Teitur, from the Faroe Islands, first came to the attention of the world with the release of his 2003 debut album Poetry & Aeroplanes, which won him rave reviews.
He concentrates on creating inspiring melodies and gentle but finely observed, often wry and quirkily observant lyrics. Since the release of his debut album, he has toured non-stop.
In 2006, in between performing at many major European festivals, Teitur started to record his second album. Stay Under The Stars, debuting in the Top 10 in Denmark, subsequently going Gold there and earning him the accolade of Best Singer at the Danish Music Awards (Grammies) in March 2007.
Teitur was born and spent his early years in The Faroe Islands. These bleak, but beautiful windswept, rain lashed, rocky outcrops in the Atlantic are due north of the UK and lie roughly mid way between Norway and Iceland. First settled by Irish monks and later Vikings, the Faroes were initially part of Norway and then latterly Denmark, of which they are still an autonomous region. The forty seven thousand Faroese who inhabit the Faroes are fiercely independent, even refusing to join the EU with Denmark. They retain their own language, with Danish only being used for commerce. It was this isolated upbringing with an inevitable sense of alienation and separation that informs much of Teitur's writing.
"Music is one of our main social activities," says Teitur. "There are always instruments in our homes. I started on my own music at thirteen, but the guitarist in my band was so much better than me and I was left at the back, playing acoustic. However I wrote all the lyrics from the start and in English. My native Faroese music is a part of me, but what really attracted me was pop music. Pop is almost all in English, which I find it gives me a bigger ocean of vocabulary," Teitur has more than one ocean of vocabulary to choose from as he speaks five languages. He finally decided to leave the islands, as many young Faroese do, at the age of 17 to study in Denmark. Then after a brief spell in Rome, he decided to base himself in London in 2002.
In mid 2007, Teitur started to pull together the songs that make up his third album: The Singer:
"The songs are written over a time-span of one to seven years. They are stories of events and experiences - like drinking beers on a musty hotel floor with mysterious blues musician Chris Whitley, before he died of cancer (Legendary Afterparty), or stories that I have come across in my lifetime..."
In October Teitur travelled to an island off the coast of Sweden called Gotland with his sound engineer Jonas and arranger Trondur, and recorded the album on a 19th century Swedish Princess' estate, normally a summer destination as a hotel, but at this time of year a beautiful, windswept and somewhat deserted piece of tranquility; interrupted only by the various musicians and singers who came to play or sing on the album, who all stayed at the hotel, during their work on the album.
"This album was made in tranquility and isolation. The result is a very natural and somehow nordic sounding record. Furthermore it has similarities to a musical or a book of short stories."
"On the cover of the album is a the picture of a cartoon figure which stands inside the room of an empty dollhouse. It looks almost like a skeleton and it has no face. The figure is a caricature of "The Singer" "
User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License and may also be available under the GNU FDL.
From Wikipedia:Teitur (born January 4, 1977) is a singer-songwriter from the Faroe Islands. He has toured extensively throughout Europe and the United States since releasing his major label debut, Poetry & Aeroplanes. He is probably best known for his song ?One and Only?, which appeared on soundtracks to the major motion pictures Aquamarine and My Super Ex-Girlfriend, and for his 2004 nomination for the Shortlist Music Prize. In 2007 and 2009 Teitur was named Best Male Artist at the Danish Music Awards, and in 2008 he opened the main stage for Radiohead at the Roskilde Festival.
Teitur has also shared a stage with Rufus Wainwright, Suzanne Vega, KT Tunstall, John Mayer, and Aimee Mann. Although considered firmly within the singer-songwriter genre, the last few years have seen Teitur's music grow in a vaster, more mature and experimental direction, including a recent collaboration with contemporary classical artist Nico Muhly. Teitur's latest album, The Singer, was released worldwide in the spring of 2008.