When composer, arranger, violinist, singer and songwriter Owen Pallett wrote the songs that would become Heartland (his 2010 release about a prairie farmer named Lewis), he didn't expect it would be recorded in the dark, cold and barren lands of Iceland. Luckily for everyone, that didn't affect its making.

“The only reason I went to Iceland was because there's a studio there with an engineer I wanted to work with and because it was cold and dark and I knew I wouldn't be distracted,” he told me from Halifax, Nova Scotia. His tour has just started, and his first dates include a trip from eastern Canada, reaching London's Aeolian Hall on February 24. “In fact most of the time when I do the writing, especially the lyrics, I just kind of isolate myself. If I'm inspired by anything, it's books.”

Certainly, Pallett's last album, He Poos Clouds (which was released under the moniker Final Fantasy before a recent name change to avoid trademark disputes) was inspired by a set of books: the rules to Dungeons & Dragons, and its eight schools of magic. Riding a wave of popularity from his work on The Arcade Fire's highly successful Funeral, He Poos Clouds received rave reviews and even won the Polaris Prize for the year, but Pallett hasn't stopped there. With more synthesizers, drum kits and some help from the Czech Symphony Orchestra, Pallett has concocted Heartland, his most substantial indie-pop - yet still classically influenced - offering to date.

“The thing realized with He Poos Clouds is that you're dealing really with signifiers as opposed to sounds,” he said of the aural landscape. “What I was thinking about when I made that record was the notes on the page, and the sounds were representations of the notes on the page without actually hearing the sounds generated. And certainly I'm not dissing that record at all, but I wanted to, with this record, get into the sound and know how to manipulate it and deal with it.”

He did so by cutting his teeth as producer for two 2008-released EPs, Plays to Please and Spectrum, 14th Century, the latter of which was recorded with help from members of indie-folk group Beirut.

“Either musicians are working with producers and these producers are fashioning the sounds of their records, or people are producing their own records. People do that when they're in their teens with four-tracks or garageband or whatever,” Pallett said. “But sometimes people just don't do that. And I wanted to do that. I wanted to be able to have the same sort of skill set that Dan Snaith [of fellow Polaris Prize winners Caribou] has, to be able to actually produce a record.”

Acting as producer of his own songs presented a certain challenge, however, when the traditional tests of a song's success can't be applied to Pallett's work.

“I think that there's no reason why any one song is successful, you know what I mean? I've heard all my life that for a song to be good it has to be able to be played by a guy with a guitar on a street corner. No thanks!”

And although Pallett agrees that such a test does have its place in pop music - “if you want to write [Radiohead's] Fake Plastic Trees” - his interest is not in music for mass consumption, despite his status as a public figure, working with The Arcade Fire, The Hidden Cameras, Beirut and more recently Mika and Alex Turner of the Arctic Monkeys. Still, Pallett recognizes the public's influence on his art.

“[Being a public figure] is pretty hard to really describe and this isn't a new thing, this has been the way I've felt since 2005. As soon as you have strangers buying your records, it changes the way that you think about the way you make music.”

And that public has been extremely supportive so far; let's hope this success continues for Pallett in the future.

Pallett will be playing at Aeolian Hall on February 24. Tickets are $22 in advance, $25 at the door.