Duncan Shiek

“IT’S a rock record,” says Duncan Sheik, excitement rushing through his typically calm South Carolina-raised voice, “in that it’s mostly guitars. And the music has more rock energy than my other albums. But it’s not really a throwback. It’s my own take on what a rock record should be.”
The New York-based singer, songwriter, guitarist, and producer is talking about the music on “DAYLIGHT,” Sheik’s extraordinary third album for Atlantic Records, made mostly in Los Angeles, in tandem with several other key New York and London sessions. Producer Patrick Leonard and Sheik recorded the collection’s new songs with guitarist/multi-instrumentalist Gerry Leonard, bassist Jeff Allen, and drummer Doug Yowell, with Leonard, as honorary fifth member, on various keyboards. The London Session Orchestra, playing arrangements by Simon Hale, Sheik’s career-long symphonic collaborator, appears on four songs. It’s a tight group.

“My last record,” says Sheik, referring to “PHANTOM MOON,” his acclaimed 2001 Nonesuch/Atlantic release, a collaboration with the poet and dramatist Steven Sater, “was an orchestrated folk album with lyrics from a playwright…’DAYLIGHT’ is the other end of the spectrum. These songs are couched in a more modern language. Of course, on both albums I was interested in getting richly coherent performances from a band. But whereas before it was all acoustic instruments, now it’s electric instruments, as well as some electronic ones, and I was trying to find the most human ways to use those modern sounds.”

Sheik is not someone to be held captive by a single musical goal, however. By the time he and Leonard got going in L.A., trying ensure that this rock record never lost the intimacy of folk or the emotionality of symphonic music, Sheik had become fascinated by the notion, in all its most luminous immediacy, of the pop song.

“What happened in the process of writing this album,” Sheik says, “was that I started from a very different place than ever before. I began asking myself questions like ‘What is a pop song?’ and ‘What is this pop music that everyone responds to so avidly and intensely?’ I became fascinated with the idea of making a music, purely within that framework, that might get very emotional responses.

“Often on my earlier records, I began with ideas that were pretty far out there. Then they would be rendered more accessible in the recording process. With ‘DAYLIGHT,’ it was the opposite: Now I started from a place of being as accessible as possible, and then going out there in the recording process. I think this made Patrick really happy, because he was encouraged to be as creatively free as he wished. People should realize he’s an amazing keyboard player.”

The result is a group of songs that excel at — and explosively combine — all of Sheik’s musical preoccupations. The album opens with “Genius,” part sad comical confession and part wide-screen rocker, a song that leaves n no doubt that after a guy misbehaves royally, it’s only the start of his troubles. From there, the music explores romance and time on “Half-Life,” which marries the direct songfulness of a classic rock ballad to the stirring sonic backgrounds of a John Barry soundtrack. In “Magazines,” another rocker, a man at a newsstand thinks he notices an old girlfriend — “rows and rows of you,” as he sings — photographed nude. But his certainty about her identity is far less exact than the charging circularity of the music itself.

“The songs ended up becoming connected in my mind,” Sheik says, “because they were to one degree or another all about these states of delusion and illusion and unreality that we find ourselves in. All these experiences that we have are in some way very surreal. Any experience that you’re going to go through in your day-to-day life is just a version of events as you see it, one that’s probably not any more ‘real’ than the dream you had the night before.”

Even in “On a High,” the brilliant first single from “DAYLIGHT,” where expertly calibrated clutches of ambient guitars zoom off into a chorus that could scarcely be more forceful or clear, certain questions continue to ring through all the energy: “The song is about looking at yourself as objectively as possible,” Sheik says, “saying, ‘Sometimes I fool myself into thinking everything is great, but that’s just not the case’. It’s owning up to your own delusions, really.”

Other songs go in different yet related directions. “On Her Mind,” co-written with Mick Jones of Foreigner, immerses itself in the crunchy beauty of ’70 transatlantic folk-rock as it investigates the mysterious psychological vagaries that exit between two people in love. “Start Again,” written by Gerry Leonard, dramatizes disintegration and flight, suffocation and open spaces in a relationship as it rocks with the stately pent-up power of English rock. “Ah, wouldn’t you know,” Sheik sings in “Such Reveries,” the supernal chamber piece at the heart of the sequence, “we’re in Mexico”: All the songs on “DAYLIGHT” have that kind of power and suspense.

“Harmony,” says Sheik, “is for me the most important aspect of the songs, the same way that for others it might be melody or groove or texture. I crave music that has an unpredictable harmonic language. It’s got to sound great, and in a surprising way. I think harmony is where you unlock the mysteriousness of what music can do to your soul. If you take a song like ‘Memento,’” he says, referring to a Brazilian-accented slice-of-life scene on “DAYLIGHT,” “you’re moving around the key of A-minor, and then the bridge lands in the key of C-major. And then a note in the chord shifts from A to B-flatÉ” Sheik pauses. “Just that one note changing brings the song into this whole other harmonic world. It’s one note. And it totally alters the whole mood of that piece of music.” This may sound like a lot of composer talk. But then Sheik works in that realm as well: He recently wrote original music for the Public Theater/New York Shakespeare Festival’s presentation of Twelfth Night, and next year will see the opening of the Roundabout Theatre production of Spring Awakening, a musical Sheik wrote, again teamed with Steven Sater.

After Sheik’s 1996 self-titled debut – which spawned the hit single “Barely Breathing,” by now a radio pop-rock classic – and its striking 1998 follow-up, “HUMMING,” working in Los Angeles on “DAYLIGHT” felt like “coming full circle,” Sheik says. “I would return to some of the spots where I used to stay. When I was 19 years old and I first came to Hollywood, I spent a few weeks in this little bungalow trying to get people to listen to my music. It was a really amazing experience, to be mixing the new album – of which I am really proud – and then to drive by that bungalow where I was kind of dreaming of being able to make records. It was only three blocks away. And that was 13 years ago, and now I had really done the thing that I had most wanted to do.”

Born in Montclair, New Jersey, and raised in Hilton Head, South Carolina, Duncan Sheik spent his teen years immersing himself in the music of such kindred spirits as the Beach Boys, the Smiths, and the Blue Nile. Duncan attended Brown University, where he spent a year playing in Liz & Lisa — a band whose membership included singer/songwriter Lisa Loeb — before heading out on his own. His demo tapes circulated throughout the music industry, and Sheik eventually inked with Atlantic.

Sheik’s 1996 self-titled RIAA gold-certified Atlantic debut — which included the hit singles “Barely Breathing” and “She Runs Away” — was an enormous popular and critical success. In its four-star review, Rolling Stone hailed the Rupert Hine-produced album as “a defiant debut — beautiful and benevolent of spirit.” Duncan Sheik reached the #1 position on both Billboard’s “Heatseekers” chart of new and developing artists, and SoundScan’s “Alternative New Artist Albums” chart, ultimately spending some 30 weeks on the Billboard 200. The top 20 Billboard hit, “Barely Breathing,” earned a place in pop history as it became the fourth longest-running single in the annals of the Hot 100, where it spent an amazing 55 weeks. In addition, “In The Absence Of Sun,” another track from the debut album, was included on the top 25-charting soundtrack album to the Paramount Pictures/Rysher Entertainment film, “The Saint”.

During nearly two years spent on the road with the first album, Sheik toured with such artists as Jewel, Shawn Colvin, and Jars of Clay in addition to headlining his own North American club tour. Along the way, he made national television appearances on The Late Show With David Letterman, The Tonight Show With Jay Leno, Late Night With Conan O’Brien, CBS This Morning, and others.

In early 1998, Sheik delivered “Wishful Thinking,” a stand-out track from Atlantic’s RIAA gold-certified “Great Expectations” soundtrack. In October of that year came the release of Duncan’s second Atlantic album, Humming, a more band-oriented expression, characterized in part by a stronger drum presence and lush string arrangements, and for which Sheik took on the role of co-producer. His partner behind the boards was, once again, the renowned Rupert Hine (Rush, Stevie Nicks, Robert Palmer, The Waterboys, Kate Bush, Tina Turner).

Stephen Holden of The New York Times previewed the album, saying, “In the late-90’s garbage heap of one-hit wonders and hip-hoppers whose samplings of the past sound more like licensed theft than creative recycling, most pop nowadays is as disposable as a Big Mac wrapper. Hardly anyone is talking about ‘art.’ But Mr. Sheik’s beautifully orchestrated meditations suggest that pop can still aspire to a lofty, searching classicism.”

In March of last year, Duncan joined his former Brown University bandmate, Lisa Loeb, on the Musical Bridges Foundation-sponsored cultural exchange mission to Cuba – aimed at promoting cultural awareness and creating human bonds between nations. The program — whose participants also included R.E.M.’s Peter Buck, John Hiatt, Indigo Girls, Bonnie Riatt, N’Dea Davenport of Brand New Heavies fame, and others — centered around collaborative songwriting sessions between English and American artists with Cuban musical counterparts. The collaborations culminated with a special concert at Havana’s Karl Marx Theater to debut the resulting material.

Additional 1999 travels brought Sheik to Albania, in the midst of the Kosovo refugee crisis, where he performed last May under the auspices of the renowned War Child organization.