Duncan Sheik, who died Thursday in New York at 56, had the greatest second act of anyone who was ever played in a dentist’s waiting room in 1997. That’s not a hot take. That’s the résumé.
Now, I understand that “best career among guys your aunt heard on Adult Top 40” is a category with no trophy, no banner, and no parade. I understand that nobody has ever argued about this on television. I’m arguing it anyway, because the math is not close, and because the people who were supposed to notice mostly didn’t, and because he deserves one person saying it out loud the day after.
Here is the résumé. A song that stayed on the Billboard Hot 100 for 55 weeks, which at the time was the fourth-longest run in the chart’s history. A Grammy nomination. A gold debut album. And then, ten years later, when every reasonable person in the music business had filed him under “that one song,” two Tony Awards and a Grammy for a musical about nineteenth-century German teenagers. If a point guard did that, we would build him a statue. We would put him in the “What if we’ve been wrong about him the whole time?” segment, and then we’d run it back every summer for a decade.
The song took a full year to get where it was going
You have to understand how slow 1996 was. “Barely Breathing” was released as a single on May 3, 1996. It peaked at number 16 on May 10, 1997. That’s 372 days. That is a song walking to the top of a mountain, not driving.
There was no algorithm to push it. There was no playlist called Chill Acoustic Vibes. There was a program director at an adult contemporary station in, say, Harrisburg, who put it into rotation, and a program director in Sacramento who heard that Harrisburg was playing it, and a guy at a Sam Goody who kept the CD single in the rack by the register because people kept walking in and humming the chorus at him and he got tired of it. That is how a song spread in 1996. By word of mouth, and by fax.
By the end of 1997 it was the number one song of the year on the Adult Top 40 chart. Not number one for a week. Number one for the year. It was the song playing at the Gap while you tried on a flannel you did not need. It was the song on the car radio while your mom drove you to a Blockbuster that did not have Jerry Maguire in stock. It was in the air the way humidity is in the air, which is to say everywhere, and which is to say nobody gave it credit for anything.
And here’s the thing everyone forgets: it was good. It still is. It sounds like a guy with a semiotics degree from Brown (he had one, and he’d played guitar in a college band with Lisa Loeb, which is the single most 1990s sentence I will write this year) trying very hard to make a hit record without cheating. He didn’t cheat. It worked anyway.
I need to talk about basketball for a minute
In June of 1997, roughly six weeks after “Barely Breathing” peaked, the San Antonio Spurs drafted Tim Duncan first overall.
This is going to seem unrelated. It isn’t.
For the next nineteen years, America treated both Duncans the exact same way. Tim Duncan was “boring.” He banked in fifteen-footers. He wore jeans that were too big and did not give quotes. His nickname was The Big Fundamental, which is what you call a guy when you respect him and cannot think of one interesting thing to say about him. Meanwhile he won five championships, and every sports talk host in the country (including the ones who would later swear they always knew) spent those nineteen years talking about somebody louder.
Duncan Sheik was the Tim Duncan of the 1997 radio dial. Soft-spoken. Tasteful. Easy to underrate because he never asked you to rate him. Guys with more hair product and bigger choruses got the magazine covers. And then, while everyone was looking at the flashier roster, he quietly assembled a career that a songwriter three times as famous would trade for in a second.
The analogy holds further than it should. Tim Duncan majored in psychology at Wake Forest. Duncan Sheik majored in semiotics. Two of the most successful people of the late 1990s were a guy who studied why people do things and a guy who studied what signs mean, and neither of them ever once explained themselves on camera. We should have been paying closer attention to both.
Suppose you’re an Atlantic Records executive in May of 1997
Run this with me.
You’re sitting in an office in Manhattan. It’s the week “Barely Breathing” hits 16. You have the number one Adult Top 40 song of the year and a gold record. Somebody from the future walks in (let’s say he’s wearing a Livestrong bracelet, because he’s from 2006) and tells you that this guy’s greatest achievement is still nine years away.
You ask what it is. Is it a bigger single? No. Is it a soundtrack hit? No. It’s a rock musical. Based on an 1891 German play. About adolescence, shame, sex, and parents who refuse to tell their kids anything. With lyrics by a poet named Steven Sater. Off-Broadway first, at a little nonprofit theater, then Broadway, starring a bunch of unknowns, two of whom are named Lea Michele and Jonathan Groff.
What do you do with that information in 1997? Nothing. You can’t do anything. You’d put out the second record (Humming, 1998), and it wouldn’t chart like the first, and you’d look at the numbers and conclude the career had peaked. You’d be doing your job correctly. You’d also be completely wrong.
And here’s where the hypothetical flips. The future guy isn’t bringing you bad news about your singer. He’s bringing you bad news about your charts. The Billboard Hot 100 was the only instrument anybody had for measuring Duncan Sheik in 1997, and it was the wrong instrument. It’s like measuring Tim Duncan by his dunk count. He wasn’t built to be graded that way. He was built to be graded ten years later, by teenagers.
The weird clue was right there, too. In 2001 he made a record called Phantom Moon for Nonesuch, with every lyric written by Steven Sater. It was quiet and strange and sold like a quiet, strange record. It was also the scouting report. Nobody read it.
There are two Duncan Sheiks, and most people only met one
I’ve thought about this more than a reasonable adult should, and I think his audience breaks down into three groups.
The 1997 people. They heard “Barely Breathing” roughly four hundred times between the spring of 1996 and the summer of 1997, usually in a car, usually without choosing to. They owned the CD, or they had it in a Case Logic visor sleeve next to Jewel and Matchbox 20, or they had it as one of their twelve Columbia House selections for a penny and never opened the shrinkwrap. They think of him as a voice. A nice one.
The 2007 people. They were fourteen and fifteen and sixteen. They had the Spring Awakening cast album on an iPod nano, and they learned every word, and they sang “Totally Fucked” in the car when their parents weren’t in it. They quoted it on MySpace. Some of them saw it at the Eugene O’Neill; most of them never did and knew every song anyway, which is how theater kids have always worked. The show won Best Musical (eight Tonys in all), and to these kids it was not “a Broadway show.” It was the first piece of art that ever told them their parents might be the problem. They think of him as the guy who wrote their adolescence.
The overlap. This is the smallest group and the best one. It’s the person who was 26 in 1997 and had a 14-year-old in 2007. It’s the moment in a minivan when the kid puts on the cast album and the parent says, “Wait, is this the ‘Barely Breathing’ guy?” and the kid says, “The what guy?”
That third group is the point. That’s the whole legacy, right there in the front seat. The same man wrote the song your mother hummed in the produce aisle and the show that made you feel less alone at fifteen, and neither of you knew the other one had him.
Ranking the gifts, in tiers, because he’d have earned tiers
Tier 1, The Unimpeachable: Spring Awakening. Two Tonys for him personally (score and orchestrations), a Grammy for the cast album, a 2015 Broadway revival performed in both spoken English and American Sign Language by Deaf West, and a new Off-Broadway revival directed by Danya Taymor that begins previews November 27 and opens December 17. It launched careers. It sent Lea Michele and Jonathan Groff toward Glee, which means a whole second wave of teenagers got Duncan Sheik secondhand and never knew it.
Tier 2, Hall of Fame On Its Own: “Barely Breathing.” Fifty-five weeks. Most people get zero songs like that. Most people who get one spend the rest of their lives touring it at casinos, and there is honor in that. He got one and treated it like a down payment.
Tier 3, The Swerve Nobody Saw Coming: American Psycho, London in 2013 and Broadway in 2016. The gentlest voice on 1997 radio wrote a synth-pop score for Patrick Bateman. That’s like finding out Tim Duncan secretly ran the best nightclub in San Antonio. It makes no sense, and it’s great, and it proves the guy was never the thing we’d filed him under.
Tier 4, The Range: Whisper House, a ghost-story concept album that became a stage show. Because of Winn-Dixie, a musical about a girl and a dog. Alice by Heart. Covers 80s. A man who can go from Bret Easton Ellis to a golden retriever in a single decade has more range than anyone gave him credit for in a Sam Goody in 1996.
Tier 5, The Quiet Part: He was a practicing Buddhist who credited meditation with getting him past his performance anxiety. Think about that. The guy whose voice was coming out of every car radio in America was, by his own account, scared of standing on a stage and singing it. He did it anyway. He kept doing it for thirty years. That’s not the least important tier. I put it last because it holds up everything above it.
One question for you
If you could go back to 1997 and tell the Duncan Sheik on your car radio what was coming (the Tonys, the teenagers, the kids who’d scream his lyrics in a school parking lot in 2007) would you tell him? Or would you let him find out?
I think I’d let him find out. The best part of his career is that nobody saw it coming, including, probably, him.
The receipt
For 55 weeks in 1996 and 1997, America thought it was hearing a guy’s big moment. It was actually hearing a guy warm up. Nine years later he walked into a little theater in Chelsea with a poet and an 1891 play and made the thing that a generation of theater kids will still be singing when Spring Awakening opens again this December, without him in the room, and with every note of him in it.
Somebody in the balcony that night will have heard “Barely Breathing” in a Gap in 1997. Somebody next to them will have been fifteen in 2007. Neither will know the other one is there for the same guy.
Thank you, Duncan. We filed you under one song. You wrote two lives.
