For Ásgeir Trausti Einarsson, songwriting is often a family affair. The Icelandic musician, who goes by the mononym Ásgeir, is the son of a poet—Einar Georg Einarsson, who has also worked with composer Ólafur Arnalds—and often calls upon his father’s talents.

It’s a collaboration that has worked out nicely: Ásgeir’s first LP, 2012’s Dýrð í dauðaþögn, for which Einar wrote most of the lyrics, not only reached the top spot on the Icelandic album chart, it became the best-selling debut album by a domestic artist in the country’s history.

“I usually find that my father’s lyrics kind of lift the song up to another level, for me,” Ásgeir says, calling the Straight from a tour stop in Oslo. “I have this melody before the lyrics come in, and the song means something in that way; it’s expressing feelings and stuff just through melodies and music, but when the lyrics come it sort of gives it another dimension. And usually I think it’s something that everyone can relate to in some way.”

When the time came to craft songs for his third LP, Sátt (the English version is called Bury the Moon), Ásgeir called on his friend and frequent collaborator Júlíus Aðalsteinn Róbertsson for lyrical help. For the really personal stuff, though, he went to his dad again. Among the results are “Eventide”, written in memory of a family member who passed away, and “Youth”, a delicately wrought reminiscence of growing up in the tiny village of Laugarbakki.

The latter neatly encapsulates everything that’s great about the album. It starts out with gently rolling acoustic guitar before building to a lush swirl of brass and shuffling drums, all topped by Ásgeir’s lilting vocal melodies.

To create the English-language version of the record, Ásgeir worked with American transplant John Grant (formerly of the Czars), a noted polyglot who now calls Reykjavík home. “I started with my own rough translations of the lyrics before going to him, because it was very important to me for the lyrics to flow naturally, so they would be very nice to listen to and to sing, and not feel like translations.”

As for which renditions of the songs you’ll hear if you go see Ásgeir and his band play live? Well, that’s entirely dependent on geography.

“In Scandinavia, I sing most of the songs in Icelandic,” he says. “We’ve played in Sweden and in Denmark, and now we’re in Norway. After that we go to Germany, then I will sing maybe three or four songs in Icelandic, but the rest in English. So it depends on where I am.”

Ásgeir plays the Imperial on Wednesday (March 4).