Stepping off: Is bodyshaming to blame for singer Nelly Furtado deciding to leave the stage?

Canadian singer Nelly Furtado has announced she is taking a break from performing.

The artist, who produced hits including ‘Maneater’ and ‘Promiscuous’, said she has "decided to step away from performance for the foreseeable future".

Furtado, 46, shared the statement on social media on Friday, saying she plans to pursue "other creative and personal endeavours that I feel would better suit this next phase of my life."

Bounced out by body shaming?

Furtado recently recently finished her Better Than Ever summer festival tour and her announcement comes after she apparently made a pointed statement calling out bodyshaming during a performance at Manchester Pride.

The singer wore an oversized t-shirt with an optical illusion cartoon drawing of a woman’s hourglass body. On the reverse were the words ‘Better than ever’ in a tattoo-style font.

While Furtado did not explicitly acknowledge that the outfit was a comment on bodyshaming, her stylist Phil Gomez shared a post on Instagram after the performance that said she "shuts down body shamers" with the outfit.

In the past, Furtado has spoken out about body image. “I have olive skin, and they’d kind of lighten my skin a lot in photos and kind of take my hips down all the time - they would always cut off in editorials,” she told People last year.

In January, the singer shared a post on Instagram addressing false rumours about her appearance.

“For whoever cares, I have never had any face or body surgeries or augmentation, besides for veneers on the top row of my teeth, quite recently,” she wrote. “So far, I have not had any face or lip injections or fillers of any kind.”

Furtado urged her fans to “express yourself freely, celebrate your individuality and know that it’s perfectly OK to be OK with what you see in the mirror, and it’s also OK to want something different.”

Stepping away from stage performances

Furtado, who won a Grammy award for her debut single ‘I’m Like a Bird’, returned to music in 2024 after a seven-year break.

"I really feel like I was called back to the industry by the industry, especially DJs," she told Grammy.com in an interview at the time.

"I would go out and hear my songs played before arena shows of other artists, and at house parties and clubs… I thought, this can only be remixed so many times, I better go make some new stuff."

Her announcement to stop performing came as she marked the 25th anniversary of her first studio album, ‘Whoa, Nelly!’ in 2000.

In her Instagram post, Furtado shared a photo of herself aged 20, preparing to perform at her “first show as a professional artist at Lilith Fair”.

She also posted a video from a concert in Berlin this summer, showing her “finally understanding what receiving flowers means” as the crowd chants her name.

In the post, Furtado reflects that 25 years on from her first album, her music has “reached a whole new generation of fans and I couldn’t be happier about that.”

“To have so many people rediscovering my music has been surreal and joyful. It’s been so fun embracing this opportunity, getting out on stages again and seeing up close, the true lasting power of good music,” she writes.

“I have enjoyed my career immensely, and I still love writing music as I have always seen it as a hobby I was lucky enough to make into a career. I’ll identify as a songwriter forever.”

She also thanks everyone who made her “pop dreams come true on a creative and organisational level”.