Duncan Sheik is enjoying a fruitful second act in his career. After initially hitting on the charts as a pensive pop crooner in 1996, he eventually made the transition to respected Broadway composer. Now he’s back with a critically acclaimed new pop album. It’s his first collection of new studio material in nearly a decade.
Sheik has spent almost 15 years working on various theater projects, including writing the score for the Tony Award-winning musical “Spring Awakening.” But he points out that he’s never been off the road as a pop performer.
“I’ve actually always kept touring when most of what people saw of me was theater stuff,” he says during a phone call from his home in New York City. “After (the musical) ‘Whisper House,’ I thought that I really should go back to my day job for a minute, write some songs that have nothing to do with theater and just get back to my roots.”
The result is “Legerdemain,” a beautifully layered pop release built on old-school synthesizers and drum machines. As Sheik was writing, he began accruing two sets of songs of differing moods.
“I started to think of the album as a battery,” he says. “One side has a positive charge and the other side has a negative charge. You need both things to make it work.”
He went with the title “Legerdemain” for the project. Sheik says he was thinking of two definitions of the word during creation of the album. “The first half of the record involves a lot of trickery and deceit in a way,” he laughs. “The literal meaning of ‘sleight of hand’ is what the second half of the record is to me. It is played in a much more internal and soft way.”
Although the music is contemporary, at times the vibe harks back to 1980s new wave. Were there any specific artists of that era that he was thinking about during the recording?
“Definitely,” he says. “When I was a teenager in the 1980s and I first started making music, I was really into Depeche Mode, New Order, Talk Talk, Japan and all these arty U.K. new wave synth-pop bands. That was all the stuff I was listening to. By the time 1996 rolled around and I was making my first records, I was going through a more organic Nick Drake, Jeff Buckley and Elliott Smith phase in my life. But I still had this underlying desire to make music with synthesizers and drum machines. In a way, I didn’t have the confidence to do it. Twenty years later, I finally plucked up the courage to bust out the synthesizers and drum machines and put those at the forefront of the sonic picture.”
Sheik is currently on tour and appears at SPACE in Evanston on Friday. He’ll split the bill with Suzanne Vega. The singer-songwriters will share band members in their individual sets.
“It’s great,” he says about his long personal and professional friendship with Vega. “It’s a nice double bill. Sometimes two heads are better than one. My audience really appreciates her and vice versa. We share a lot of the same musicians, so it’s a fun kind of mix and match of players during both our sets.”
The two have more than musicians in common. When it comes to life philosophy, Sheik and Vega are both Buddhists of long standing.
“Buddhism for me is where I get a lot of my creative energy,” he says. “When I have to deal with the slings and arrows of the music business — that part of the pop music business that is very unforgiving and mean-spirited — I definitely appreciate having my practice to have some distance from that nonsense. Which is not to say that I’m immune from criticism, because I definitely take it all to heart. But at least I have some way of sublimating it.”
His song “Barely Breathing” became a pop hit in 1996, but Sheik never again duplicated that major chart success. He’s learned to find the bright spot in that situation.
“My manager freaked out when I sent him the set list for this tour because it’s pretty much the new record,” Sheik explains. “He said, ‘Your fans are going to be so bummed because you’re not playing stuff from the catalog.’ I said, ‘I’ve had one radio hit in my entire life.’ The only good thing about that is that when I go onstage, there’s really only one song I have to play. If I were Neil Young, there would be 17 songs I have to play. I can play that one song, then play my new material. My fan base seems to be really psyched about that.”
Sheik has made a substantial name for himself on Broadway as a composer. Like Cyndi Lauper with “Kinky Boots” and Green Day with “American Idiot,” he brings a contemporary music sensibility to his theater work. He says there was a learning curve.
“I didn’t really know what I was doing in the beginning,” he says. “When it worked, it was pure luck. Now that I’ve been writing for the theater for almost 15 years, I do feel like I have a deeper understanding of the form, how to write for characters and how to write specific moments in the larger narrative arc. That’s been really useful even in terms of writing pop songs. It gives you a much bigger palette to work from.”
His major breakthrough came when he wrote the music for “Spring Awakening,” the rock musical that debuted on Broadway in 2006. When that original production garnered multiple Tony Awards, it gave Sheik some much-needed validation.
“It had been a decade since I’d had a quote-unquote ‘big hit,’ ” he recalls. “So to have it happen in this other medium was huge for me.”
He’s working on a Broadway adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ controversial 1991 novel “American Psycho” about a serial killer Wall Street yuppie. The book was also a 2000 film starring Christian Bale.
Sheik said he was flattered but skeptical about the project when approached by a producer in 2010. “I had read the book in college and I had really not liked it,” he remembers. “I found it to be this awful, repetitive list of food and clothing items and these incredibly violent sequences that were just hard to even read.”
Given that 20 years had passed since his original assessment, he decided to give the book another shot. During a flight to Japan, he reread Ellis’ novel and was knocked out by its power.
“As I read it I said, ‘Oh my God, this book is amazing.’ It’s so prescient, trenchant and funny. I read it for what it is, which is this really dark satire.”
The musical had its initial run in London last year. It is set to open on Broadway in March. “I’m looking forward to rolling up my sleeves and getting it going,” he says.
Chrissie Dickinson is a freelance writer.
Twitter @chitribent
When: 7 p.m. Friday
Where: SPACE, 1245 Chicago Ave., Evanston
Tickets: Sold Out; (847) 556-9756 or www.evanstonspace.com
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