Duncan Sheik, the young, sensitive man who once crooned the top 10 hit “Barely Breathing” in the 1990s has grown up. Well, kind of.
He has left the pop star life behind and is now composing music for theater. His work on the rock musical “Spring Awakening” – opening Tuesday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center – won him two Tony awards, for best orchestration and best original score. The show carried away a total eight Tonys in 2007, including the prize for best musical. The soundtrack also won a 2008 Grammy Award for best musical show album.
“Spring Awakening” explores the angsty teen world of boarding school students in 1890s Germany. Initially, it’s a weird setting for rock songs such as “The Bitch of Living,” but the off-Broadway musical wound up winning over Broadway and the critics.
We caught up with Sheik, 39, who discussed his journey from pop darling to outcast to musical theater champion.
Orange County Register: It’s been almost three years since “Spring Awakening” first hit Broadway. What’s this whole experience been like?
Duncan Sheik: It’s been a long three years. I say that mostly in a nice way. It’s kind of interesting right now, because “Spring Awakening” is kind of winding down for me in my life. I’m involved in other projects when I’m doing these interviews for the tour, for international productions.
I think this is maybe the fourth iteration of the cast. Some people have been doing it a long time. The touring cast is every bit as strong as the Broadway cast. I’m happy about that, because you hear horror stories.
OCR: Steven Sater is your writing partner. He writes the lyrics and you compose the music. How do you write music to lyrics that have already been written?
DS: Steven and I first started working together in 1999. He had a lyric or two in a play of his. He asked me to set that to music, and I had never done anything like that. I said, “Well, let me read the play, see how I feel about it.” I found that it was something that came really naturally to me. That was surprising, because I had never done it before.
I did that for a couple songs. Then he began faxing me lyric after lyric after lyric. Eventually, we had a stack of 25 songs. The best of those songs became my third record, “Phantom Moon.”
OCR: How did you guys come up with the ideas behind “Spring Awakening”?
DS: Steven gave me a copy of the Frank Wedekind book, the original “Spring Awakening.” He said, “Let’s adapt this to musical theater.” My initial response to his idea was, “That’s not really what I do, Steven.” It’s not a genre that, to be honest, I’m particularly fond of.
In the subsequent 10 years or so, I’ve become a real aficionado of musical theater. There are things in Broadway music that are fake and not my cup of tea. We had many conversations about how we might try and do this.
Stylistically, I wrote the same songs that I might try and write for my own record. Steven was fine with that idea. This idea of putting kind of alternative rock music to a story about teen angst – it was accidentally a perfect fit.
Alt-rock in its various forms has been the soundtrack to teen angst. When it all of a sudden clicks, we found it to be a very lucky guess.
OCR: This musical started off-Broadway and wound up winning all these awards. Were you surprised by its success?
DS: It was hugely surprising. We had spent a good five years, six years working on the show. Everyone told us – even other members of the creative team – that this show will never go on Broadway. It’s not a Broadway show. We always hoped, but we were kind of told pretty explicitly that it will never happen.
We got incredible critical response. It’s interesting – during the first three weeks of previews in New York, we were losing a quarter of a million dollars in a week. Then the reviews came out on opening night. Never in my wildest dreams would I imagine the positive response. In theater, critical response really matters. It’s not like normal music. You can get good reviews and still, nobody buys your record.
OCR: You’ve had to reinvent your career a couple of times. You went from clean-cut pop singer-songwriter to bearded troubadour to theater and found success there.
DS: After my fourth album “Daylight” came out, I was no longer on a major label. “White Limousine” was on an indie label. Between 2003 and 2006, it was a very, very difficult time. It was a real struggle for me. I had a lot of irons in the fire, in terms of both “Spring Awakening” and other shows. When “Spring Awakening” became the success that it became, it kind of gave me some confidence again, that what I was doing was meaningful, that I was part of the cultural argument.
Early in my career, I had a wonderful core fan base. I felt like it was getting smaller and smaller. It was very difficult to make the records that I wanted and make a living. “Spring Awakening” was a huge shot in the arm. It gave me a renewed sense of hope and renewed burst of creative energy.
OCR: Were you disappointed with the sales of “White Limousine” (2006)?
DS: I’ve been disappointed with the sales of every single one of my records. My first record sold three-quarters of a million copies. Everything after that seems not so great.
OCR: You’ve told us before you weren’t comfortable with the pop music world and the image that industry was trying to shape for you. What’s your opinion on the business now?
DS: The music industry is broken. Everything is so loose. It used to be, you’re on a label and your songs get released on that particular label. Now it’s a free for all. Anyway you can get your music out there is good.
I don’t have the answer on how to monetize music. I do feel that I’m really lucky that I have these other mediums to work for. There’s a real audience that will spend $50, $60 or $100 to see a show. I think it never was an issue with the music itself. It’s how things are marketed. I wasn’t always comfortable with that stuff.
OCR: What kind of music do you listen to now?
DS: I still listen to the same music that I listened to in college – Talk Talk, the Cure, the Smiths, Depeche Mode, all this ’80s English pop. I really do try and keep that spirit alive in myself. I’m hopefully still thinking I can connect to the youthful energy in some way. Sometimes I feel like I’ve never really grown up and become an adult.
OCR: In the interest of full disclosure, we went to college together at Brown. Is there anything you carry with you from college?
DS: It’s funny. Things that I read in my various classes that I took, having to do with culture and media, I think they’ve had kind of a slow burn. They influence my thinking about what it means to create art, art that’s commercial and how that functions. It was really a formative time.
OCR: Have you gone back to Brown or Providence to visit or perform?
DS: I’ve been to Providence to play some shows. I haven’t played at Brown. I went on campus, went to the bookstore. I enjoyed the fact that it was like, the same sets of people, but different human beings in the same costumes.
OCR: What are you working on now?
DS: I have another musical, “Whisper House,” opening in mid-January at the Old Globe Theater in San Diego. It’s a ghost story set in World War II. The songs are sung by these whimsically malevolent ghosts. The actors in the show never sing; the ghosts sing.
I’m working on another kind of big musical with Steven Sater. It’s an adaptation of (Hans Christian Andersen’s) “The Nightingale.”
And finally we’re doing something about the Roman emperor Nero. It’s potentially done and ready to be staged, once we find the right director and theater. But I’ve learned that the speed of theater is very similar to plate tectonics. It takes a long time.
