Mi Plan — Nelly Furtado's first Spanish-language studio album

In an interview with the television station Etalk on 17 October 2008, Nelly Furtado said that she was currently working on new albums. One of them would be in Spanish and the other one in Portuguese. She confirmed this again on her MySpace page on March 4, 2009, after a song called Gotta Know surfaced on the Internet purporting to be by Furtado; however, this turned out to be a mistake, as Nelly Furtado had already begun work on her fourth studio album in October 2008 with James Bryan, a longtime friend and guitarist of the Philosopher Kings, and Alex Cuba, a Cuban-Canadian singer and songwriter. According to Furtado, she was unable to record English-language songs because she lacked the inspiration to do so. "After ten years of recording songs in English, I hit a wall. I felt this was the moment to make the dream come true." Further, she said she has always loved singing in Spanish and Portuguese. She could express a lot of things better with it than in English, so the songs became more intimate and personal. "I think the album contains my first real love songs. They're not complicated. They're not too intellectual, and I found it liberating to sing in the Latin language and express myself through my Latin soul." She also explained her block at not being able to have written in English: "I was physically tired and didn't really feel inspired. It was almost like I lost my inspiration to write in English. I just needed a new approach and I found it in writing in Spanish."

Nelly Furtado had almost finished the album and played the individual pieces to her, at that time, five-year-old daughter Nevis. She found many of the album's tracks too slow and Furtado therefore recorded some more up-tempo songs. Furtado justified the behavior and the criticism of her daughter with the fact that she was already very musical.

The topics that the songs on Mi plan deal with are mainly love and everyday life. For the album, Nelly Furtado enlisted the support of many Latin pop artists. The artists featured on Mi plan are Julieta Venegas, La Mala Rodríguez, Concha Buika, Juan Luis Guerra, Josh Groban, Alejandro Fernández and Alex Cuba. In this way, Furtado wanted to give the album a unique touch.

After the first single Manos al aire was first released on radio on 29 June 2009 and then on CD on 31 July, the album was released in Germany, Austria and Switzerland on 11 September. In addition, there was a countdown called Countdown to Mi plan on iTunes, where the three singles Más, Mi plan (feat. Alex Cuba) and Bajo otra luz (feat. Julieta Venegas & La Mala Rodríguez) were released exclusively as promo singles.