Nelly Furtado’s ‘Maneater’ Joins The Spotify Billions Club
The 2006 smash hit is Furtado’s second song to crack one billion streams on the platform.
“Maneater,” welcome to the Spotify Billions Club. Nelly Furtado’s massive 2006 hit has surpassed one billion streams on Spotify. It’s Furtado’s second song to reach that milestone on the platform following “Promiscuous,” her chart-topping Timbaland duet from the same year.
Furtado wrote “Maneater” with Timbaland, Danja, and Jim Beanz. Timbaland and Danja produced the track, which reached No. 16 on the Billboard Hot 100 and climbed to No. 2 in Furtado’s native Canada, where it also became the second biggest selling digital track of 2006.
Speaking to Rolling Stone in the lead-up to Loose’s release, Furtado described “Maneater” as “a ‘couture pop’ song,” drawing comparisons to the work of electroclash singer Peaches: “It’s got a crazy loud beat, and the vocals are bitchy and loud.” Also in Rolling Stone, critic Rob Sheffield noted that while “Maneater” has no connection to the Hall & Oates song of the same name, it “bumps hard enough to qualify as a sequel, and that’s high praise indeed.” Critical praise for “Maneater” continued throughout 2006; at year’s end, it ranked highly on the Village Voice’s annual Pazz & Jop critics’ poll.
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Furtado worked closely with Timbaland on Loose, the 2006 album that yielded “Maneater” and “Promiscuous” as well as the No. 1 hit “Say It Right,” which is well on its way to an eventual Billions Club induction of its own. The following year, after the blockbuster success of Loose and Justin Timberlake’s Timbaland-produced FutureSex/LoveSounds, the three artists joined forces on another No. 1 smash, “Give It To Me,” which functioned as a victory lap for the cohort’s reign over mid-2000s pop music.
It is not an exaggeration to say Furtado and her crew were on fire at the time. In 2010, she told the BBC a speaker burst into flames while recording “Maneater” at the Hit Factory in Miami: “We put that beat on, and it was so rumbling and rapturous and pagan that it incited a fire! We actually were scared of the beat. We felt like it had the devil in it, or something. We put it away for a few weeks, until we had the courage to play it again. It was life-threatening! Someone almost got first-degree burns.”
