Songoftheday 9/8/22 - Your faith in me brings me to tears, even after all these years end...
"I'm Like A Bird" - Nelly Furtado
from the album Whoa, Nelly! (2000)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #9 (one week)
Weeks in the Top-40: 17
Today's song comes from singer/songwriter Nelly Furtado, who grew up in Western Canada the daughter of immigrants from the Azores islands off Portugal. A multi-instrumentalist as a child, Nelly eventually moved to bustling Toronto out east, where she tried to get her way into the music business before being guided by Gerald Eaton and Brian West of the local rock band Philosopher Kings, who had two top ten hits in Canada in the late 1990s. She recorded rough demos with them before being signed to the DreamWorks label, where they were honed into her debut album Whoa, Nelly!, which was released in the fall of 2000. The lead single from the record is the bright and sunny pop of "I'm Like A Bird". Written by Furtado, who produced the track with Eaton and West, the song defies it's upbeat disposition by having Nelly break up with her love, confessing that, yes, like a bird, she's well, flighty. She drives the knife in when its revealed this wasn't a passing romance with the lines "Your faith in me brings me to tears, Even after all these years end, And it pains me so much to tell that you don't know me that well". She's not happy about it, but yet she's doing nothing to stop it either. The music video has a lot of avian-like levitating, but her happy expression is a little disconcerting to the lyrics...
"I'm Like A Bird" flew all the way to the American pop top ten on Billboard magazine's Hot 100 in May of 2001. On the radio, the song went to #6 on the Mainstream Top-40 chart, #5 on the older-skewing Adult Top-40 format, and #26 on the Adult Contemporary (or "easy listening") airplay list. Internationally, the single topped the chart in Portugal, made the top ten in Australia (#2), New Zealand (#2), Ireland (#4), the United Kingdom (#5), and The Netherlands (#8). It also hit the top-40 in Denmark (#13), Italy (#16), Sweden (#16), Belgium (#16F/#19W), Switzerland (#17), Norway (#17), Canada (#19 before RPM shut down at the end of 2000), Romania (#24), and France (#33). The Whoa, Nelly! album, released in October of 2000, stopped at #24 on the Billboard 200 sales tally, but spent a hefty 79 weeks on the list, going on to sell over two million copies. At the Grammy Awards in 2002, "I'm Like A Bird" won for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance, and was nominated for Song of the Year, losing to Alicia Keys for her debut smash "Fallin'". Furtado was also up for Best New Artist, which also went to Keys that year. But both Nelly and the album will be back to the series.
(8/10)
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Next up, at the Glastonbury Festival in England in 2002...
Fast forward four years for a show in 2006 at the Roxy...
and lastly, an in-studio live take...
Up tomorrow: This mulleted country singer is just happy to be here.
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