Manos Al Aire

Album: Mi Plan (2009)
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Songfacts®:

  • This was the first single taken from Nelly Furtado's Spanish-language debut album, Mi Plan.
  • The song's title means "hands in the air" in English and the lyrics are about surrendering to love.
  • Furtado told MTV News the emotion behind this song's subject matter of surrendering to love could only be expressed in Spanish. She explained: "It's intense and it's vulnerable and strong at the same time. And I think when I sing about those emotions in Spanish, they come off differently. I don't think I could write an English song about such a complex emotion."
  • Mi Plan was Furtado's first release since her marriage to Cuban sound engineer Demacio "Demo" Castellón in 2008. So it's not surprising that this song and the other tracks are all about one subject-love. Furtado told MTV News that writing in Spanish was liberating. She explained: "The songs are all about amor. They are all about love, and it's my first album with more love songs. They're really like songs that everybody can relate to about love and life and everyday living, just the things you go through. So basically, I found that once I started writing songs in Spanish, I had a new voice."
  • The Daily Mail October 9, 2009 asked Furtado why she recorded Mi Plan in Spanish rather than her in the language of her Portuguese parents. She explained that, encouraged by her father and mother, she was fluent in both languages by her early teens. "Learning Spanish was easy because of all the Portuguese my mom and dad spoke at home. The languages both come from the same Latin root. I used to sing in Portuguese when I was a little girl, so I feel comfortable singing in Spanish now."
  • Furtado explained to Digital Spy why she found it easier to write about the emotions expressed in the song in Spanish. She said: "In the verse I'm having a heated argument with my love interest, but in the chorus I'm actually quite gracious and saying, 'I've put up the white flag and I just want to love you'. There's a complexity going on there that would be a bit of a train-wreck in English. I think what you can accomplish emotionally within one Latin song is quite vast - female Latin singers have quite a lot of emotional license without being pigeonholed."

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