Nelly Furtado’s “Say It Right” has reached one billion plays on Spotify. The 2006 Timbaland-assisted hit appeared on Furtado’s third studio album, Loose, from the same year. The song received a Grammy Award nomination for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance and topped the Billboard Hot 100.

“Say It Right” marks the third song from Loose to achieve the milestone. “Maneater,” which famously interpolates Hall & Oates’ 1982 hit of the same name, reached one billion streams last year while “Promiscuous,” her chart-topping Timbaland duet, hit the mark in 2023. Each of these songs topped the Billboard charts upon release.

Furtado spoke about the creation of “Say It Right” in a 2006 interview with Rolling Stone:

“Basically it’s like four in the morning, and Timb’s like, ‘Go home, you’re tired.’ And I’m like, ‘Really? I’ll show you,’ and put my little hoodie on and then I started to jam. Then Nate [Hills]— he writes like a 100 beats a day — he and Timbaland and I started jamming on the song, and basically we produced it and wrote it as we went. So it got more intense as I kept singing. Then we went back and took the vocals we liked and perfected them. That particular song, we used four microphones in the live room and we moved them around, like every two minutes or something. That’s why when you listen to it –there’s a lot of dimension. It kind of sounds like he’s in another country [laughs]. So we experimented a lot with depth and different sounds.”

In 2024, the music video for “Say it Right” reached one billion views on YouTube.

Last year, Furtado released a slate of new remixes of “Say it Right” and “Maneater” in celebration of Women’s History Month. The tracks were reimagined by Deborah De Luca, Rinzen, Adana Twins and Nala.

Buy Nelly Furtado’s Loose on vinyl here.