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Teitur's Soundtrack to Pleasant Dreams

Teitur's music radiates accessible sweetness.
Teitur's music radiates accessible sweetness.

When Danish singer-songwriter Teitur (pronounced "tighter") released Poetry & Aeroplanes in 2004, he sounded like a star in waiting: With a warm gentility to match his melancholic delivery, he radiated accessible sweetness on song after song. But the album itself didn't quite connect commercially, and Teitur opted to release the new Stay Under the Stars on his own record label.

Though uneven and oddly paced compared to its slickly consistent predecessor, Stay Under the Stars doesn't want for moments of grace. "Don't Want You To Wake Up" opens the disc on an almost stridently good-natured note, with Teitur extolling the virtues of watching a lover sleep — "Don't want you to wake up / Stay under the stars / where no one can make us / change what we are" — amid strummed acoustic guitars and subtly breezy strings.

The track never accelerates beyond an agreeable amble, but "Don't Want You To Wake Up" isn't about momentum anyway. Instead, it's about setting a tone of almost extreme comfort, and about reveling in a late night's moments of peace and freedom from responsibility. In the end, it celebrates sweet dreams by giving them a loping, lovely soundtrack.

Listen to yesterday's 'Song of the Day.'

Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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Stephen Thompson is a writer, editor and reviewer for NPR Music, where he speaks into any microphone that will have him and appears as a frequent panelist on All Songs Considered. Since 2010, Thompson has been a fixture on the NPR roundtable podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour, which he created and developed with NPR correspondent Linda Holmes. In 2008, he and Bob Boilen created the NPR Music video series Tiny Desk Concerts, in which musicians perform at Boilen's desk. (To be more specific, Thompson had the idea, which took seconds, while Boilen created the series, which took years. Thompson will insist upon equal billing until the day he dies.)