At only 28, wistful Norwegian musician Sondre Lerche has released seven albums and scored the Steve Carell weepie Dan In Real Life. His latest album, Sondre Lerche, is a natural, folk-y showcase of his considerable skills, and arrives just in time for summer days by a Nordic lake. We caught up with Lerche to discuss the ins and outs of his special craft.

Where are you right now? I’m at home in Williamsburg.

I saw you tweeted about being happy to be able to play a show in walking distance from your home. How was the show you played in Brooklyn recently? We did a really special night at Union Pool. They were kind enough to let us shoot a video there. They have a really nice bar and concert room so they let us use that for our video. It’s really tiny, but I thought it would be fun to do a sort fan type show where we have all the most enthusiastic people come out. So we played the record over the speakers so it was sort of a pre-listening party and then we screen the video we shot there and then we did a little show.

Did fans love the new music? Yeah, It’s surprising, songs that have only been out a couple of weeks, there’s people lip singing the words already. It was pretty cool. I’ve done a lot of different things on my albums, so I feel lucky to have an audience that’s been really open to following that. I think the great thing about having an ongoing conversation with the audience is that you lose some people along the way, and new people come too, and then you reconnect with people down the line with a new record. I really like the random arch of that whole dialogue, it’s something that I find really fascinating, and I like challenging the audience with new directions or tendencies or whatever’s on my mind

You’ve been playing music for a while now, is touring still something that invigorates you as a performer? Yeah, absolutely. I love playing concerts and touring, it’s very important to me. It’s sort of a forum for me to just get a lot of stuff off my chest.

Something I love about your music is how you mix genres a lot--your voice may sound one way but the music sounds another. Is that something that’s important to you when creating music? It’s not something I think a lot about, but through the years I definitely see a pattern of going in lots of different directions, and often I’ll do one thing and follow it with the opposite, I did a record called Phantom Punch and on that one, I thought it was really beautiful to have these really beautifully harmonically complex songs, but performed as if they were three chord punk songs. I think also with the new record, a lot of these songs, I wanted to just follow the narrative of the song or the way the song moves, and not over-think things I wanted to really get away from the stylistic self-awareness in a way that I’ve played around with a lot on previous albums. With this one it was almost like it was just folk songs that were passed around.

I read that you recorded at least 40 songs and then weeded out which ones belonged together on the album? I always write more songs than I would need for any record, really, but I had a lot for this one. It feels important to me to be able to choose, when you get to the part of the process where you’re really starting to get the feeling that this is an album. and be able to pick the songs that feel that they should have a life together. And I know in our time that the album format is sort of for sentimentalists or people who are really crazy music fans like myself.

It’s sort of a dying art. It is. but it’s still matters to me to at least have put out an intended running order. I don’t mind people picking it apart and making their own order, whatever people want to do I’m totally cool with it, but at least there is a document of how these ten songs would relate to each other.

Why did you choose to self-title the album? I usually have a title from one of the songs that I know from the get-go is pretty strong, and it sort of names itself in a way. But I didn’t really have that this time, so I was looking much more and I was pursuing the title, and I became obsessed with it in the way that I become obsessed with a lot of things I get really focused on. So I became obsessed to the point where I would have dreams at night. And then I woke up from a dream where I had the feeling that I had found the title. In dreams you have the feeling of having done something or experienced something, but you can’t really put your finger on it, so I had the feeling of, “I got it, it’s the best title ever,” but I couldn’t name it, I didn’t remember what the title was. And after a while I just gave up trying to find it in my head. I guess it’s there somewhere, but maybe I didn’t have a title, maybe I just had the feeling of having found it.

I saw the video for "Domino," which I thought was really beautiful and it seemed to fit perfectly with the song. As someone who’s not a music video artist, how much input do you have on these sort of things? It’s usually a collaboration with friends. I like to work with friends or people who know me, or people who think they might have an idea. Sometimes I like to just have fun and do silly videos. We had all this footage that my friend had taken along the way from some gigs and around the studio and in the neighborhood, so it seemed to just really relate to the making of this album, so in a way it’s sort of a non-video. It’s just footage from the road and I thought it would be a nice almost documentarian video for that song. And the one we shot at Union Pool is for the song “Private Caller,” which will come out in a little while. It’s going to be really cool as well, it’s more of a performance video and actually has some very sexy ladies in it. I don’t think I’ve had a sexy video before. It’s sort of darkly Lynchian.