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Furtado gets deep, and Hood throws candy to fans

Nelly Furtado
Folklore (Dreamworks)

Radio doesn’t know what to make of Nelly Furtado. What else can one conclude when an album as stellar as her latest effort, Folklore, fails to make the waves that her debut did? Furtado was this young, spunky, Canadian-Portuguese fireball who breathed fresh life into pop music in 2002. Sexy without trying too hard, smart without losing her sense of fun, she was an antidote to her belly-baring, tabloid-fodder contemporaries. Sure, you’re going to hear “I’m Like a Bird” in elevators and grocery stores until you’re ’90, but if that’s all you know of Furtado, you’re missing out.

Where Whoa Nelly! was breezy and all over the place, Folklore is deeper, more focused, more ambitious. Pregnant while writing and recording the album, we catch her in that scary-beautiful time of becoming a grown-up. She reveals more—her outsider/insider status as the daughter of immigrants, a sense of comfort in her own skin, the overwhelming emotions that falling in love and having a baby bring.

The passion in this album is real, complicated. The ballad “Try,” a meditation on catching life’s curveballs, has a melancholic wisdom. “All of the things we want each other to be/ we never will be/ and that’s wonderful, and that’s life.” The jubilant, up-tempo “Forca,” which loosely translates as “Be strong, carry on!”, features Bela Fleck on banjo. It’s so joyful and peppy that I’m sure it’s soon to be co-opted by Nike or Gatorade any day now. “Childhood Dreams,” a lovely lullaby to her child, swoons with lyrics like, “You are/ the little boy made for me in the stars/ You are the realest thing I know/ I’m sliding on the rainbows of my childhood dreams.”

This is a treasure-chest of an album, filled with world music and hip-hop beats, unorthodox instruments, a refreshing vitality. It’s not a perfect album—the second half loses a bit of steam compared to the first, and some of Furtado’s lyrics are too stream-of-consciousness to make much impact. But Furtado’s Folklore is worth hearing. It’s not fairy tales and legends—only the journey of a bird finding out where her soul and her home lie.

—Laila Shahrokhi

Patterson Hood
Killers and Stars (New West)

It’s understandable that these demos would become something of an underground hit.

Hood’s band, the Drive-By Truckers, broke artistic and commercial ground with its two recent albums, Southern Rock Opera and Decoration Day. The band is smart without being snooty, populist without pandering. Plus they rock.

Hood recorded these acoustic demos in his dining room in March 2001. The songs were written during some personal tumult that surrounded Southern Rock Opera. Hood had just divorced and the band was on the verge of breaking up (but thankfully didn’t). Other songs written during this period were later released on Decoration Day. Hood sold a few hundred CD-Rs these songs during a solo tour in 2001 and since then copies have continued to circulate, so he decided to officially release them.

Killers and Stars confirms that Hood is one hell of a songwriter. They also show why his initial judgment to not release these recordings was the best. An obvious comparison is Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, except the songs on Killers and Stars are of uneven quality, with some being little more than fragments.

“The Assassin”—about a trained killer who loses his taste for blood after killing his lover—is silly and spurious. “Cat Power,” a tribute to the enigmatic songstress Chan Marshall, falls flat on the details that make Hood’s best work so engaging—there’s no insight beyond the public face Chan so adeptly portrays.

But there’s also some gems here, including the opener, “Uncle Disney,” about “when they thaw out Uncle Disney” and “someone will be held accountable/ Forty years of decisions made.” Painful to listen to is “Miss Me Gone,” about the breakup of Hood’s marriage, where he sings, “Comes a time for cutting losses, wish that time had not come/ Two more things before I walk out that door/ You’re the best friend I’ve ever known.”

Killers and Stars is nice indulgence for fans, something to get excited about until the DBT’s release The Dirty South in August.

—Joe Tarr

April 22, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 17 © 2004 Metro Pulse