Furtado came to fame in 2000 with the release of her debut album Whoa, Nelly!, which featured the Grammy Award-winning single "I'm Like a Bird" and "Turn off the Light". After giving birth to daughter Nevis and releasing the less commercially successful Folklore (2003), she returned to prominence in 2006 with the release of Loose and its hit singles, "Promiscuous" and "Maneater".
Furtado is known for her musical eclecticism, continually experimenting with different instruments, sounds, genres, languages, and vocal styles. This diversity has been influenced by her wide-ranging musical taste and her interest in different cultures.
Furtado's parents emigrated from Portugal to Canada in the late 1970s. She has stated that visiting her parents' birthplace, the Azores islands, as a child and experiencing its culture and learning the Portuguese language has made her an open-minded person. This has strongly influenced her artistry as she has incorporated many cross-cultural sounds into her music. It is also evident in her multilingualism as she can speak English, Portuguese, Spanish and, to a lesser extent, Hindi. Furtado has acknowledged her parents as the source of her strong work ethic; she spent eight summers working as a chambermaid with her mother, who was a housekeeper in Victoria. She has stated that coming from a working class background has shaped her identity in a positive way.
Furtado first sang at the age of four when she performed a duet with her mother at church on Portugal Day. She began playing instruments at the age of nine, learning the trombone, ukulele and, in later years, the guitar and keyboard. She began writing songs at the age of twelve and, as a teenager, she played in a Portuguese marching band.
Furtado's music has also been influenced by her current residence, Toronto, which she calls "the most multicultural city in the entire world" and a place where she "can be any culture". Growing up in Canada and experiencing Toronto's cultural diversity, she has said that she did not have to wait for the Internet revolution to learn about world music; she began listening to it at the age of fifteen and continues to discover new genres. In 2006, she commented about her diverse taste:
The first musicians Furtado interacted with were underground rappers and DJs. During a visit to Toronto, after the summer of eleventh grade, she met Tallis Newkirk, member of hip hop group Plains of Fascination and contributed vocals to their 1996 album Join the Ranks on the track "Waitin' 4 the Streets". She spent the rest of that summer in Portugal, opening her mind to native rock acts, and then returned to British Columbia. After graduating from Mount Douglas Secondary School in 1996, she moved to Toronto where she eventually formed the trip hop duo Nelstar in 1997 with Newkirk. The experience led her back to her hip hop influences and allowed her to become more comfortable with writing her own melodies and rhymes. Although, "Like", one of the songs Nelstar recorded, received a VideoFACT grant to cover for the production of a music video, Furtado felt the trip-hop style of the duo was "too segregated" and believed it did not represent her personality or allow her to showcase her vocal ability. She left the group and decided to move back home.
Before moving, she performed at the 1997 Honey Jam, a female, mostly-black talent show at Toronto nightclub Lee's Palace. She performed to a Digital Audio Tape in jeans and a t-shirt. At the club, The Philosopher Kings singer Gerald Eaton (aka Jarvis Church) was impressed with her performance and approached her to write with him. Eaton and fellow Kings member Brian West, collectively known as Track and Field, helped Furtado produce a demo, but she already had plans to backpack through Europe and return home to take creative writing courses at Camosun College. She stayed in touch with Eaton and West who insisted that she return to Toronto to record more material. She eventually returned for two weeks; the material recorded during those sessions led to her record deal with DreamWorks Records in 1999.
Furtado continued to collaborate with Eaton and West, who co-produced her debut album, Whoa, Nelly!, which was released in October 2000. The album saw major success all over the globe supported by its three singles, "I'm Like a Bird", "Turn off the Light", and "...On the Radio (Remember the Days)". It received four Grammy nominations in 2002; her debut single won for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance. Furthermore, Furtado was critically acclaimed for her innovative mixture of various genres and sounds. Slant magazine called the album "a delightful and refreshing antidote to the army of 'pop princesses' and rap-metal bands that had taken over popular music at the turn of the millennium". The sound of the album was strongly influenced by musicians who had traversed cultures and "the challenge of making heartfelt, emotional music that's upbeat and hopeful". Following the release of the album, Furtado headlined the Burn in the Spotlight tour and also appeared on Moby's Area:One tour.
Before the release of her sophomore album, Furtado gave birth to her first child, daughter Nevis (purportedly named for the Caribbean island, Nevis, on which she was conceived - in actuality named for the latin word "Nevi", confirmed by Nelly on Australia's Kyle and Jackie O radio show on the 7th of August, 2006), on September 202003 in Toronto; she had a home birth with midwives. She has said about motherhood, "It's actually pretty incredible. It's a lot more instinctual than I thought".
Nevis's father is Furtado's then-boyfriend, DJ/producer Jasper Gahunia aka Lil' Jaz. Furtado and Gahunia, who broke up in 2005, were together for four years and friends for several years before that. She has stated, "We're fully active co-parents and really close friends, so things are irie".
Nevis is culturally a quarter Filipino, a quarter Indian, and half Portuguese. Furtado has chosen to raise her in Toronto due to the city's cultural diversity, open-mindedness, and grassrootspolitical activism.
Furtado's second album, Folklore, was released in November 2003. The title was influenced by her parents immigration to Canada, "when I look at my old photo albums, I see pictures of their brand-new house, their shiny new car, their first experiences going to very North American-type places like Kmart. When you have that in your blood, you never really part with it—it becomes your own personal folklore." The album also displayed a diverse sound but with a more rock-oriented, acoustic approach. As she focused more on the songwriting rather "than on frenetically switching genres five times in one song",BBC felt that it had "twice the originality" of her debut. Furtado attributed the mellowness of the album to the fact that she was pregnant during most of its recording. The final track on the album, "Childhood Dreams", is dedicated to her daughter.
The album includes the single "Força" (meaning "strength" or "carry on" in Portuguese), which was written as the official anthem of the 2004 European Football Championship. Furtado performed the song at the championship's final in Lisbon, Portugal in July 2004. Other singles included the ballad "Try" and "Powerless (Say What You Want)", in which she embraces her Portuguese heritage; the song deals with "the idea that you can still feel like a minority inside, even if you don't look like one on the outside".
The album was not as successful as her debut, partly due to troubles at DreamWorks Records and the less poppy sound. It lacked promotion because DreamWorks was sold to Universal Music Group at the time of Folkore's release. In 2005, DreamWorks Records was shut down, and many of its artists, including Furtado, were absorbed into Geffen Records.
Furtado's third album, Loose, was released in June 2006. It was named partly after the spontaneous, creative decisions she faced while creating the album and also for the band TLC, who she said she admires for "taking back their sexuality, showing they were complete women." Four lead singles were released in different regions of the world: the Spanish reggaeton-influenced "No Hay Igual" (featuring Calle 13), the hip-hop "Promiscuous" (featuring Timbaland), the latin "Te Busqué" (featuring Juanes) and the pop "Maneater". For the first time, Furtado worked with a variety of record producers and followed a more collaborative approach in creating the album. The album, mostly produced by Timbaland, showed her experimenting with a more R&B–hip hop sound and the "surreal, theatrical elements of '80s music". She has categorized the album's sound as punk-hop, which she describes as "this modern, poppy, spooky music" and stated that "there's a mysterious, after-midnight vibe to [it] that's extremely visceral". She attributed the youthful sound of the album to the presence of her two-year old daughter.
Furtado also wanted the album to sound more like her demo tapes which she prefers over her finished albums. She recalls, "The cool thing is we did the mixes as we went. The whole album is a board mix theoretically. We didn't bring in the fancy mixer at the end". During the album's creation, she listened to several electro and hard rock musicians including System of a Down and Death from Above 1979 who influenced the rock sounds present on the album and the "coughing, laughing, distorted bass lines" which were kept in the songs deliberately.
Loose became the most successful album of Furtado's career, reaching number-one in several countries including the United States and Canada and producing the hit singles, "Promiscuous" and "Maneater", which became the most successful songs of her career, reaching number-one in many countries.
In June 2006, in a interview with Genre magazine, when asked if she had "ever felt an attraction to women", Furtado replied "Absolutely. Women are beautiful and sexy." She also said the idea that everyone was inherently bisexual made sense to her and agreed with Kurt Cobain's statement that "everyone is gay" from Nirvana's "All Apologies". This was considered by some to be an admission of bisexuality, while others felt it was more to do with a straight woman dabbling with bisexual chic.
Furtado began acting in school plays in middle school. She formally began studying acting after she planned to appear in an Indian Hindi language film which never came to fruition. Acting courses taught her to "let go of [her] ego and feel really grounded"; this influenced the theme and creation of her third album Loose. She prepared for a role in a second film, the independent drama Nobody's Hero (2006), but plans fell through as filming conflicted with the promotion of Loose.
