HOWZAT

As it is on Loose, electrically so. Just like Gwen Stefani on Love.Angel.Music.Baby, Furtado and Timbaland meld from the 1982-86 pop pomp of Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, Eurythmics and Pat Benatar, and the rocking beats of contemporary hip-hop and reggaeton, a heady hybrid that will surely, like the No Doubt singer’s album, ravish the charts. So, Nelly’s got her groove back — and, imminently, her sales figures, too.

And she is clearly adept and talented at what she does: hopping from the charts to experimentalism and back again. Is she happy to do this, happy with the compromises, the flash bulbs, the celebrity wattage, the sense that something might be getting lost in the transaction? That’s a very different question — with a very different, and possibly unutterable, answer. And it begs another: if Loose sells zillions, is Furtado more or less likely to resolve this problem? Push her on this and she tries the la-di-dah rictus grinning, the it’s-a-breeze nonchalance about the star-making machinery. And she punctuates these inquiries with a curious staccato laugh that hasn’t even a semitone of humour in it; it sounds, instead, defensive and calculating.

And sounds, too, as if the person emitting it isn’t listening at all — as if, moreover, the ack-ack-acks are there to purposely drown out the questions. But later, reflecting on the music business, her expression and her tone alter.

“I used to feel really awkward and humiliated,” she says softly. “Like, why am I a VIP? I was uncomfortable with the idea of being better than anybody else.” Okay, well that’s the “awkward” part. “I remember,” she continues, “feeling, for example, in limousines, about to do the red carpet, I’d feel such a dork, like, ‘God, this is horrible.’ Then, as soon as the door would open, I’d get out and I’d be like” — she fixes the pap smile — “and I was in it.”

But why humiliated? By whom? By what? The likeliest answer seems to be: by the situation she was in, her discomfort at it, and its consequences for her self-esteem. “I can’t fake it,” she says. “I’m terrible at that. I’m a really bad liar.” A less commercially copper-bottomed album might suffer from the omission of one of its key tracks — in this case, All Good Things, which Furtado and Timbaland recorded with Chris Martin, and which, rumour has it, Coldplay’s label nixed at the last minute.

Featuring the two vocalists’ incantatory singing of the lines “Flames to dust, lovers to friends”, over the sort of flute part not heard since Julie Felix’s El Condor Pasa, it was intended as the album’s closing track. “It’s because he doesn’t sound like Chris Martin,” conjectures Furtado of its non-inclusion. “He sounds like some wonderful hillbilly artist.” But Loose will survive this decision. Armed with two incendiary singles, it will duly play the Nelly trick of gulling millions of record-buyers into expecting a whole album of the same.

“Oh, no, I’m misleading everyone again,” says its creator. And once they’ve got it home, they’ll discover a record that, for all that it flaunts the heat and semi-clothed sexiness of the city where it was made, nonetheless has a surprising sadness to it. Two songs (In God’s Hands and Say It Right) deal with the break-up of her relationship. The Spanish-language Te Busque addresses the depression Furtado says has “come in and out of my life since I was about 17”.

In other words, a classic contradictory Nelly album. Except that it’s more than that: in its duality, complexity, melancholy and joyfulness, in its sense of claustrophobia one minute and liberation the next, above all in its extraordinary songwriting, Loose is the best thing she has ever done. And she looks as if she sort of accepts that. For now.

“When I became a mother at such a young age,” she says, “and everybody thought I was crazy, that changed me. I kind of went, ‘Well, f*** all of you.’ I did care what people thought. But now I really don’t.” Which leaves just the one person left to please. Herself. And, slowly but surely, she is getting there.

Maneater is released on June 5 on Geffen/Polydor; Loose follows on June 12