Nelly Furtado is blown away by her younger social media following, but she's embracing it 'fully'

At the start of “Promiscuous,” before the beat begins, Nelly Furtado asks, “Am I throwing you off?”

“Nope,” her co-producer and fellow singer on the track, Timbaland, responds, before Furtado quickly replies, “Didn’t think so.”

The confident exchange would turn out to be prophetic. The track would become one of the defining pop songs of the early 2000s, ensuring Furtado’s legacy as a pop icon.

Now, nearly two decades later, Furtado has announced that her seventh studio album and her first in seven years, “7,” is set to release on Sept. 20 — though the Portuguese Canadian singer’s music seems to have never left radio stations, playlists and now TikTok.

Furtado sat down with TODAY.com on July 12, the day her new album was announced, to share what she thinks about younger generations finding her music and how her relationship to music has changed over the past two decades.

“It’s different because I love myself more and I’m more confident. I’ve learned so much and I have boundaries,” Furtado says. “I used to try all my ideas — I have always co-produced all my albums — but this time was different. It was, like, complete freedom, complete liberation in (the studio) — just trying anything I wanted.”

The 14 songs that make up “7” were whittled down from nearly 500 tracks she created over the past four years, which she calls a “festive process” of making the record.

“I really felt like it was about community and bringing as many friends and collaborators by the studio at all hours of the night as possible,” she says. “I always credit my ADHD because it can be so debilitating in your home life, but when you’re in your creative life, at work — for me — it’s amazing. It’s like a superpower.”

“I can be like, OK — 500 songs, three rooms, 15 people making music with me, today! And to me it’s, like, normal,” she continues.

Sitting on the couch of her greenroom, she confirms that her longtime collaborator, Timbaland, won’t be making an appearance on “7,” though she says she plans to get back together with him in the studio.

“We have to get back to our collab that we started with Justin (Timberlake). We gave the world a song last September,” she says of their track, “Keep Going Up.”

“We’ll get back to that, but he’s on tour with Missy Elliott right now,” she adds.

Furtado’s career took off with “I’m Like a Bird” in 2000, but it was her electrifying club hits “Maneater” and “Promiscuous” from her 2006 album, “Loose,” on which she collaborated with Timbaland, that solidified her status as a perennial radio queen.

The 45-year-old’s relevance has not waned since. When Furtado’s songs come on in the club, everyone starts singing. For instance, when Furtado’s “Maneater” was the backing track to the trailer for “Challengers” earlier this year, the hype for the tennis film starring Zendaya, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist only grew.

“I love any stories about strong women,” Furtado says of her involvement with the film. “I always support storytelling in general about valuable stories, but obviously about strong female leads. I mean without question, Zendaya is badass.”

When producers asked to use her song in the trailer, Furtado was sold on the cast and storyline alone: “So they were just like, ‘Zen—’ And I was like, ‘Yes! Green check mark. Cleared.’”

She adds that she thinks “Maneater” brings out the badass in us all.

“‘Maneater’ has become a verb — ‘maneatering,’” she says with a laugh. “That song, when I sing it live, I love the energy. I always use pyro in that song. There’s fire and it just feels like there’s this primal badassery going on when I play it, and everybody when they listen to it, they feel badass. I just love that.”

While Furtado’s output has slowed since the late aughts, her music has stayed relevant in part thanks to TikTok, where remixes of her songs have gone viral. Gen Z gave Furtado’s music a renaissance, with original dances to a sped-up version of “Say It Right” hitting more than 450 million views and 50 million likes.

Furtado says it was her oldest daughter who first told her the song was trending on TikTok a few years ago.

“She was like, ‘Mom, your song’s trending on TikTok.’ And I was like, ‘What is TikTok?’ But I’ve changed so much since — I love TikTok. It’s, like, my favorite hobby.”

The feeling didn’t sink in that a younger generation had truly embraced her songs from the early 2000s until she played her first show in five years in Australia in 2022, Furtado says.

“It was a New Year’s Eve show, and I went out there and there were, like, 20-year-olds singing all the songs to me back at the top of their lungs,” she says. “And I was like, ‘Woah.’ It was really like ‘The Matrix’ — I was pinching myself. Like, ‘Is this real?’”

“It blows my mind,” she adds. “The power of, like, social media and TikTok is insane, but I love it. I embrace it fully. I love nostalgia culture, I love remix culture. I love sort of that scrapbook pastiche, again, and (it), like, works very well with my ADHD. I feel like now’s a great time to be in the music industry. It’s more fun than ever.”

And now Furtado shares how she created her seventh album — across multiple continents and with a slew of collaborators, from Bomba Estéreo to Dom Dolla.

Furtado describes working with Bomba Estéreo in Santa Marta, Colombia, on her lead single, “Corazón,” to whom she says she was introduced through her friend Lido Pimienta.

“Liliana from Bomba Estéreo picked me up at the airport and brought me to her ... treehouse jungle studio. There were dangerous snakes on the path back to the car, but it kind of born out of this sisterhood of, like, other moms who make music and rock stages being supportive of one another and creating a community.”

The mother of three shares that she and Pimienta call themselves “las productoras,” or the female producers.

“It’s very empowering to be able to come home from the studio at 7 a.m. and then text your friend and she’s coming off the stage in Amsterdam, because we’re moms,” she says. “We’re all moms. We all had to remind each other that, ‘Hey, we love being moms’ ... but we also know that it’s so important to be artists. It’s so important to follow your truth and your passion — you’re given talents for a reason.”

She adds: “It’s not OK to deny those for too long. It’s not good for your spirit. I had to learn that firsthand.”

While making “7,” Furtado says she leaned into her love of collaborations and seeing how people react to each other.

“I purposely discovered that I love bringing people together in the studio I think might not get along and see what happens,” she says with a laugh. “I feel like that’s my inner truth. That’s one of my values, is believing that anybody can get along. So I like to test it out in a musical environment. I think if you look at my collaborations you can see that that is true.”

She adds that making music in her 40s is different than in her earlier years because she’s a different person now — but that she loves it more than ever.

“But I didn’t do this alone,” she explains. “I had other people help me discover this about myself, like Dom Dolla — one of the most rewarding collaborations of my life. I told him that from Day 1, I’m just so grateful to him because he kind of, like, reminded me how to sing again.”

She shares one moment in the studio when he stopped her and asked why she was enunciating every word.

“‘Like, just sing, you know?’” she recalls him saying. “Something clicked and I became that 17-year-old again in my first hip-hop band, just singing because I love it so much.”

While she doesn’t share more details on who else she collaborated with on “7,” Furtado says there are still many artists she wants to work with that she hasn’t yet, including John Summit, Shygirl and Taylor Swift.

“I have a song Dom Dolla produced and I want Taylor Swift on the remix. It’s called ‘Ready for Myself.’ Verse two,” she says through laughter. “She can rewrite it. Write whatever you want. Change the chorus.”

She also shouts out her collaborators SG Lewis and Tove Lo on their new song, “Heat,” calling it her song of the summer. The trio previously released a track together titled “Love Bites” earlier this year.

Furtado again emphasizes that working with other artists helped her create the final version of the record.

“Naturally, through this festive environment, I have more and more people in the studio listening to the songs, and I think just naturally the cream rises to the top, and then you’re like, ‘Oh, I feel more passionate about finishing this.’”

She describes the process of choosing her favorite songs of the nearly 500 she created to picking flowers at a flower shop.

“You know, right at the door as you walk into a flower shop — what draws you to those flowers? There’s something,” she says.

This article was originally published on TODAY.com