The key song in Duncan Sheik’s oeuvre, and the first on his two-disc pop career retrospective, Brighter/Later, is “That Says It All,” a tribute to his (male) musical heroes that tracks his praise for them while also admitting how he feels he might pale in comparison to them, lyrically. Jagger, Dylan, and Lennon get kudos in the first verse, then the second verse turns darker through the invocation of Jimi Hendrix, Brian Wilson, and Nick Drake, all of whom struggled with addiction and in two cases died quite young from drug overdoses, and in Nick Drake’s case, an overdose of an antidepressant, no less. I’d heard Duncan perform a solo concert of only Nick Drake covers, and we admired many of the same artists, so when I first met him back in January of 2007 at an album signing for his game-changing musical Spring Awakening, I told him that he had great taste in cover songs. He rolled his eyes at me and kind of sighed. “Yeah, that will probably be the next album project,” and it was. His covers of his favorite 1980s New Wave classics like The Blue Nile’s “Stay” and The Psychedelic Furs’ “The Ghost in You” are some of the most quietly powerful songs that he recorded, sung in his distinctively dressed-down tones, beyond somber. And so I think his roll of the eyes at me when I praised his taste in covers was not so much a dismissive insult but rather a quick visual admission that I got it. We are what we like.
But I also hadn’t stood in front of him praising his own compositions, just after he’d made the big decision to pivot from pop music to theatre, and theatre was largely where he stayed for the remainder of his career. I have all of his studio albums but little interest in them after his fourth album, 2002’s Daylight, which I think was probably his pop peak. His eponymous debut in 1996 had a couple of hits, which led to songs on rom-com soundtracks, and then 1998’s Humming showed him deepening his palate as he began to pursue Buddhism (quite seriously, not as a hobby). “Barely Breathing” and “She Runs Away” from his debut album were inward-looking for mainstream pop, but that debut also includes contemplative numbers like “November” and “The End of Outside,” conceived in a style that morphed in complex ways (for pop music) by the time he arrived at Humming. On “In Between,” the opening track of that album, he sings, “I feel a little undefined” and “I’m in between, no use wondering what I mean,” in contrast to “the endless bright parade” of the apparent certainty of active life surrounding him. The song ends as an intimate apology for not being clearer-cut to the people closest to him.
Sheik’s third album, 2001’s Phantom Moon, featured lyrics by Steven Sater, a kind of preview to their work together on Spring Awakening and other musicals. I remember going over for dinner at the apartment of a guy I was dating, and I had the CD of Phantom Moon in my backpack, so we listened to it while we ate. “Who listens to music like this?” was his response. Needless to say, that was our last date, and the introspective, galaxy-spanning reach of Phantom Moon sort of defined where Duncan Sheik’s music would go from there. “Requiescat,” the album’s penultimate track, could have been written as a song to be played at Sheik’s own funeral, and Steven Sater quoted his own lyrics from the song at the beginning of a tribute piece that he wrote for Duncan after Duncan’s death. Death, as we know all too well, is nothing new, even if it always feels somehow so unfamiliar.
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