Nelly Furtado

Nelly Furtado was born in 1978 in Victoria, a town in the west of Canada. Her Portuguese parents emigrated from Portugal to Canada in the late 1970s.When she was just a child she visited her parents' birthplace, the Azores islands and later said that this experience helped her become an open-minded person not only because she discovered this new culture but also because she learnt Portuguese there. This has also influenced her music as she mixes different cultural sounds into it and she sings in English, Portuguese and Spanish.

Before becoming famous she used to work as a chambermaid with her mother during the summers. She stated that coming from a working class background has formed her in a very positive way. The first time she sang was with her mother at the age of four on Portugal Day. Then, at the age of nine she began playing instruments like the trombone, ukulele and later the guitar and keyboard.

During a visit to Toronto, when she was almost twelve Nelly met Tallis Newkirk, a member of the hip hop group Crazy Cheese. She contributed to their album. After graduating in 1996, she moved to Toronto. The following year, she formed a duo called "Nelstar" with Newkirk. Nelly thinks that Toronto is the most multicultural city in the entire world, the place where she can be any culture. During this period she received many hip hop influences and started to write her own songs. However, she wasn't completely happy with things so she left the group and decided to move back home. Before leaving Nelly sang in a club in Toronto. The singer Gerald Eaton was impressed with her performance and asked her to write with him. But she already had plans to travel over Europe and return home to take creative writing courses at College.

However, she stayed in touch with Eaton and eventually collaborated for the production of her first album, "Whoa, Nelly!" released in October 2000. The biggest hit of this album, "I'm like a bird" won Best Female Pop Vocal Performance. Nelly was also acclaimed for her innovative mixture of various genres and sounds.

In 2003 her second album "Folklore" was released. This name was influenced by her parents emigration to Canada. This album includes the single "Força", that means "strength" in Portuguese and became the official anthem of the 2004 European Football Championship. In the same year she gave birth to her first child, Nevis, whose name was inspired by the Caribbean island on which she was conceived. Unfortunately this album was not as successful as the first one, maybe because of troubles at DreamWorks Records, her record company. In 2006 she presented her third album "Loose", produced by Timbaland. It shows her experimenting with a more R&B-hip hop sound that she has defined as punk-hop, a modern and mysterious sound. "Loose" has become the most successful album of her career. Nelly attributed this great success to the presence of her two-year old daughter.