Duncan Sheik’s death last week at age 56 had a lot of Gen Xers recalling the halcyon days of 1996, when the economy was good, we weren’t mired in wars in the Middle East and the nascent internet was still uncorrupted. People were tiring of grunge when “Barely Breathing,” the first single from Sheik’s self-titled debut LP, put him on the pop culture map.
Though it topped out at No. 16, “Barely Breathing” stayed on the Hot 100 for over a year and gave him wide exposure. The possessor of a semiotics degree from Brown University, where he played in a band with Lisa Loeb, Sheik was uncomfortable with his sudden fame. Most of his music was less pop-oriented than his hit, and despite consistently glowing reviews and comparisons to Jeff Buckley and Elliott Smith, Sheik never sold many albums.
Seeing the writing on the wall, Sheik turned his attention to theater. He met playwright Steven Sater through their interest in Nichiren Buddhism and scored a musical with him; Sater then wrote all the lyrics for Sheik’s 2001 album “Phantom Moon.” It reminded reviewers of Nick Drake, another frequent touchstone for music critics.
In 2005 Sheik released his fifth album, “White Limousine.” The title track got some airplay on AAA radio stations. Here he performs it at Philadelphia’s World Cafe in 2008.
I suppose that technically Sheik is a one-hit wonder, but he did top Billboard’s dance chart in 2002 with “On a High.”
Not many one-hit wonders won a Grammy and two Tony Awards. An entire generation too young for “Barely Breathing” knows him from the hit musical he scored with Sater, “Spring Awakening,” their adaptation of a turn-of-the-(20th)-century German play about adolescent angst. It was a surprise Broadway hit in 2006. It helped launch the careers of Lea Michele and Delaware native John Gallagher Jr., who was featured on one of the show’s most rock-oriented numbers, “The Bitch of Living.”
Sheik scored several more plays, but none repeated the success of “Spring Awakening.” He also released albums every few years, the last in 2022. One of the more interesting exercises was an album of ’80s covers done in a stripped-down acoustic style. This is what he did with the Love and Rockets hit “So Alive.”
One of the most boring performers I ever saw live.
I remember he and his band were doing some Buddhist-type meditation in the Green Room. The concert was basically the onstage equivalent of that.
No one knows who this guy is. Instead of wars in the middle east in 1996, Islamic terrorists detonated suicide bombs in Sri Lanka and Israel and also took control of Afghanistan. Your right, nothing to see here.
Seriously, WTF? FYI, Duncan Sheik wasn’t a real sheik.