Duncan Sheik, the pop songwriter known for his hit song “Barely Breathing” before finding success on Broadway, has died. The news was confirmed by his mother, Suzanne Sheik, via The New York Times, which reports that he died from cardiac arrest. He was reported to be in critical but stable condition in the hospital earlier this week. Sheik was 56.
Initially rising to fame in the late 1990s with his Grammy-nominated hit song “Barely Breathing,” Sheik brushed against the MTV heartthrob label that success brought him. In the 2000s, he found even bigger success on Broadway, composing the score for Spring Awakening. The show was a major hit in New York, winning awards and breaking many of its original cast members into stardom. Sheik followed the show with musical versions of The Taming Of The Shrew, Alice By Heart, and American Psycho, which became a cult classic.
Born in New Jersey in 1969 and raised between Montclair and South Carolina, Sheik was exposed to music at a young age by his Juilliard-trained grandmother. He played piano by six and guitar by 12. As a teen, he recalled listening to everything from The Beatles to Van Halen to the Cocteau Twins to Yes. When he finished high school, he attended Brown University, where he studied semiotics and performed in a band with fellow student Lisa Loeb. At 19, he became a practicing Buddhist. Within a year of graduating, he had moved to Los Angeles and signed a record deal. His first label, Immortal Records, was a poor fit—one of their biggest acts at the time was Korn—but he later signed to Atlantic, where “Barely Breathing” was born.
The single, which came from his self-titled debut album, was a major hit, and Sheik quickly determined that he didn’t enjoy the pop star life. “It’s not really in my personality to say, “Hey, I’m up on stage; it’s great,'” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1997. “I’m very uncomfortable in that situation—so much so that it sometimes gets in the way of my performance.” Even at that point, Sheik openly spoke about how he’d rather be in the studio—a personality aspect that lent itself well to composing. Though Sheik released more albums in 1998, 2001, and 2002 (and continued to do so through 2022), none of them caught on the way that his debut had.
By 2002, however, he had already turned his attention to composing for the stage. That year, he composed the score for a production of Twelfth Night staged as the year’s Shakespeare In The Park programming. “It’s nice to make music and have it be performed in a situation where I’m not the front man,” he told The New York Times at the time. “I don’t mind being entertained, but I don’t particularly like entertaining people.” These dueling impulses informed much of his theatrical work going forward. In the late 90s, Sheik met writer Steven Sater at a Nichiren Buddhist center in New York, with whom he would foster a creative relationship. When their show Spring Awakening opened on Broadway in late 2006 after seven years of workshops, Sheik bemoaned the “pandering aspect” of many musicals. “There were many times during the process—we did extensive workshops—when I shook my head and thought: ‘What am I doing here? This is terrible,'” he told the Times in 2006. “But in the end, for all the torture, it is the thing of which I’m most proud.”
Spring Awakening, based on a 1891 German play by Frank Wedekind about teenagers struggling to understand sexuality in a repressive society, became one of the most influential musicals of the 2000s. The production won Best Musical at the 2007 Tony Awards, and Sheik won Tonys for Best Score and Best Orchestrations. The original production of Spring Awakening also featured several young cast members who would go on to long careers on both stage and screen, including Jonathan Groff, Lea Michele, John Gallagher, Jr., Skylar Astin, and Gideon Glick. Sheik ultimately won a Grammy Award for the show’s soundtrack.
After the success of the show, Sheik stuck around in the theater. He and Sater collaborated again on the 2012 show Alice By Heart, an Alice In Wonderland adaptation that played in London. Sheik wrote both music and lyrics for American Psycho, a musical adapted from Bret Easton Ellis’ novel of the same name. For the score, Sheik was inspired by 1980s acts like Depeche Mode and Kraftwerk. Reviews for the show were mixed, and it ran just 54 regular performances on Broadway in 2016. However, the show earned a cult fanbase, having since been referenced in Riverdale, with a revival playing in London earlier this year.
Sheik released his last solo album, Claptrap, in 2022. Just this week, a new New York production of Spring Awakening, set to open in November, announced a cast of unknown actors after an open audition. In a statement posted on Instagram today, the show’s page wrote that Sheik “captured the ache, hope, confusion, rebellion, and beauty of growing up.”
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