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Look to the North – your new favourite singer-songwriter is coming. He has a voice of a peculiar angel, soft as a kiss, that has the ability to warm the coldest of hearts. His lyrics, gloriously tender at times, nicely twisted at others, create vivid, romantic worlds – of girls in dancing dresses and alphabet shirts; hitchhikers and cowboys; and boys endlessly, hopelessly, falling in love. He is Teitur (Tie-tor) Lassen, a boy from the Faroe Islands who turns music into magic beautifully and effortlessly.

Earlier this year, Teitur released The Singer, his first album to be issued in Britain. It garnered five star reviews in The Guardian ("deep, viscous stuff that is never less than extraordinary") and The Independent ("a rare beast"), while the Sunday Times praised the singer-songwriter's " wonderfully idiosyncratic talent". The Singer was presented as a glorious introduction to a shining new star, but few of us knew that there had been many other brilliant records before it. Now, the album 'All My Mistakes' takes us through the last seven years of Teitur's glittering career and reveals the marvellous jewels from his back catalogue.

Teitur Lassen was born in 1977 in Tórshavn, the tiny capital city of the Faroes – a collection of islands that sit in the North Sea between the Shetlands and Iceland. His father played the church organ; his mother was a pop singer who had a little success in her homeland; and they named their son after the Old Norse word for "happy". "The Faroes is a great place to grow up," Teitur says. "Everyone knows each other, and people sing all the time. You get to find out a lot about the way people are here, and how they behave, and how to make music about it at the same time."

As a child, Teitur took inspiration from their peacefulness and the strangeness of his country, from its wild, rugged mountains to its dramatic coastlines. He adored "all kinds of music from The Beatles to Stravinsky", and began writing songs in his early teens. He quickly found he had a gift for it, moving to Denmark to write full-time a few years later, before being signed up as a songwriter by an American company. Here, he wrote songs for Corinne Bailey Rae and others, but he still wrote material he wanted to keep for himself; songs that held personal weight, and peculiar beauty. "I still wanted to write stories that came from my heart," he says. "These were songs that only I could sing – songs of a desperate romantic, but a person still in touch with reality."

In 2003, Teitur released his first album in America, Poetry & Aeroplanes, through Universal Records. Its simple, sincere songs made it a critical hit. He toured the USA and Canada extensively, performed on American chat shows, watched as his songs got snapped up for film soundtracks (My Super Ex-Girlfriend and Aquamarine), and attracted the attention of respected singer-songwriters like Rufus Wainwright, Aimee Mann and John Mayer, all of whom took him on tour. Five songs from his debut feature on this compilation: the moving paean to lost love that is Sleeping With The Lights on ("I've been haunted by this old ghost before...like a dancing wave, you balance on the shore"); the heartbreakingly simple I Was Just Thinking, the warm-hearted You're The Ocean, the moving One And Only, and the extraordinary Josephine, about a boy mesmerised by his "neighbourhood queen" – a girl who steals her grandmother's watch and kisses cowboys that cry.

In 2006, unhappy with the label's plans for his future, Teitur left Universal. He and his manager started their own label, and called it Arlo and Betty (after his 2 guitars). He released Stay Under The Stars in the same year, a record full of richer writing and bolder characters. "I'd been thinking about The Beatles' Eleanor Rigby and 'all the lonely people – where do they all come from?' I wanted to write songs about these people, and make them come alive for others." Many of these tracks, including the song after which this compilation is named, are here in all their glory. Louis Louis is a cry for Louis Armstrong to 'come down through the heavens' in order to touch 'the quiet generation'. Don't Want You To Wake Up is the story of two lovers dreaming in the dark ("where no-one can make us, change what we are"). Hitchhiker plays with our assumptions about dark country lanes while treating us to the sinister sound of lush, country drones, while I Run The Carousel presents a mysterious circus worker, watching "children swirl around/Like drapes in a summer town". Then there is You Get Me, which presents Teitur's most sublime yet succinct vision of love: "Like a beautiful song, you heard a million times/ Let the rainbow's end, you can never find/You get me".

In 2007, Teitur fulfilled a lifetime ambition by releasing an album in his mother tongue, Kata Hornid, before beginning work on The Singer. For those who haven't yet come across it, two glorious tasters feature here, too: The Girl I Don't Know, with its swaggering Spaghetti Western guitars and dark, mournful horns; and the jaunty Catherine The Waitress, which takes us into the mind of an amorous ("Is there anything you'd like? If I could only tell you..."). Radio 2's Mark Radcliffe and Stuart Maconie loved this song so much they invited Teitur in for a session earlier this year, helping his reputation grow, and pointing fans towards his series of successful shows across Britain – including an acclaimed spot at the Latitude Festival.

And now, with the release of All My Mistakes, Teitur is casting his light upon us even more brightly. This record allows us to enjoy the spectacular songs he has already written, and fall in love with a talent whose star is still glowing, and growing. As the angel of the north he continues to turn music into magic, it is our duty to look north, let him come, and hold him close to our hearts.