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"Teitur writes story songs of immense beauty, they reverberate with an elegiac poignancy and emotion that move the listener with an almost wilting intensity. The influences are diverse, the lyrics stand alone as startling poetry, such is his ability as a storyteller and they recall the Russian greats Chekhov, Tolstoy, Bulgakov, but also American writers like Richards Brautigan and Yates, as he deals with the mundanity and absurdity of everyday life and captures the humour and bleakness in the human condition inside his verse. Musically his vision is equally ambitious; at times he reminds of the dramatic instrumentation of a Krzystof Komeda score or a soundtrack to an Ingmar Bergman film. The Singer is the first evidence of an extraordinary talent about to delicately land upon our shores.

“I like communication,” he says in way of explaining why he does what he does. “It doesn’t have to be just through words, it can be through pictures or music. I just like stories in general, I’ve al0ays read a lot, books, short stories, comics, articles, newspapers, and that inspires me to write all the time. I write everyday, everywhere.”

And although Teitur constantly questions which “media is the most expressive; film? songs? short stories? instrumental music?” he appears constantly driven to write songs.

“I’ve always made music,” he says. “I’ve al0ays been interested in song writing from a really early age… in chord patterns and forms. I hear everything as music, when I see a film, when I read, I hear it as music, it has sound. And with a song, it comes down to what you want to share and how you want to express yourself and how you want to communicate.”

Teitur seems to give so much away of himself in his music, managing to create an almost metaphysical, magical realm between his lines.

“Writing a song is one of the most exciting things for me, there is so much to consider. You can look at songs like memories, everyone thinks about things, maybe about a story you’ve heard, or a conversation you’ve overheard, or something someone’s said to you, or something that has happened to you, and those things are al0ays there, they are carried around with us and for me those things become songs. If you look at it from an historical perspective, like folk songs, they are really about something that happened that shouldn’t be forgotten. And that informs my writing. I think you can only talk about the things that you have experienced and that make you feel, that make you happy, that make you sad, that make you angry. And once I have written the words I use the music to set the scenery, all the instruments have got different colours, if you are using strings it becomes a very emotional thing, if you have a civic concert band then that becomes more upbeat… what you use depends on what mood you are trying to create, a song can be arranged in a 1000 different 0ays and that makes it exciting too.”

Teitur was born in the Faroe Islands, and his last album Kata Hornio was recorded in his native language and perhaps that explains where some of the mystery, searching and soul within his music stems. “There is no getting away from the fact that the Faroe Islands have influenced me,” he says. “The place is very dramatic, the weather conditions are averse, there is a lot of silence, it’s a part of me, it’s in my dreams, it is hard for me not to put some of that atmosphere into my music as I feel so attached to it.”

The Singer though was recorded in an abandoned hotel on the beautiful scenic Scandinavian island of Gotland. “I wanted to go somewhere remote, somewhere exotic where people were out of their ordinary environment so we could go on a journey together while making the record,” he explains his choice of location. “Being in a studio in a stressed city like London or New York, you’re fitting into somewhere else you can’t make your own space, you’re fitting in with a schedule. We looked into finding places in France, Switzerland and Italy, I was hoping to find an empty church house, I wanted a natural sound, a place made of wood and stone, and then I thought of the hotel that my mother in law looks after in the winter months and I just thought this is the perfect place. We were in complete isolation, we were going into another world, and the hotel is very grand, it used to belong to a princess, the furniture is all from the 1860s and it made us feel very blue blooded. And it 0as brilliant because it made us feel like we had stepped out of time.”

While there he hooked up with the local community. “We set up a girls’ choir and there was a great brass band in Gotland that we used. There was also this brilliant musician who had made the music for the Pippi Longstocking TV series, and we befriended him.”

There was also an added bonus of working in Gotland. “Ingmar Bergman had lived on the island and shot some of his films there. I am a big fan and sadly he died while we were recording and I feel because the music is very cinematic, he is in there somewhere.”

The songs took seven years to write and they’ve been well worth the wait. The title track is Teitur’s statement of intent although it is not without humour. “I al0ays had the voice and now I am a singer,” he sings. “The audience grows silent when I open up my mouth. I sing the words I've written every night before a crowd. As if I were a poet or some legendary mind.”

Elsewhere there is Your Great Book, an angry retort at his sister, Legendary Afterparty, a tribute to blues singer and friend Chris Whitley who sadly died of cancer and Catherine The Waitress, a quirky, endearing tale of love at first sight.

The album is the first of four albums shortly to be released courtesy of A&G Records, who have licensed the record directly from Teitur and his manager’s own label, Arlo and Betty Recordings, which they set up in 2006. This will be quickly followed by an introductory compilation album of his previous albums, providing a beautiful inception for those not familiar with Teiturs’ past efforts, prior to the rest of his back catalogue unfurling here in the UK for the first time.

“It is called Arlo and Betty Recording because it is named after my vintage Gibson acoustic guitars. I released my US debut Poetry And Aeroplanes in 2003 via Universal and when I wanted to record my second they weren’t ready for it so we decided to do our own thing. I want and need creative freedom, I want to be able to make records all the time and I want to be able to write all the time without being tied to a release schedule. I live for writing and touring, I’m just a creator. I want to be making things all the time.”

And thank heavens for that.