Nelly Furtado

Nelly Kim Furtado f r t d o , ComIH is a Canadian singer and songwriter. She has soldmillion albums worldwide and more thanmillion singles, bringing her total sales to overmillion records around the world. Furtado first gained fame with her debut album, Whoa, Nelly, which spawned two successful singles, Im Like a Bird and Turn Off the Light. Im Like A Bird won a 2001 Juno Award for Single of the Year and a 2002 Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance. In 2003, Furtado released Folklore, which produced three international singles Powerless , Try, and Fora.

Furtado was born on December 2, 1978, in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. Her Portuguese parents, Maria Manuela and Antnio Jos Furtado, were both from So Miguel Island in the Azores and had emigrated to Canada in the late 1960s. Nelly was named after Soviet gymnast Nellie Kim. Her siblings are Michael Anthony and Lisa Anne. They were raised Roman Catholic. At age four, she began performing and singing in Portuguese. Furtados first public performance was when she sang a duet with her mother at a church on Portugal Day. She began playing musical instruments at the age of nine, learning the trombone, ukulele and in later years the guitar and keyboards. At the age of 12, she began writing songs, and as a teenager, she performed in a Portuguese marching band. Furtado has acknowledged her family as the source of her strong work ethic she spent eight summers working as a chambermaid with her mother, along with her brother and sister, who was a housekeeper in Victoria. She has stated that

Source: Wikipedia