Hold onto your headphones, Sir or Madam, because this Sunday’s cover will surely shake your nerves and rattle your brain.

I really have to thank John Mayer at the outset, since it was through an article the musician wrote for Esquire magazine that I was turned on to Teitur. Back in September 2004, Mayer was touting Teitur Lassen’s unjustly ignored major-label debut, Poetry & Aeroplanes, which had been released the previous summer. The singer-songwriter (whose name is pronounced “tie-tor”) hails from Denmark’s Faroe Islands, situated about halfway between Scotland and Iceland.

Picking up Poetry & Aeroplanes, I heard what Mayer did. Teitur’s sound is at once cozy and warm, intimate even, but he’s singing of love on hold, heartbreak. When his follow-up, the independently released Stay Under The Stars, arrived two years later, I eagerly snatched it up. Back then I had no blog, but now I can share the unexpected cover Teitur tucked in the middle of the album.

Written by Otis Blackwell and Jack Hammer, “Great Balls Of Fire” was recorded by Jerry Lee Lewis in October 1957. Lewis, raised in a conservative Christian family, originally refused to record the song on religious grounds, but eventually he relented (Sun Records’ Sam Phillips famously convinced Lewis he had the power to “save souls” with the song). Delivering one of the most hell-raising performances ever put to tape (irony, that), “Great Balls Of Fire” was released the next month and quickly became a certifiable smash, reaching #2 on the Billboard Pop chart, #3 R&B, and #1 Country.

Teitur’s take on “Great Balls Of Fire, recorded live at a show in Copenhagen, methodically slows the pace of rocking tune. He recasts Lewis’ sexually charged come-ons as something sinister, with a string quartet amplifying the darker mood. In an interview with Paste Magazine last year, Teitur was asked why he’d selected to cover The Killer. “I was writing a song about schizophrenia and started to play ‘Great Balls of Fire’ real slowly in the key of minor,” he said. “It was spooky how the words took on a new meaning.” Goodness gracious, was this foreboding tension lurking beneath the surface for nearly 50 years? Hear here:

After releasing an album in his native Faroese in 2007, Teitur issued his third English-language LP, The Singer, in 2008. A new import compilation, All My Mistakes, came out earlier this month, comprised of tracks culled from Teitur’s three albums.

Purchase Teitur – “Great Balls Of Fire” via iTunes, Amazon MP3.