Nelly Furtado became famous in 2000 with the release of her first album Whoa, Nelly!, which contained the breakthrough Grammy Award-winning single “I’m like a Bird.†After giving birth to her baby and releasing the less commercially successful Folklore in 2003, she returned to the top of the charts in 2006 with the release of her album titled Loose and its hit singles “Say It Right”, “Promiscuous”, “Maneater” and “All Good Things (Come to an End).”
Nelly Furtado is well known for using new and different instruments, sounds, vocal styles, genres and languages. This diversity has been fueled by her wide-ranging musical interests and her interest in different cultures of different peoples.
On September 20th, 2003 in Toronto, Nelly gave birth to her daughter, Nevis. The father of the child is DJ Jasper Gahunia. Nelly Furtado and Gahunia had been good friends for several years and remained together for 4 years until they finally broke up in 2005. Nelly said in an interview with Blender magazine that they continue to be on good terms and jointly share custody and raising of Nevis. Nevis is ethnically a one quarter Filipino, a one quarter Asian Indian, and half Portuguese.
In 2006, Nelly Furtado told Genre magazine, when asked if she had “ever felt an attraction to women”, Nelly replied “Absolutely. Women are beautiful and sexy.” A lot of people considered this an admission of bisexuality, but a few months, she said that she was “straight, but very open-minded”. In November 2006, Furtado revealed that she once turned down Playboy’s Heffner’s offer of $500,000 to pose nude in the magazine.
In 2007, it was announced that Furtado got engaged to Cuban sound engineer, Demo Castellon, who worked with her on her album Loose.
Nelly Furtado embraced many musical genres in her teenage years listening mainly to mainstream hip hop, R&B, alternative hip hop, trip hop, drum and bass, world music and a variety of others. Nelly’s influences have included Esthero, Amalia Rodrigues, Jeff Buckley, Janet Jackson, Oasis, Caetano Veloso, TLC, Mariah Carey, Digable Planets, Radiohead, Madonna, Mary J. Blige, The Smashing Pumpkins, The Verve, U2, Enya, and Beck.
Nelly Furtado’s work has also been influenced by her current place of residence, Toronto, which she named “the most multicultural city in the entire world” and a place where she “can be any culture”. Concerning Toronto’s cultural diversity, Furtado said that she did not have to wait for the Internet to come along to learn about world music. She started listening to it at the age of 5 and continues to discover new genres all the time.
Nelly Furtado started acting in school plays in middle school. She appeared on the episode “Some Buried Bones” of CSI: NY playing a master-thief and victim of domestic abuse. She was also guest star on an episode of the soap opera by the name One Life to Live, on which she performed some of her songs in a local club. Furtado had a role in the major Portuguese soap opera titled Floribella.