Duncan Sheik, who rose to fame as a one hit wonder in the mid-90s and turned into a Tony-winning composer, has died at age 56.
Sheik’s mother told the New York Times that he passed on Thursday at a Manhattan hospital after cardiac arrest.
- Duncan Scott Sheik was born on November 18th, 1969 in Montclair, New Jersey.
- Sheik’s Juilliard-trained grandmother tauight him piano and he later started playing guitar. By age 12, he was playing guitar with high school students in a cover band.
- Sheik attended Brown University, and while there he played guitar in a band with fellow student Lisa Loeb.
- Following his graduation from Brown in 1992 he moved to Los Angeles and played guitar again for Loeb and her Liz and Lisa duo. He also recorded with His Boy Elroy in 1993, a connection that happened through another Brown alum, Tracee Ellis Ross.
- In 1996, Sheik released his self-titled debut album, which contained the smash hit “Barely Breathing,” which peaked at number 16 on the Billboard Hot 100 and remained on the chart for more than a year. The song also scored Sheik a Grammy nomination for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance.
- Sheik wasn’t able to follow up on that success with three other major label albums he released between 1998 and 2002. But by that time, he’d started focusing on composing music for plays, musicals and movie. His first big commission was original music for the 2002 New York Shakespeare Festival production of Twelfth Night.
- 2006 saw the off-Broadway opening of Spring Awakening, a collaboration Sheik did with Steven Sater that was written over a period of eight years. The musical became a hit when it moved to Broadway in the fall of 2006. Sheik won the Tony for Best Orchestrations and he and Sater won a Tony for Best Original Score and Spring Awakening won the Tony Award for Best Musical and the Grammy for Best Musical Show Album.
- After the success of Spring Awakening Sheik would go on to write or co-write the musicals Alice By Heart, American Psycho, Because of Winn-Dixie, Noir and The Secret Life of Bees. He also released five more studio albums from 2006 to 2022.