MTV: How did you get your start in the music business?

Nelly Furtado: I've been doing it since I was a kid, performing-wise. The first time I performed I was four. [It was] a duet with my mother in Portuguese, so I was singing in Portuguese before English. I started writing songs when I was about 12. [I was] infatuated with urban music, I wrote books and books of R&B kind of songs. I had my room plastered with WordUp! and Rap Pages magazine. The first musicians I came into contact with were hip-hop musicians, MCs and DJs.

I met some kids that were from the States; they went to a boarding school in Victoria, [Canada]. One of them was in a hip-hop group, [he] knew a producer in Toronto. On my way out to Portugal one summer on vacation, I stopped there [and] did some tracks with them. My first recording experience was doing back-up vocals for a hip-hop group. I was 16 years old.

I did that for about a year, even filmed a video. But at 18, I wasn't ready to pursue music professionally. I wasn't writing songs on guitar yet, I wasn't writing complete singer/songwriter-style songs and I felt like that was the last frontier. I moved back to Victoria for a year to go to college, studied writing, and I learned guitar and started writing songs. And I was doing more experimental stuff with DJ friends who lived in the city and just doing techno and ambient and house stuff, always having a solid footing in both pop writing and the technological, progression kind of thing.

MTV: Can you explain the sound? It's very wide open.

Furtado: I think it's a pop record, because I feel that even when I was writing, in that trip-hop, more street scene, the stuff I was writing was a bit more hooky than that scene. When I started playing guitar, I started writing these more traditional pop songs. What I set out to do with Whoa, Nelly! was make a record that was under thepop umbrella, but combined more elements of my Portuguese heritage. And used Brazilian percussion.

From the scenes that I come out of, you hear the hip-hop on the record, and you hear the world element [and] you hear the techno element. I think hip-hop energy really runs through the record, and I think the spirit of that is stream-of-consciousness writing, and spontaneity.

MTV: What was it like growing up in Victoria?

Furtado: My parents are from the Azor Islands in Portugal. It was cool growing up first-generation Canadian, 'cause we spoke English at home, but I went to night school to learn Portuguese. In my church we had different festivals and so you'd get the culture, the folk dancing. I got a great cultural education, because I could be at an East Indian Banghla-dance one weekend, next weekend I'd be at a Latin dance, dancing to the merengue, and the next weekend be celebrating Chinese New Year.

MTV: Some of your songs deal with relationships. How do you come up with the lyrics?

Furtado: I write in two different styles. One style is, again, very stream-of-consciousness. I'm very inspired by the Beat poets, like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. When I was 14 I got a hold of a Jim Carroll novel ["The Basketball Diaries"] way too early. It was like, wow, street science and street energy and rawness. I think you hear that on tracks like "Party," "I Will Make U Cry" and "Trynna Find a Way."

MTV: Who would you say your main musical influences are?

Furtado: I'm very influenced by modern Brazilian artists, like Caetano Veloso and Tom Ze — Brazilian music in general. The instrumentation is so diverse, and that's what inspired the record a lot, because there are no rules, really. And Asian Dub Foundation and Cornershop, which I love as well. The lead singer combines his East Indian heritage under a pop umbrella, but there's a slight political thread running through it. Which I like and you don't really hear on my record; it's not really a political record, but I love the energy of that. Jeff Buckley's a huge influence. In the way that he used his voice as an instrument.

I listened to Mary J. Blige, religiously, [all] my life. Mariah Carey I listened to a lot when I was about 12, 13, because, technically, she's a great singer, and not having lessons or anything, I'd flip the tape over and over again and memorize the licks.

Counterculture references, getting confused with rapper Nelly, and the meaning of "I'm Like a Bird" ... NEXT!