RIHANNA, the "island girl" whose music with its global appeal has sold at least 15 million albums in three years, has several males in her life.

The first is her biological father, Ronald Fenty, a Bajan. As Elle, an international glamour magazine, explained it in a cover story, the father of the Grammy Award-winning singer battled a crack and alcohol addiction when she was a child, a situation that led to a "strained relationship" between them. Now it's back on an even keel.

Looking back on those years, Rihanna, "shaking her head and staring at her dish of pasta" at a California restaurant she frequents, told the magazine that "was way, way, way back."

Things have changed since then.

"We're friends now," Rihanna said. "Now, my dad is like the coolest person on the planet. He doesn't bother me. He lets me live my life. And he's been like that a lot, even when I was younger. He would watch me make a mistake and he wouldn't stop me. My dad, he lets me make it and then I learn."

Reflecting on those early years, she spoke about the 'excruciating headaches' that began when she was eight years old. At first the doctors in Barbados believed it could be a brain tumour and ordered a CAT scan, which turned up nothing. But after her parents separated and later divorced when she was 14 years, the headaches stopped.

"I never expressed how I felt," she said. "I always kept it in. I would go to school ....you would never know there was something wrong with me."

'Father figure'

As for the second key male in her life, he is Evan Rogers, who has become something of a "father figure." He was the music composer and producer who spotted her talent in Barbados and encouraged her mother, Monica, a Guyanese accountant, who primarily raised her, to allow the teenage Combermerian to come to Connecticut at 16 years old and live with him and his Bajan wife, Jackie.

"I think her mother was very nervous at first," Evan recalled. "But the Barbados connection with my wife, that helped."

As he remembered the day in Barbados in 2004 when Rihanna walked into the room where he was listening to a girl group sing as a favour to a friend, he immediately became keenly interested in her after he heard her belt out a tune.

"I thought, if that girl can sing, then, she's a star," he recalled. "A lot of time with young singers, they have a particular singer that they mimic heavily, and I could hear a little of Mariah (Carey) and Beyoncé in there –she sang Dangerously in Love by Beyoncé and Emotion by Destiny's Child. But there was this edge to her voice. It just cut like a knife.'

It was Rogers, a quiet, soft-spoken and affable professional, who guided Rihanna through a four-song demo and then she headed back to Barbados while he sent it to a handful of record labels, including Def Jam. Not long after she landed back home, Jay-Z, the head of the label, called and invited her and Rogers to a meeting to discuss her future.

She flew back to New York and the rest, as they say, is history.

"I remember staring into everybody's eyes in the room while I was singing, and at that point I was fearless," Rihanna told 'Elle' about the audition. "But the minute I stopped singing, I was like, 'oh my God, Jay-Z is sitting right in front of me.'"

As the story goes, Jay-Z and Def Jam were more than keenly interested, so much so that he literally locked his office door so she and Rogers couldn't leave. They signed a contract in 12 hours.

"We made a little Godfather joke," Jay-Z recalled. "We said the only way she could leave was through the window."

But apart from her father and her "father figure", two other males in her life are her brothers, Rajad and Rorrey, who are often at her side.