Barely Breathing singer Duncan Sheik, who traded pop stardom for Broadway, dies at 56

NEW YORK – Duncan Sheik, the introspective American singer-songwriter whose alt-pop hit Barely Breathing (1996) became a Gen X touchstone, but who eventually decamped to Broadway, winning two Tonys in 2007 for composing the smash musical Spring Awakening, died on Sept 17 in Manhattan. He was 56.

His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his mother Suzanne Sheik, who said the cause was organ failure.

Soft-spoken and cerebral – complete with a degree in semiotics from Brown University – Sheik seemed like a long shot for fame when he arrived in Los Angeles in 1992 with a demo tape and a deep unease with the spotlight.

Though he had played guitar in college in a band with future hitmaker Lisa Loeb, he “could barely sing in public to save my life at that point”, he recalled in a 2011 interview with the site Pop Dose. Yet, in just a few years, he was a rising star. In 1996, Rolling Stone called his first album, Duncan Sheik, a “defiant debut – beautiful and benevolent of spirit” and praised his “raw and articulate singing”.

The single Barely Breathing, an unvarnished sketch of a dying relationship that was propelled by candy-sweet hooks, saturated the radio airwaves. It earned a Grammy nomination and rose to No. 16 on the Billboard Hot 100, remaining on the chart for 55 weeks – at the time, the fourth-longest run ever.

In a decade of Nirvana and Soundgarden, Sheik intended his artfully crafted record “as a reaction against the existing alternative music”, he said in a 1997 interview with The Palm Beach Post, complaining that alt rock had become “this kind of monolithic distorted guitar chord”.

With a grounding in classical composition, and influences as diverse as Joni Mitchell, the Cocteau Twins and Estonian composer Arvo Part, Sheik mixed heart-rending melodies with lyrics that mined Buddhist philosophy and brimmed with existential angst.

In a review of his second album, Humming (1998), in The New York Times, Stephen Holden wrote that Sheik’s “beautifully orchestrated meditations suggest that pop can still aspire to a lofty, searching classicism”.

Fans embraced him as a tortured troubadour, like Jeff Buckley or Elliott Smith. Critics often noted his musical similarities to Nick Drake, the haunting and haunted British singer-songwriter of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

But Sheik was also cast in the news media as a sensitive, soulful sex symbol. The Palm Beach Post noted his “name straight out of a romance novel and the face of a GQ model”. “Don’t hate Duncan Sheik because he’s beautiful,” critic Ann Powers wrote in a review of a 1998 concert in The New York Times. “He is trying very hard to distance himself from that fact.”

Duncan Scott Sheik was born on Nov 18, 1969, in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, to Jack and Suzanne (Tracy) Sheik. By the time he was six, he was learning piano from his grandmother, who had studied at Juilliard.

After his parents divorced, his mother moved to Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, where Duncan got his first electric guitar and played in a band that performed Def Leppard and Van Halen covers.

He graduated from Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, in 1988, then enrolled at Brown, where he holed up in the campus recording studio working on his own material when he wasn’t playing with Loeb, a fellow student who in 1994 would hit No. 1 with Stay (I Missed You).

It took a few years of living in Los Angeles after college for his career to take off, but once it did, he found fame to be at times overwhelming.

“I was put in situations that I didn’t have the experience to handle,” he recalled in a 2003 interview with University Wire, adding that he had performed on David Letterman and Jay Leno’s late-night shows when he had “just made one album and I had played maybe 30 or 40 shows in my life. And I’m sure I sucked”.

An adherent of Nichiren Buddhism, rooted in 13th-century Japan, since he was 19, he found that daily chanting helped him to be “just a bit more positive about life in general”, he told The Palm Beach Post.

Despite critical plaudits, Humming sold modestly. Sheik’s sombre third album, Phantom Moon (2001) was, according to Holden’s Times review, “the most entrancing collection of pop dream songs since Nick Drake’s 1969 album, Five Leaves Left”.

That, Holden added, was “not to suggest that this hauntingly melancholy suite is poised to hurtle up the charts any time soon”.

By that point, Sheik said in a 2015 interview with HuffPost, “the ‘authenticity’ of the alt-rock era of the early and mid-90s was over and the music business took a hard right turn back towards artifice and the more overtly pop sound of Britney, Christina, ’N Sync and Backstreet Boys”.

He scored an unlikely dance hit in 2002 with the percolating On A High, from the album Daylight, but he was growing ever more weary of the industry hustle.

“I thought, I’m not going to win in this game of trying to be Justin Timberlake,” he recalled in a 2022 interview with The Houston Chronicle. “Maybe I should try and do something different.”

Sheik met poet, playwright and fellow Buddhist Steven Sater through the Buddhist association Soka Gakkai, and in 1999, Sater broached the idea of working together on a musical based on Spring Awakening, Frank Wedekind’s 1891 play exploring the tormented inner lives and flowering sexuality of a group of teenagers.

After initial doubts, Sheik ended up feeling a kinship with the material. “Being a recording artist who tours and performs and who has never had a normal job or anything, I have never really evolved past my 17-year-old self,” he said in a 2014 interview with Broadway World.

The rock-meets-folk-meets-emo musical – striking for its raw treatment of topics such as abortion, abuse and suicide – ran off-Broadway at the Atlantic Theater Company starting in spring 2006, before opening on Broadway that December.

“It was really about ‘Can we make a musical score that sounds as cool as the music that any alternative rock kid is listening to on their iPod?,’” Sheik recalled in a 2020 interview.

Before the show premiered, he coached the cast – which included future stars like Lea Michele, Jonathan Groff and John Gallagher Jr – to steer clear of traditional Broadway bombast.

“Imagine that you’re Thom Yorke,” he said he told them. “Imagine that you’re a young David Bowie. Imagine that you are Fiona Apple. And please forget about all the vocal training you’ve ever had.”

The Times critic Charles Isherwood praised Sheik’s “ravishing rock score”, calling the show a “brave new musical, haunting and electrifying by turns”.

Spring Awakening won eight Tony Awards, including best musical, with Sheik taking home two, for the score – an honour he shared with Sater, who wrote the book and lyrics – and for his orchestrations. The show ran for over two years on Broadway, where it was revived in 2015. A new production opens off-Broadway in November.

Sheik wrote the scores for several other musicals, including Alice By Heart, a version of Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland set in London during World War II, and American Psycho, an adaptation of the blood-soaked Bret Easton Ellis novel, which flopped on Broadway in 2016.

He is survived by his parents; his Singaporean wife Nora Ariffin, a former model; their seven-year-old daughter, Ines Sheik; and his half siblings, Peter and Kacie.

Along the way, Sheik continued to release non-theatre albums, including a 2011 collection of covers of songs by British acts of the 1980s like Depeche Mode and Tears For Fears. His final album, Claptrap (2022), wove his trademark delicate melodies into an ambient electronic soundscape. NYTIMES