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Home , Barely Breathing, David Sylvian, Duncan Sheik, Gentlemen Take Polaroids, The Ghost in You, Thompson Twins

DUNCAN SHEIK Bio

After breaking through in the late ‘90s with his Top 20 single “,” spent much of the subsequent decade taking a breather from the usual rock singer/ rituals. His focus was on that broke with conventions and, additionally, theatrical musicals like , the Broadway sensation that won him 2 and a Grammy. As he explains this lengthy diversion now: “After a while you get boring to everyone else, but you get really bored with yourself. There was a moment where I was much more interested in these kind of longer narrative arcs, and being able to sing from the perspective of somebody else’s persona, as opposed to Duncan Sheik’s.”

His new (s) splits the difference. Sheik makes his long-awaited return to singing stand-alone pop songs, but he hasn’t given up his recent habit of inhabiting characters. In this case, though, the characters are Morrissey, Robert Smith, Martin Gore, and . Duncan Sheik Covers 80s, released in 2011, features twelve of his highly personalized takes on the synth-pop era, including smashes and obscurities from the likes of the Cure, New Order, Tears for Fears, the Smiths, , the Thompson Twins, Love & Rockets, Howard Jones, , Talk Talk, and the Blue Nile.

“It is nice to sing these songs that are written by other people, because again, you’re inhabiting this other character that isn’t you, but in this case is part of what made me who I am,” Sheik says. “Right now, I’m getting ready to go record a quote- unquote ‘regular’ album of my own stand-alone songs again, and maybe this is my way of kind of transitioning back into that mode.” But it’s hardly an impersonal stopgap measure. “The litmus test for me for choosing the songs was: Did I really, really care about it when I was 15 or 16?”

If films like and Hot Tub Time Machine have ingrained it into our beings that anything associated with the must involve a winking nostalgia for kitsch, needless to say, Sheik was coming from a much purer place. “Mine is a much more lachrymose kind of nostalgia,” he laughs. “It’s almost tragic. At the moment I was listening to that material, it’s like when you’re going through your first real heartbreak, and all of that angst of just being a teenager. So there was nothing campy to me about it at all. It was all deadly serious, and it was all stuff that I was really moved by in some way.”

Sheik would be the first to admit that the production on some of the original recordings is a bit on the dated side, and the associations with certain over-the-top vintage MTV videos are sometimes hard to get past. “Stylistically, it could be something that really puts people off, but underneath that production—at least to my mind—those songs are these really great examples of pop songwriting, and I wanted to give them another life, in some small way. Some of these artists may seem a bit more throwaway than Talk Talk or the Cure or the Smiths or Depeche Mode. “But I believe these are great songs written by great . I totally expect certain people to have had experiences where they were really annoyed by some of these songs! It’s not like I’m trying to rescue them or anything. I’m just trying to offer a different perspective on what the songs might be.”

Enter: synth-free synth-pop. “There are no drums on Covers 80s,” he points out— electronic or otherwise. That’s just the beginning of the strict—yet rich—set of colors he chose. “I had a very particular sonic palette, centered around a dozen or so acoustic instruments. It was about trying to find the internal logic or the internal emotion of these songs, which is not always the obvious emotion that you hear in the original recordings. There’s something underneath there that I wanted to try and excavate. I don’t know if it was successful, but that was the hope.”

Some numbers will sound immediately familiar to just about anyone who wanted their MTV a quarter-century ago, while other choices, like Love & Rockets’ “So Alive,” have been rethought almost into unrecognizability. “If you’re going to cover a song, you might as well make it different from the original. When people cover songs and it sounds exactly like the original recording, I’m like, well, what’s the point?” No danger of carbon copying here, with instruments like marimba, hammer dulcimer, harmonium, and ukuleles replacing sequencers and Linn drums in the mix. of the twelve tracks also make use of the voice of Rachael Yamagata, “a really great singer/songwriter in her own right,” as Sheik says. Her contributions were vital to songs like the Thompson Twins’ “Hold Me Now,” which he was “on the fence about—but when Rachel came to sing on it, it started to have the emotional resonance that made me think I should include it on the record.”

The closing song, “The Ghost in You,” actually dates back to Sheik’s previous album, , where it served as a bonus track. Whisper House was a collection of songs from a musical of the same name that was his immediate follow-up to Spring Awakening, and the show’s plot involved some melancholy haunting spirits… so it made some sense to add a well-known song about a figurative ghost to wrap up that set. You might also find some continuity there in the new album’s adaptation of New Order’s “Love Vigilante,” a song about a soldier who returns home from a war only to realize that he’s dead.

But, all spooks aside, there’s a livelier origins story behind Duncan Sheik Covers 80s. As he recounts it: “I’ve been a singer/songwriter professionally for the past 16 years of my life. Yet there’s this funny thing when you’re at a party with a bunch of people and there’s a guitar there. They’re like, ‘Here, do some songs, and we can all sing along.’ I know exactly two songs that other people in the universe know, so that would always be slightly awkward, because once I finished the one Radiohead song and one Oasis song, I was done. I thought, maybe I should learn some things, so at least I have a dozen songs up my sleeve that I can play. But as I started to proceed to do that, I thought, why am I going to sit here learning how to play ‘Hey Jude’ or ‘Wild Horses’? There’s so many other people that do that better than I would, and it’s not interesting to me. But that made me think about the songs that were my big influences as an adolescent, when I was away at boarding school in New England in the ‘80s—and it was all these English art-rock and synth-pop and bands of a certain ilk.

“Because the production on those songs is oftentimes very much of its time—you know, a lot of synthesizers and drum machine programming and a production aesthetic that maybe has come back into vogue right now but for a long time people felt was really dated—I thought it would be interesting to re-imagine them using only acoustic instruments. Obviously acoustic guitar and piano, but harmonium and dulcimers and banjos and ukuleles and whatever I could get my hands on that would speak to what the original sounds were while being played by human hands with an instrument made of wood and bone and steel. So that was the idea: Maybe I could make a set of recordings with this material that was really important to me as a kid growing up, and then I’d have a few more songs to play at the late-night party when I get handed the guitar.” He laughs to consider the roundabout route he took getting back to that guitarist-goading soiree.

If these aren’t the “roots” you’d be expecting for someone who came to the fore as a singer/songwriter in the alt-rock generation… well, he knows. “There frankly was a huge disconnect between those two things,” Sheik allows. “I may be one of a very few people of my generation of singer/songwriters who was as influenced by these guys as I was. While everyone else was listening to Neil Young or the Grateful Dead or the Who and Led Zeppelin, I was buying these other strange and—at the time— slightly obscure import records by these strange new English bands. Each of these people had made me who I am as a songwriter. And certainly if you listen to ‘Barely Breathing,’ I don’t know that you would catch that at all. But if you listen to the other 80 percent of the music I’ve made, I think it’s there. So I wanted to foreground that aspect of my own journey as a songwriter.”

In 2012, Sheik took the interpretation one step further and enlisted a coterie of DJs such as El-p, , Chi Duly, Bookworm, Gabriel & Dresden and others to remix each track from Covers 80s, giving birth to Covers Eighties Remixed. In stark contrast to Covers 80s, Covers Eighties Remixed, tackles the songs deconstructed by Sheik and then reconstructs and reimagines each song with a modern electronic approach by the DJs. The resulting work is wildly imaginative, daring and ultimately satisfying.

Beyond setting out to work soon on a new album of original songs, Sheik still has plenty of irons in the musical theater fire. One of them, coincidentally, is also 1980s- themed: a musical adaptation of the infamous Brent Easton Ellis novel , which is soon to reach the workshop stage and will premiere in the near future. The book and movie had some fun with the antihero’s predilection for Huey Lewis and Phil Collins, but Sheik says he won’t be treating his original score for American Psycho with any more of a sense of ‘80s kitsch than he did this new album, stylistically different as it’ll be.

“Ironically, or maybe just confusingly, the sonic palette for that show is literally the exact opposite of the ‘80s cover album. The idea for the American Psycho score is for it all to be played on analog synthesizers and drum machines of various kinds. It will have a completely electronic score, which I’m fairly certain has never been done on a Broadway or West End stage—unless inadvertently, when they had people playing keyboards to sound like trumpets and string sections. A lot of people think of the ‘80s as this campy thing, but the book is obviously dealing with kind of much weightier kinds of ideas, and I think it would be a real disservice to the book if you were to go that direction. There certainly is a sense of humor at work in the show, but it’s a blacker, gallows humor.”

If axe-wielding masters of the Wall Street universe aren’t your thing, there may still be other theater pieces for you on Sheik’s plate. “Whisper House looks like it’s going to have another reincarnation for our ghosts,” And he’s working on two projects with his Spring Awakening collaborator . One is an adaptation of The Nightingale, the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale. The other is a musical retelling of Alice in Wonderland that is set for London’s National Theatre in early 2012. “In some ways, there are parallels between Alice and Spring Awakening, because the cast is teenagers, 13- to 19-year-old kids, and there’s a kind of coming-of-age story going on there.”

Sheik has done some coming of age of his own, going from a theater outsider who shared a mutual suspicion with the Broadway community to a Tony winner and favorite of hardboiled stage critics. Spring Awakening not only established him as a midtown-Manhattan household name, but also, of course, seriously launched the careers of Lea Michelle (“Lea really made herself, but I’m happy to have been a little tiny small part of that journey”) and Lauren Pritchard, who just released her excellent debut album as a singer/songwriter.

But if anyone thought Sheik was destined to “go Broadway” after the unexpected success of Spring Awakening, they were quickly disabused of that notion by Whisper House, which, on stage or on record, sounded even less like a conventional musical score than the one that established him.

“No, I went the other direction,” he laughs. “Honestly, jokes aside, spending all this time working in the theater, I think I have a much more profound respect for the form than I did before. When I first started working on Spring Awakening, I was probably kind of obnoxious about my opinions about musical theater. But I really do love the medium, and there are many, many composers where I listen to this music and I’m really blown away by it. But I also feel more and more that it’s fundamentally important that if the form is going to continue, it needs to have composers and writers who are doing stuff that is unique and really relevant to the times in which it’s being made. So as much as I love Sondheim’s and Kander & Ebb’s work, it would feel very wrong for me to start writing music in that modality.”

As for his own next record, it’s “a quote-unquote normal singer/songwriter record. God, it sounds like a recipe for disaster!” Hardly: The experiment Sheik is undertaking at his newly built studio in upstate New York sounds like it could be the culmination of everything he’s learned working in such disparate media and styles. “I have some funny ideas about fusing some of the stuff I've been working with lately—i.e., all the purely acoustic instruments, and then all the purely electronic stuff—and trying to find a way to marry these two universes of sound, where it’s unique and hopefully moving in some way and strange and enigmatic and brings people to a different place.”

DUNCAN SHEIK COVERS 80s: THE SONGS

“Stripped” Originally recorded by Depeche Mode

“In the case of Depeche Mode, I actually had covered “Blasphemous Rumours” on an EP that came out after my second album, in 1998. And there were a couple songs on Black Celebration that I thought about doing, including “Fly on the Windscreen,” which from just a purely harmonic chord progression perspective is really cool. But it’s just so bleak. “Stripped” is kind of bleak, too, but there’s a sliver of light coming through the doorway. When I was 16 years old and I would be walking through an airport listening to my Sony Discman, or whatever it was at the time, this song would be playing, and I would look around at the people in airports… and where normally I might be misanthropic and annoyed by everybody, when that song would be playing in my headphones, all of a sudden I’d be filled with compassion for my fellow mankind. For some reason it had effect on me. So I knew there’s something in that music that is pretty powerful and can unlock something that needed to be unlocked in me.”

“Hold Me Now” Originally recorded by the Thompson Twins

“That song is slightly anomalous in that maybe I didn’t love it as much as this other material at the time. But whenever I would hear it come on the radio in more recent decades, I would always be really amazed at the intricacy of the production. So I looked at that as a challenge: How can I recreate this arrangement without drum machines and synthesizers and still create that kind of compositional intrigue? That was like a puzzle to me, in a way—but a really enjoyable one. Then when Rachael Yamagata came to sing on it, it started to have the emotional resonance that made me think I should include it on the record.”

“Love Vigilante” Originally recorded by New Order

“It’s so strange that a band like New Order would write a timeless anti-war protest song. You’d never think that would come out of a band like New Order, but there it is. It’s this great, trenchant little miniature tale about this guy coming home and he’s a ghost. The other thing about that is, I normally hate songs that are 1/4/5 chord progressions. It normally drives me up the wall. But for some reason, that one I’ve always liked, despite the total simplicity of what’s going on in terms of the changes. I thought, I should record one 1/4/5 song in my lifetime! I think it’s the only one.”

“Kyoto” Originally recorded by the Cure

“I needed to do something by the Cure, because when I was 14, they were the first legitimately cool band that I ever saw live. Their pop songs were almost too bright, though—songs like ‘Love ’ and ‘Close to You.’ And ‘Kyoto,’ granted, it’s a little bit of an album track on Head in the Door. But there’s something about it that is so mysterious and enigmatic and really suited a certain mood or experience that I wanted to have as a teenager—wanting to wake up in a strange hotel room with this strange person.”

“What is Love” Originally recorded by Howard Jones

“It’s one of the earlier songs on the record, in terms of the year. Howard was performing on some TV show when that record first came out—I guess it was 1984, maybe 1985—and at that time, I had just gotten my first Juno 106, my first 4-track recorder. Just seeing one guy with this bank of synthesizers and drum machines, I was so impressed that he was able to pull all this music off by himself. Also, it’s such an instantly catchy song that I loved it so much. It’s an interesting, tricky melody, and a deceptively strange chord progression. It seems like it’s straight ahead, but there’s, like, three key changes in the chorus. It was a fun project, figuring out how to play it on the guitar. And again, Howard’s been such a good friend of mine through the years that it was important for me to include that on this set.”

“So Alive” Originally recorded by Love & Rockets

“This one is so different from the original, it may be considered a kind of heresy to some people. The original recording’s vibe is so strange and arch. I thought it'd be interesting if I was able to maybe imbue it with a little more heart, in a way—have it be less about the rhythm and shallow human desire and more about something that’s a little more fragile.”

“Shout” Originally recorded by Tears for Fears

“It’s an anthem, right? That was a hard choice, because there were some songs I felt were too obvious, and this was such a ubiquitous radio song at the time and an MTV staple. But Roland Orzabal is a meticulous craftsman, and I’m sorry that he didn’t make more records. And the truth is, it’s really fun to play it live. When Rachael Yamagata sang on it, and when this baritone ukulele part comes in midway through the song, I thought, okay, it’s not just an aping of the original song, but there are some other layers of memory that are at work here. The only thing on the record that’s not completely acoustic is there’s a fair amount of tape echo—these clouds of sound that come in through certain parts of a lot of the songs, like this one. To me, it was the sound of memory, in a way. That’s really what a lot of these songs are about: the memory of that time.”

“Gentlemen Take Pictures” Originally recorded by Japan

“My two biggest influences overall, in terms of artists that have compelled me to want to make records, are Mark Hollis, the lead singer of Talk Talk, and David Sylvian, the lead singer of Japan. And it’s really David Sylvian’s solo work that was important to me. But in some ways it didn’t quite fit the brief of what this record was, so I went back to the Japan stuff. And even though I think as a record I like ‘Tin Drum’ much better, there’s something about ‘’ that captured a 15-year-old’s desire for sophistication. It’s all there in that song. You know, wanting to travel the world to exotic places and meet exotic, beautiful women—all the stuff that’s completely out of your reach. That song encapsulated the desire for me at that time.”

“Life’s What You Make It” Originally recorded by Talk Talk

“Talk Talk’s last two albums, and Laughing Stock, are definitely in the top of my canon. You have this amazing transition, where their early work was almost like a rejoinder to Duran Duran or something, yet they evolved into this art- rock powerhouse that went on to be incredibly influential to Coldplay and Elbow and all the other cool UK bands of today. And that transition from being interested in synthesizers and drum machines and then becoming increasingly organic in terms of your tastes, in terms of sonic palette—I think they were the ones who led me down that path, for better or worse. So that’s a really important song to me.”

“William It Was Really Nothing” Originally recorded by the Smiths

“I did do ‘How Soon is Now’ initially, but I have some friends who are really major Morrissey and Smiths fanatics—perhaps much more than I am—and they read me the riot act about doing another cover of ‘How Soon is Now.’ I wasn’t allowed to put it on the record! So I put that one aside, because otherwise I would get in big trouble. The other song I might have done was ‘Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want,’ but again, that’s been covered more than enough at this point. And ‘William It Was Really Nothing’ was a fun challenge. Harmonically, it’s an interesting, strange song that goes to a lot of strange places in terms of the chord changes and really shows what a cool guitar player and composer Johnny Marr is. I also wanted there to be one moment with a sense of humor on the record. If there’s any bit of levity there, it’s in the lyric of that song. It’s like a precursor to Brokeback Mountain, this funny song about somebody having some kind of, I guess, same-sex experimentation. It’s actually quite sweet, in a way. Also, the withering view of everyday garden-variety domestic living situations is really funny.”

“” Originally recorded by the Blue Nile

“Here was a song that was the most pop of all the songs on that particular record, Walking Across the Rooftops. That album is way up there in my canon of important and influential records growing up. I thought, ‘The Downtown Life’ has been covered by Lennox and probably others. Why don’t I take the ‘pop’ song and turn it around? Not that it’s necessarily slowed down that much, but give it a different treatment and see what happens there. Again, I don’t know if that was a good idea or bad idea. But it’s a song that I felt deserved a different version.”

“The Ghost in You” Originally recorded by Psychedelic Furs

“That was the first one I did that started this whole journey. I have a friend of a friend who’s friends with Richard Butler, and I had to call him up to find out what the lyrics were to the background vocals, because you can’t really tell what they are on the original recording. He was very nice and sent me an email with the correct lyrics. It’s one of those really, really great songs. The original version certainly transcends the moment that it was created, and it really stands the test of time as this evocative, beautiful piece of pop songwriting.”