I’m a lyrics person. I like the music but it’s the lyrics that I attach myself to when I really love an artist.
Last week, a New York Times app notification told me Duncan Sheik died at age 56. I gasped and read it over and over again but like so many of the notifications the NYT sends to my phone, it was something I didn’t really care to believe.
As many others probably did, I immediately wanted to listen to him again. I started with his first album, the self-titled, Duncan Sheik. I made it to track four, Reasons for Living, before the tears came. But that wasn’t unusual as I had cried many times listening to this album. It was beautiful. He was beautiful.
Welcome to another day
It don't seem that different 'cause nothing has changed
Try to remember
Try to remember
When we weren’t just running in place
There was something existential and brooding about his lyrics that resonated profoundly when I first heard them at 18, and still does at 47.
Over the next ten years, he would release Humming, Phantom Moon, Daylight, and White Limousine. And there amongst those albums is a significant part of the soundtrack for my 20s. For all the varying degrees of homesick, heartache, yearning, occasional joy, and full-blown depression that I experienced, there was a Duncan Sheik track that could mirror me. He knew how to articulate my feelings better than I did.
Out of Order is something he knew. It’s the state of your brain when all at once everything and nothing make sense and the only explanation is you just saw someone with the bluest eyes or a smile that undid you and for a moment everything. just. stopped. And when it restarted, you could only focus on them (for a while).
You say I'm giving up too much
Taking too many chances
But I won't believe you now
I've got to check this out
And nothing you can do
Will convince me otherwise…
Just go easy on me
I'm feeling out of order
In my 2nd summer at UCSD, I was working in the cafeteria when a grad student from Sweden walked in. When he came up to pay, I almost couldn’t remember how to operate the till. Most recently, the culprit was a guy that was too old who lived too far away for it to work out. Fortunately, there have been others in between those two. I hope you have been out of order too, because it’s a wonderful part of living, even with the risk of the heartache that follows.
Duncan’s second album, Humming, was released in 1998 during a time when you didn’t just stream the songs on a platform that doesn’t pay artists fairly. You went to the record store, bought the CD, and listened on your CD player while looking at the insert that came with it, following along to the lyrics, studying the pictures, and experiencing the tracks in order.
Humming gave us Bite Your Tongue. It was so satisfying to digest. Later when I got into Bob Dylan, the song reminded me of some of his most acrid and savory lyrics.
Such an annoying conversation
I’m sorry but I’m tired of trying
To be some picture of compassion
...and anyway it sounds like I’m lying
There was also Alibi which seemed like the most romantic song at the time.
I had so many things to ask you
Now you don´t have much to say…
…And I want you to be my alibi
So they won't find me
And they won't find you
And we may tell lies
But we may be true
But the one that REALLY impacted me was That Says It All because it was a musical education. It opened me up to artists I hadn’t listened to yet. I had to search Napster (if you know, you know and you’re middle-aged too) and listen to what Duncan listened to.
In the song, he mentions (by surname), Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Brian Wilson, Jimmy Page, and Nick Drake. They weren’t all new “discoveries” but even for those I already knew, I was able to listen to them with so much more appreciation. Duncan covered Drake more than once. There is a performance of Pink Moon here.
Mr. Wilson took some pills
...and I don't blame him
It's hard to be alive
...Mr. Page, how he played
Mr. Drake stayed up late
...and made me cry
That says it all, doesn't it?
We always want what we never get…
One of the biggest gaps in my musical knowledge at that time was Jeff Buckley. And as a tribute to Buckley, Duncan wrote A Body Goes Down. It is heartbreaking, especially after you listen to the album Grace or you learn about him. He was so important to music and influenced so many people that a documentary was released last year. Check out It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley online.
Of course there is grace
And those halos of pain
Maybe he sang what he came here to sing
Duncan’s covers were also a huge part of my musical education. In some ways, he was like an older sibling sharing his cool records with me.
The first time I heard Radiohead’s Fake Plastic Trees, it was Duncan singing it. There are many covers of it but his is still my favorite. He covered Reel Around the Fountain by The Smiths (who I didn’t really give a good listen to until the film 500 Days (of Summer) was released years later). That track was on a special EP which I remember buying on eBay. It’s probably in a landfill now. I got rid of all of my CDs before I moved overseas (a painful but necessary task). The way he sang Fleetwood Mac’s Songbird was simply lush. And the last cover that’s part of my current memory flood is Court and Spark by Joni Mitchell. She was a major influence on him.
I could go through the next albums. But at some point, I might lose you so I’ll skip ahead and just say that Phantom Moon as an album was an achievement with its orchestral arrangements and lyrics not by him but by Steven Sater. Later the pair would take the groundbreaking Spring Awakening to Broadway, really changing musical theatre. It’s even getting an off-Broadway run this Fall along with another new musical featuring his music and lyrics. I saw another musical Duncan wrote, Whisper House, when it made its world premiere at The Old Globe in San Diego. I’ll see Nero in London in November. He had so much ahead of him this year.
Skipping ahead to Daylight, I think I listened to Half-Life the most. It was on repeat some days like a somber meditation.
It takes so much out of me to pretend
Maybe, I need to see the daylight
To leave behind the half-life
Don’t you see I’m breaking down
I realize that I could say something about almost every track because each one was important in some way. For me, every Duncan Sheik album had no skips.
I was able to speak with Duncan before a concert once, when he agreed to be on my first podcast, Piratepods. It was on October 15, 2007 at The Belly Up Tavern in Solana Beach. I’m hoping to recover the recording but so far, all I have is the screenshot below from the broken website. Even that seems like treasure right now.
Some friends reached out to me sharing memories of seeing Duncan with me or just because they remembered me going on and on about him twenty-five years ago.
I started to write this the day he died and was going to leave it incomplete and in draft form but I couldn’t. I wanted to tell you about him, reader. I want you to know the impact he had on me. If you have only ever listened to Barely Breathing, you have missed out. Luckily, his music lives on, every time someone presses play.