Swooping through the sky, down, down, down to the Pacific Ocean on a Ferris wheel at the end of the Santa Monica Pier, Nelly Furtado lets out a small peep of alarm. If she's like a bird, right now it's a chicken. "Uh, isn't it supposed to be balanced?" she asks, suggesting that perhaps I should sit across from her, rather than right next to her.

For Furtado, balance is essential — on her debut album, Whoa, Nelly!, she juggles styles from bossa nova to beatbox, trip-hop to tear-stained ballad, sometimes in the same song.

She is a pop star with J. Lo glitter and Lilith Fairy dust, who can sing like a new-school R&B diva, a pissed-off alterna-chick and a teen temptress — in three languages. And though this twenty-two-year-old Portuguese-Canadian singer-songwriter is at home in the world of prefab pop — on a recent bill in Los Angeles, playing between Backstreet Boys and Ricky Martin, she was introduced to the crowd by Britney Spears with the simple words, "This girl rocks" — her music is full of emotional complications and romantic struggle. Her inescapable single, "I'm Like a Bird," obsesses over the fickle nature of her heart. On "I Will Make U Cry," she raps, "Gonna make you cry so damn hard/You're gonna curse your drawers and wish you weren't a boy."

"I'm kind of a heartbreaker," Furtado admits. "In relationships, I tend to be the dumper. Not by wickedness or insensitivity, but I'm usually the one with the common sense to end things before they go too far. I'm getting wiser, learning to think more like a guy, actually, and not let my heart get wrapped up in things too quickly. So I am always cutting someone loose because the lure of being independent is just too romantic."

She is a strange and romantic bird, this Nelly Furtado. In person, she is impossibly cute, like Courteney Cox on solid foods, a comparison she finds both flattering and "a curse." In conversation, she is randomly, circuitously articulate about her work, saying she'd like to put the "sublime poetry" of Wordsworth to music and promising, on her next record, "to really speak my mind instead of hiding behind metaphors so much.

"I'm a bundle of contradictions," she confesses. "I always thought the idea of being a hermit, living in some cottage really far away with just books and a cat, sounded so great. But then there was this other fantasy of living in Portugal on some big ranch with a tall, dark and handsome husband, kids, horses and me in a white dress."

Nelly Kim Furtado was born on December 2nd, 1978, the third child of Antonio Jose, a stonemason and landscaper, and Maria Manuela, a chambermaid. Her parents came from the same village in Portugal, and though they had immigrated to Victoria, British Columbia, they raised their brood according to the traditions of their Roman Catholic faith. "It was a big part of my life," Furtado says about church. "Very exciting and colorful. It was just so customary that I didn't really take the time to think about what everything meant, besides the basics. I still believe in the Ten Commandments and the Seven Sins. It keeps me on the straight and narrow, though I get jealous of people sometimes who can just let go and give in to sin." She would like to live a life like Frida Kahlo or Jack Kerouac, artists who "were sinners, who went through suffering, redemption and great love affairs."

Furtado's first great love was music. It ran in the family; her uncle, her grandfather and her brothers were all musicians, and Furtado remembers hiding behind the couch listening to her mother's choral group rehearse. She started performing at age four, the same year she began piano lessons. "She never complained about practicing," her mother recalls. "If anything, she complained about not having enough lessons."

"I was kind of obsessive-compulsive when I was a little kid," Furtado says. "The whole don't-step-on-the-cracks-in-the-sidewalk thing and random outbursts of tidiness." At school, she was hopeless at math but an overachiever in English and the arts. She was also such a loner that her kindergarten teacher once told Mrs. Furtado that she was concerned because Nelly didn't talk to anybody.

Furtado picked up the ukulele at seven and found she could easily transpose the songs she heard on her parents' records to her little four-string. She also took Portuguese folk-dancing lessons at church. "You'd get to wear these really great outfits," she recalls, "but sometimes you'd have to be the boy, so you'd have to wear a black hat and a black vest and pants."

She soaked up American pop from her older sister and brother. She obsessed over Billy Joel's Glass Houses, and when she got her first tape recorder, she tried to sample the sound of breaking glass she'd heard over and over again on that LP. By the age of twelve, she switched her allegiances, developing a wicked crush on Kris Kross. Overnight, she went from A-student to B-girl: "My fake MC name was Skatz. And me and my friends would tag up the lockers at school." They had a gang called the Portuguese Mafia, which committed the high crimes of stoning school buses and crashing parties. "I was a rebel. I liked being friends with the underdogs at school. I found strength in that."