not that the Canadian singer cannot act: she has previously played roles in the science fiction series ‘Roswell’, the sleuth ‘CSI: New York’, and the action film ‘Max Payne’.
Nelly Furtado sings “worst ‘O Canada’ ever”
In February 2016, Nelly Furtado did not make a right turn in Toronto when she was allowed to play the national anthem of Canada during an NBA competition. The singer received a lot of criticism about the way she brought O Canada.
Furtado sang the song on Sunday before an NBA All-Star competition in its unique way and did it a lot slower than the original. A flutist accompanied the singer, but at times the two did not seem to be completely synchronized. Furtado’s version was utterly destroyed on social media. Many Canadians, in particular, called it “the worst ever”.
Frontman Danko Jones from the rock trio of the same name compared the performance with “hemorrhoids in your ears and a cat that uses that as a scratching post”.
