“I Was Just Thinking”
from the album Poetry & Aeroplanes
2003
[iTunes]
Watch the video for “I Was Just Thinking” for free at the iTunes Music Store.
When you’re from a small town, it’s pretty hard to get noticed as a musician. It’s even harder when you’re from a tiny European island populated by only 45,000 people. Yet somehow singer/songwriter Teitur Lassen beat the odds.
The artist is from the Faroe Islands, a self-governing nation that’s part of the Danish kingdom, located in the Atlantic Ocean between Ireland, Scotland and Norway. In Teitur’s community, people gathered and sang folk music, so the youngster grew up with a strong grounding in local melody and song structure.
“I would hear people sitting in their living rooms and singing without microphones or beats,” he said. “So I became very used to hearing music that way, which is why my performing is very based on singing.”
Teitur started playing organ at age 13, then he picked up piano and guitar. Soon he was writing and recording his own songs. At first, he wrote in his native tongue, but quickly decided to write in English.
“Pop music and rock-and-roll is all in English, so it wouldn’t make sense to play English music with Faroese words,” he said.
When he was 17, Teitur left the Faroe Islands and moved to a village in Denmark to go to school. Later, he relocated to Copenhagen, and found that fans were receptive to his music. Encouraged to expand his audience, he spent much of his time flying between London and New York to play shows. While in New York last year, he met producer Rupert Hine, who agreed to work with him on a record. Having previously recorded with Suzanne Vega, Duncan Sheik, and Tina Turner, Hine had experience with a variety of music styles, and immediately took to Teitur’s strummy, sentimental songs.
In the months that followed, Teitur, Hine and five other musicians molded the songs on Poetry & Aeroplanes into shape. Instead of recording one song at a time, and doing dozens of takes of each one, Hine encouraged Teitur to approach the project more organically. The producer made set lists for him, and Teitur performed his songs solo acoustic, one after another. Then he added keyboard, bass, strings and drums over his live performances. As a result, Poetry & Aeroplanes sounds intimate, personal and uncomplicated. Sonically, tracks like “Sleeping With the Lights on,” “One and Only” and “Amanda’s Dream” are a cross between Sting at his most vulnerable and folksy Paul Simon.
The album was named after one of the songs on the disc, but it also refers to the regular overseas commutes Teitur has made to reach his goals.
“A lot of the songs are very much about traveling, so it kind of makes sense to give it the title instead of rejecting it and cunningly disguise it as something else.”
Since his music is delicate and acoustic, you might figure Teitur’s concerts would be pretty calm and uneventful. That’s not always the case.
“A couple weeks ago in Philadelphia there was a big convention of fire trucks,” he recalled. “I was just starting the third song, and all the fire trucks’ sirens started going. There were like a hundred at once and you couldn’t hear a word. That was funny. It’s as close as I get to a rock-and-roll moment.”
~ by Jon Wiederhorn and Matt Paco, MTV.com
 Teitur Lassen |