Nelly Furtado's new Spanish album, Mi Plan, came out last month and a song from it, Manos Al Aire, has made her the first North American artist to have a song hit No. 1 on the Billboard "Hot Latin Songs" chart.

Having established a successful English pop career, singer Nelly Furtado decided it was time to move forward by branching out into a different language. Yet the challenge of her new Spanish album Mi Plan was almost a homecoming of sorts.

"Latin music is just so massive, I've always listened to tons of it," Furtado says during a recent Toronto promotional stop. "My mom always had Julio Iglesias albums lying around and he sang in 10 languages. I've always admired world artists that experiment with language, everyone from Bjork to Gloria Estefan. I love that eclecticism."

Furtado -- whose first performance was a Portuguese song to her mother when she was four -- recorded some Spanish songs following her 2002 album Whoa Nelly! Since then it's been a natural progression, including penning the song Toma De Mi with Julio Reyes Copello for the El Cantante soundtrack, a song sung by Jennifer Lopez.

"I love Spanish pop music because the lyrics are so engaging," she says. "The vocals are so loud on the track and it's so direct. I just wanted to bring the emotion of the Latin language into the music in a pop context. I didn't want to try to flex some non-existent regional or folkloric muscle, so I brought in other people who would bring that with their voice to the album to fill in the blanks."

As for the new album, Furtado says fellow Canadian musician Alex Cuba was a huge help in getting what she had down on paper in English into fluid and fluent Spanish lyrics.

"I had phrases and a lot of melodies and he really brought the poetry to the table to make it really have weight," she says. "I wanted to stay true to the Latin pop tradition of the lyrics being really important, but at the same time I wanted the music to be accessible to all listeners.

"We had long debates over what I wanted to say versus the way you would say it in Spanish. The way I think one phrase I'm singing in Spanish makes sense, Alex might say, 'I wouldn't say that in the first line, I would say that in the third line.' It was fun, I learned a lot."

While Mi Plan has a few guests, Furtado says she was especially pleased having Josh Groban duet with her on Silencio, a song she describes as "very dramatic and entangled."

She also says the album offered her a huge opportunity to push the artistic envelope.

"It's so fun to sing in Spanish because you can be three things at the same time," she says. "I get to capture that in these songs. It's the same reason people like going to the opera, there's all this drama going on and it's so over the top. I took that licence and ran with it. I said, 'Here's my chance. I can be a basket case if I want to.'"

Whatever she's done, it's working. In late August, Furtado became the first North American artist ever to have a song (Manos Al Aire) hit Number One on Billboard's "Hot Latin Songs" chart.

Making the video for the song -- a song she calls a "meat-and- potatoes love song" -- was also something Furtado enjoyed.

"I thought how great it would be to see this woman driving this army truck and she's all angry with all these weapons," she says. "I thought how funny it would be to have high heels and curling irons as part of your weaponry. And of course she ended up with hardly any clothes on at the end, how perfect?"