Adriana Calcanhotto grew up in Porto Alegre, the daughter of a musician of Italian descent, and started playing music professionally in the mid-1980s. She moved to Rio de Janeiro and spent years working the city's small bars and street festivals, repeating the same short set night after night before it caught on, and released her debut album, a mix of covers and one original song, in 1990.
Her sound sits inside MPB but pulls from samba, bossa nova, rock and pop, carried by a wide vocal range and a phrasing that reads almost conversational. The self-written Senhas (1992) gave her the hit "Esquadros," and Marítimo (1998) produced "Vambora," still one of her most streamed songs. She later built a parallel persona, Adriana Partimpim, for a run of children's albums, and she has taught and served as an artistic ambassador at the University of Coimbra in Portugal.