(Cover) - EN Showbiz - Nelly Furtado stopped working on her hit Maneater for a while as she was convinced the beat had the devil in it.

The 31-year-old released the song in 2006, and it was featured on her album Loose. She has confirmed there was a fire in the studio when she was laying down the track, revealing it left her incredibly spooked. She feared something about the sound of the music had caused the flames, and for a while was too scared to work on it.

This is true - there are many witnesses who were there: when we recorded Maneater a speaker caught fire. It started smoking and a flame shot out of the speaker, which nobody at the Hit Factory in Miami had ever seen before in the 40 years the studio has been there, she said. 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.

Nelly has experimented with different sounds, and even released a Spanish album called Mi Plan in 2009. She enjoys mixing up what she does, although she knows her varying music confuses some people.

The star insists there is one key element which runs through all her releases if they dont sound good stripped back to just vocals and a guitar, she ditches them.

The one unifying thread is, clearly, I'm a pop singer and pop songwriter and melody and lyrics are central to what I do, she told the BBC. My goal is to always record albums where pretty much every song sounds just as good with only an acoustic guitar and a vocal. That's always the test. (C) Cover Media