Predicting, a few years back, that Owen Pallett would become the poster-child for the new indie hip would’ve taken quite a few rolls of the 12-sided dice and a couple strong hoots of the ol’ mystical weed.

The soft-spoken Pallett was raised in a deeply religious family in Milton, Ontario, his mother and church-organist father both entomologists, the former studying wasps and the latter developing modular bumblebee hives for greenhouse pollination. Only slowly did Pallett come to grips with the reality of living with 10 different siblings and half-siblings (his parents split up when he was 6 months old) and of being a young gay boy raised solely on classical music. (His dad owns over 300 Bach recordings.) Pallett didn’t hear Top 40 or hip-hop until he was 10.

"My clique in high school was a bunch of born-again Christians. I went to youth group and played football with them but wasn’t so interested in the religious part," recalls the 25-year-old known as Final Fantasy. "None of them were into pre-marital sex, so I kept my girlfriend and boyfriends a guilty secret from almost all of them.

"When I was 17, my best friend’s mother lent me a Bertrand Russell book and I freaked out. I had no idea that atheism was even something that existed."

His becoming the darling of the indie rock world must’ve seemed as improbable as the stuff unicorns are made of.

Already classically trained on piano, Pallett expanded his modernist approach and taught himself the violin throughout his university years while studying contemporary opera, soon becoming the de facto string arranger for Toronto’s indie rock scene–which lead to collaborations with the Jim Guthrie Band and the gayer-than-gay Hidden Cameras. He then picked up guitar to form manic folk outfit Les Mouches, recording the substantially acclaimed You’re Worth More To Me Than 1,000 Christians.

But it was after hooking up with a yet-to-be-hyped Arcade Fire and touring with them as a strange violin-based solo act that Pallett would finally find a true cult following, recording his solo debut, Final Fantasy Has A Home, in just one week in 2004.

Final Fantasy–a project that had started as a joke/tribute for boyfriend and fellow violinist Patrick Wolf when the couple were on the verge of breaking up–was an act making a romantic and somewhat abstracted reference to the Japanese role-playing videogame series, and would ultimately become is blazing arrow.

Yet, for all his nerdy propensities and his easily identifiable namesake, Pallett himself is admittedly rather Fantasy-shy.

"I like Final Fantasy 6. The other ones had lengthy, boring dialogue or awful voice acting," he admits. "It’s amazing to me that Shadow Of The Colossus could tell a far deeper story with only 50 lines of dialogue than Final Fantasy 7 could with 10,000."

SKY-BOUND EARTH SOUNDS

Considering his unique upbringing and his obsession with solitude (he has recently been heard covering Mariah Carey’s "Fantasy" live–"it’s such a banging track, people don’t realize it’s the loneliest song ever written"), ethereal simplicity becomes the key to Owen Pallett’s music.

With its plucked classical strings dancing atop staccato strumming, layered and looped through a sampling device and sometimes enhanced through the addition of keys and subtle percussion ("to clean people’s ears a little"), nothing else in the indie rock universe sounds quite like it.

Pallett’s delicate lyrics blend idiosyncratic Canadiana and his own past; whether he is heard unearthing the bones of history ("The CN Tower Belongs To The Dead" on his sophomore effort He Poos Clouds), or dedicating his music to Arcade Fire’s front couple ("This Is The Dream of Win and Regine" from Has A Good Home). At the same time, his whimsical cues are directly taken from Dungeons & Dragons, epic videogames, and familiar fantasy literature (with titles like "Many Lives -> 49mp" or "The Chronicles of Sarnia").

Along the way, Pallett fires his crossbow on all fronts, subtly hitting various targets including nature, religion, sex, and romantic relationships.

But the journey that led to the Polaris Music Prize-nominated He Poos Clouds was one as rambunctious and bittersweet as the adventures taken on by imaginary-sword-toting nerd warriors confronting their dragon-conjuring dungeon masters.

Looking to up the ante after Has A Good Home ultimately led Pallett to seek refuge in Spain to compose He Poos Clouds in 2005, and prompted him to imagine the set of three rules that were to be his new masterwork’s more positive modus operandi (see "tree").

"In Barcelona I just practiced the violin in the morning and then wrote into the evening. It was kind of romantic. I was working so hard that I stopped eating well and lost a lot of weight," remembers Pallett, who at one point had to raid friends Broken Social Scene’s food on one of their Spanish tour stops, in order to replenish his health points. "People don’t really realize how romantic eating disorders can be..."

He’s only kidding about that last part.

Back in recording mode, the decision was made to add more instruments to the mix (horns, for example), leading Pallett to "neurotic overanalysis" of the work-in-progress and many heartaches and delays due to production collaborator Leon Taheny’s busy schedule.

Consequently, the current Polaris nomination is a testament to Final Fantasy’s resilient inventiveness. However, in his usual fashion, Pallett takes it all with a grain of salt.

"I think, in tribute to Canada’s self-mutilating nature, we should award prizes for the worst album. Or better–the most overrated album. Yes! That would be such a Canadian thing to do."

BUT, ONCE A NERD...

"The [forthcoming] record is kind of inspired by [author] Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. However, Pullman was trying to dethrone C.S. Lewis and reinstall a new, anti-theistic form of children’s fantasy. I’m just trying to make a successful fantasy record, ’cause there aren’t that many," ventures Pallett, already looking forward to a record to be released in late 2007, while also planning to write some pop singles and, hopefully, collaborating with Toronto-based dance duo MSTRKRFT in the meantime. "The album [will be] an epic fantasy romance novel about a young religious zealot who sets out to kill the god of his world, whose name is Owen Pallett."

Pallett is indeed a strange boy/man in a league of his own; and for better or worse, Final Fantasy’s music has been as despised as has been revered by critics–here and abroad.

"Nobody really hated Has A Good Home. It wasn’t until He Poos Clouds came out that I started getting the snide comments–which is to be expected, I mean, it’s pretty annoying music."

Fair enough, but it’s hard not to imagine the huge grin on Owen Pallett’s face as he cues the strings.