Duncan Sheik, the singer-songwriter who rose to fame for his hit 1996 single “Barely Breathing,” then went on to compose the Tony Award-winning musical “Spring Awakening,” died Thursday. He was 56.
“The world has a lost a singular talent, and deeply influential voice in music and theater,” his family said in a statement on Sheik’s official Instagram account.
The cause was cardiac arrest, his mother, Suzanne Sheik, told the New York Times.
Mr. Sheik, a New Jersey native who studied at Brown University, was a practicing Buddhist who had been inspired by moodier artists such as Björk and Jeff Buckley. He was somewhat thrown by the success of “Barely Breathing,” from his namesake debut album. The song stayed on the Billboard Hot 100 chart for 55 weeks.
“When I was all of a sudden thrust into that context, there was a lot of cognitive dissonance for me personally,” Mr. Sheik said in a 2015 interview with The Washington Post.
A decade after that hit, he would strike debut gold again, winning a Tony Award for composing “Spring Awakening,” a Broadway musical about teens coming of age in 19th-century Germany. Mr. Sheik said in 2015 that he strove for “Spring Awakening” to reflect the Buddhist idea that humans are always shuttling between 10 different states of being.
“At any moment you’re going from hell to hunger to animality to anger to tranquility to rapture, realization, compassion, enlightenment. … For me, the art that inspires me really does that, it shows the human condition in its totality,” he said.
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