"Every night when I lay you down, lay you down to sleep / You know, I'm thanking the lord for blessing you with hockey teeth" singer-songwriter Afie Jurvanen, a.k.a. Bahamas, sings in his appropriately- titled song, Hockey Teeth. But despite the clear reference to our country's national pastime, Jurvanen denies he wrote it with any sense of national spirit.

"(It's) a love song and I wrote it for a woman," he said over the phone while doing some grocery shopping downtown Toronto. "I never really thought of it in any specific Canadian way, I just thought those two words were really strange and it was a little bit of an inside joke and it just turned into this thing."

Kitschy love songs have become a staple of Jurvanen's writing, however, and he'll be sure to play several when he visits the London Music Club on November 27. It's his first headlining tour in support of Pink Strat, Bahamas' 2009 collection of upbeat acoustic-based pop folk with a slight island flair, long-listed for the Polaris Prize and nominated for a JUNO in the Roots Album of the Year category.

It's been a slow but steady rise to success for Jurvanen, who up until recently was best known as the touring guitarist for Jason Collett and Feist. And though crowds now are a little smaller than the arenas and halls his benefactors had him playing in, the transition has been extremely welcome on a personal level.

"(For years) I've been writing my own songs … and that sort of just took a back seat for a long time. And when Feist came off the road, it was very much a conscious decision on my part to just say no to playing in other people's bands and put out my own record and just get in my own car and play my own songs."

But shifting from support to frontman can be a difficult transition, too, Jurvanen admitted.

"It's such a different thing when you're playing in someone else's band. You just want to play well and that's your main concern, (to) just share the stage with your friends and have fun. (Bahamas) is such a different musical muscle to flex."

And though Jurvanen made exceptions to perform at the Olympics with Feist and toured with Jason Collett as part of a collaborative "Bonfire Ball" earlier this year, he has been steadfast in his decision to not get sidetracked from a solo career. Jurvanen went as far as isolating himself in a northern cabin for the making of Pink Strat.

"When you take away your distractions, when your cell phone doesn't work very well because you're in the middle of nowhere and you don't have to stress about what you're going to have for dinner because you know you're probably going to have some hamburgers, that stuff is essential to me. I'm not very good at multitasking so the more things that I can get out of life so I can focus on what I'm doing, the better."

According to critics and fans, Jurvanen's isolation was well worth the end product, and Pink Strat has been admired for its simplicity, skill and charm. Catch songs from it, as well as many others at the London Music Club on November 27.

Tickets are available for $11.50 at ticketscene.ca, $10 (if there are any left) at the door.