Somewhere in the Faroe Islands, about 15 miles taxi ride from the capital city of Torshavn - although the word ‘city’ has grand connotations Torshavn doesn’t really deliver on - down by the sea, next to a swarm of puffins, in a small rusty red house at the foot of a mountain and next to a horse that no one seems to know where it came from or where it goes at night, dwells this tiny nation's most significant contribution to popular music. His name is Teitur Lassen.

It is 2 am. Currently the thirty-two year singer is drunk on the viciously potent Black Sheep beer and hammering out a well-oiled rendition of Guns N’ Roses’ ‘Paradise City’ on the piano in his living room. An ensemble of music journalists are drawing penises in chalk on the blackboard that covers the far end of the room. His manager is asleep in a coil on the floor. Every so often someone slurs, "Is there any more Black Sheep left?"

Rewind four hours and what greeted us – ‘us’ being an ensemble of journalists and photographers from various magazines, the singers UK PR, label boss and manager, all wrapped up in scarves, gloves and Christmas jumpers – was a platter of prawns and horse mussels the size of a toddlers head, all harvested from the icy waters only a few yards away.

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Teitur, the welcoming host, demonstrated his preferred style of eating shrimp ("first you rip off the head, I actually like to suck the head, then you can eat the balls if you’d like...") while his house guest Nico Muhly, the NYC born contempory classical composer and Philip Glass protégé, entertained us with a rendition of Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’ on the piano.

Muhly is in town to write music with Teitur for their audio-visual ‘Confessions’ project (which you can learn more about at www.confessions-tour.com), a series of songs, now on volume two, which they will later perform with the Dutch ensemble Holland Baroque Society – soundtracking Youtube clips users have uploaded anonymously, concerning their innermost secrets.

Muhly, who has orchestrated arrangements for the likes of Bjork, Will Oldham, Grizzly Bear and Anthony and the Johnsons, is described by the more cultured shrimp suckers amongst us (hey! I like the Ramones...) as being a "genius". I don’t argue. Men who can merely play chopsticks on the piano shouldn’t argue with such things.

I really like Teitur, and it’s hard to dispute his own unique brilliance, despite his failure at over estimating how many prawns a party of music journalists can consume. Beloved by the likes of Rufus Wainwright and Grammy Award winning Blues revivalist John Mayer (who described our man in his monthly Esquire column as: "utterly melodic and hopelessly romantic. When he performs live, he robs the air from your lungs. Oh, and he's devoid of any charisma or star power whatsoever"), he’s a talent who’s long overdue mainstream recognition.

Okay, so you might know his most high-profile song ‘One & Only’ from its brief appropriation by Hollywood (appearing on a host of bad romantic comedies and a bad-er Luke Wilson film), or you may be aware of his 2004 nomination for the Shortlist Music Prize (which is a little bit like the American equivalent of the Mercury Music Prize – TV On The Radio won that year). But I’d argue that his talent deserves a much wider audience than those who’ve had to actively look for his past successes.

See, Teitur is the kind of songwriter whose compositions are so laced with effortless warmth and charm, they should really be part of the fabric of slightly left of centre guitar pop in the way the songs of Beck or Radiohead are. Yes, he’s a bit of a nerd (but endearingly so). Yes he’s a bit awkward (although I think Mayer has confused ‘lack of star power’ with ‘being Faroese’).

But the boy has a repertoire of songs that veer from mariachi folk (‘The Girl I Don’t Know’) to acoustic emo ‘Josephine’ (kind of like the Dashboard Confessional you don’t want to shoe in the face), making him the kind of eclectic songwriter the mainstream dearly needs; he knows tunes are the universal currency of adoration, yet is capable of going from A to Z rather than merely A to B.

Perhaps next month's UK release of his third English language record (sequentially speaking, 2007’s ‘Káta Hornið’, his first record sung in his native tongue was his third) will be the record to make him the global name his talent deserves. Most of the Faroe Islands hope it will.

Currently, Teitur Lassen is a big fish in a small pond - the Faroe Islands really are a tiny nation; a 2008 census estimated that this autonomous province of Denmark, located roughly equidistant between Scotland and Iceland in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean, registered a population of approximately 48,855. That’s 20,000 less than the UK town of Doncaster.

Yet, while the singer now lives principally in Denmark ("as do most Faroese people of a certain age," he explains. "There comes a time when you just run out of things to do here"), splitting his time between living there and writing songs here, he’s still adored in the Faroes.

If you go buy a jumper - because there’s not really much to buy in the country other than knit-wear - the shopkeeper will whistle ‘Catherine The Waitress’, the standout song from ‘The Singer’. If you eat out in one of the islands few restaurants - the notion of eating out is still something of a virgin notion - the waitress will ask you what Teitur is like and serve you some fish.

While if you go and buy some chips in a Torshavn take-away, you will a) shave a few years off your life due to the vendor’s insistence on drenching the potatoes in beef dripping and b) have the owner say, "Oh, Teitur – he’s big news! He’s banned in China" (the singer is effectively banned from performing in the country after his song ‘All My Mistakes’ appeared on the 2008 ‘Songs For Tibet’ compilation). The preconception is this; if you’re foreign, and you’re in the Faroes, you’ve probably come to interview Teitur.

Now, as beautiful as the place is (the only place I can conceivably compare the awe-inspiring scenery to is Narnia), I guess there’s not much else to talk about in the Faroes Islands; there’s never been a recorded murder here (Teitur: "except for someone from Greenland who shot someone by mistake, and that doesn’t really count") and the football team is bobbins (currently ranked 166th in the world out of a table of 207).

But even so - if you went to, say, Manchester, a conversation with a taxi driver might involve something other than just The Stone Roses. They love Teitur here. In fact, the Faroese love Teitur so much, he can leave the keys to his recording studio underneath a brick by the door, and nobody ever robs him, despite him having the most beautiful collection of guitars I’ve ever seen.

The day after the dark scenes at his house down by the sea, I’ll go see him perform with avant-garde ensemble Orka, a collective of Faroese musicians who make music out of bits of farm machinery, and have decreed they will do this for a year before setting fire to their ‘instruments’. It’s brilliantly odd stuff, but most of the audience chant "Teitur! Teitur!" - currently onstage doing perverse things with a lathe and a sheet of metal - during the (rare) quiet bits.

One thing you don’t talk about in the Faroe Islands is killing whales with sharp stuff (whaling in the Faroe Islands has been practiced since 1584, and around 950 Long-finned Pilot Whales are killed annually, mainly during the summer). The last UK music journalist to write about Faroese music made the mistake of mentioning this, and came home to a small but intimidating pile of death threats. (Teitur explains his view on this prickly issue up by saying, "there are no trees here. There are no oranges here. People had to get their food somehow - almost nothing can grow here in this kind of weather").

In fact, my trip to the country ends with a visit to ‘G!’, the island's first major music festival, which takes place on the beach at Norðragøta, a place where, when they’re not showcasing the nations best new music (and in 2007 headliner Natasha Beddingfield), they’re killing whales with sharp stuff.

It’s a beautiful place; the year Metronomy played, rumour has it they lied to the promoters of the festival back home that they were due home to play at, that they’d come down with a mysterious illness, just so they could bail out and hang out in the village a little bit longer. It’s an insane place too; come 4 am (the country only getting two hours of darkness between midnight and 2 am), there are more drunk people dressed as trolls throwing sausages in the air than there are not.

Then, after one of the mainstage acts finish, the entire crowd turns en mass to face the sea, to watch twelve naked men hold a running race across the shore.

It's worth mentioning too that, due to the lack of hotels in the area, every year, as G! swings around, the residents of Norðragøta move out and let bands, journalists and visitors to the festival stay in their houses. It is for this reason that, for one week in July, I wake up to the bedside photo of a Faroese family I will never ever meet.

Yet somewhere in the middle of all this madness, Teitur plays a set of songs that confirm all outlined prior. Backed by a four piece brass section, made up of children from Norðragøta waving to their mums when they’re not playing trumpet, with Nico Muhly on keyboards and the three other members of his band adding exciting flourishes to his simple, yet classy collection of pop songs, it’s hard to hear the singer singing, such is the wealth of admiration within the crowd for every song he queues up next.

Okay, so we’re on a beach, flanked by mountains, with houses with grass roofs with sheep on them keeping the grass trim, while guillemots skydive into the sea and children throw sausages into the air; it’s easy to get carried away. But such is the mans talent, I’d be suprised if I wasn’t bowled away by Teitur in more mundane locations soon.