Exclusive: Nelly Furtado Brings 'Drama' on Spanish-Only Album

She can afford to be loose and relaxed right now about the move, as she's already made history by becoming the first North American artist to score an original No. 1 song on the Billboard Latin Charts. Naturally, it's an honor Furtado is proud of. "Yeah, it's exciting and it's kind of cool because a lot of times North American artists, when they cross over into the Latin world, they usually do it with a translation of a current English hit," she says. "But the difference with this album is it's an album full of original songs written from scratch in Spanish."

But one gets the sense the Portuguese-Canadian songstress would be cool even if the album tanked commercially. Furtado is just one of those people who likes to have fun whatever she does and she is embracing her new role as a Latin music star. "I'm going to countries I've never been before like Argentina, Venezuela, Columbia, so it's kind of cool," she says.

Singing in Spanish also gives her the chance to be more flexible musically. "I can be a little more dramatic than I can be in an English song," she says. "It's easy to be pigeonholed when you sing in English, like if you sing too passionately suddenly you're too angry; if you sing too sweetly, you're weak."

Where Furtado has really found the spirit of the culture is in the first two music videos for the album, 'Manos Al Aire' and 'Mas.' "My second single, 'Mas,' what we did was like a Latin soap opera theme," she says. "We used the same actors from the first video and we continue to tell the story in the second video and I think I'm gonna continue the theme as the album progresses. I really play up the drama and do a lot more acting in the videos for this new stuff."

With that, PopEater wonders if there's a chance for Nelly's own Telemundo show. "I think it would be incredibly fun, I love acting, it's a lot of fun," she says laughing. "But no soap opera yet."