Album: Nelly Furtado, Mi Plan, (Polydor)

Like fellow Anglo-Latin crossover stars Shakira and Christina Aguilera, Furtado knows the value of keeping all her demographics happy.

On Mi Plan, the singer doesn't use her parents' Portuguese tongue but strangely, if potentially lucratively, Spanish, while the robotic R&B of "Maneater" is replaced by light, acoustic Latin pop. To linguistically ignorant ears, she could be twittering about anything from climate change to nail varnish, but it's pleasant background music all the same.