Interview: Teitur

Teitur Lassen is a singer-songwriter from the Faroe Islands, whose latest album The Singer is his first to be released in the UK, to great critical acclaim (most notably from the Guardian and the Independent).

The beauty of Teitur’s music lies in the way his orchestration complements his song structures, his stunning minimal arrangements drawing comparisons with Steve Reich. When he played at the Duchess last week, much of The Singer was reimagined for forces including toy piano, double bass and glockenspiel, and delivered with great emotion and humour. As his band took a break from the stage halfway through the set, Teitur delivered a minor-key cover of ‘Great Balls of Fire’ (partly to illustrate how much a song can be changed by a major-minor transposition, and partly because, well, “Jerry Lee Lewis loved minors”). The Yorker caught up with him before the show.

On his early years:

I grew up in the Faroe Islands and went to school in Denmark, so I think of them both as home. The Faroe Islands music scene is very isolated; when I was growing up we never had any bands from elsewhere visiting. Music is so important there though; there’s a great tradition of singing and playing folk music, and learning to play and sing those traditional songs was my first exposure to music.

On his music:

My father listened to a lot of the Beatles and rock music, so I grew up with that influence. I look at songwriting as a way of expressing those things that you carry around with you: people, stories, things that happen. I write a lot of songs about the same topics, it’s like taking photos: you capture the same subject so many times but only one or two of them seem to be good enough to share with other people. I write some fictional songs, but until songs become somehow real to me they’re not interesting to play.

On The Singer:

For this album, we chose to narrow the textures down to put more emphasis on the storytelling, the drama, so we picked instruments like the marimba, which brings the melody to the front and leaves space that a piano wouldn’t. We recorded the album on an island called Gotland, off Sweden, and we were lucky that there was a great local brass band, and a choir, there. There was a great community feeling when we recorded it; lots of people came to stay with us in the hotel and while some of us spent a few days recording, other friends came to cook. It was really, really fun, a big family sort of thing.

The song ‘The Singer’ is autobiographical, but it’s also with a sense of humour. The album is sort of half character and half real, and that song shaped it. There are some songs that are complete true stories, like the song about the two guys who accidentally shoot a man (‘Guilt By Association’), and the time I spent an evening drinking and talking with [iconic singer-songwriter] Chris Whitley, who died of cancer soon after, on a hotel room floor ('Legendary Afterparty').

On his next work:

I’ve got some ideas for my next album, which should be out next year, but recently I’ve been working with my friend [acclaimed American composer] Nico Muhly on a project called The Confessions. We’re writing a sort of song cycle for the Holland Baroque Society, to accompany a series of mundane home videos off the internet. It’s inspired by the comments people make on these boring videos, but the visual aspect of it gives a kind of freedom, we don’t have to say as much in the songs.

Teitur completes his tour in Scotland and London this week, before returning to the UK to play Latitude Festival and Summer Sundae Weekender.

Teitur: official website | MySpace

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