Duncan Sheik, the singer-songwriter who turned “Barely Breathing” into an enduring ’90s alt-pop hit before finding a second act on Broadway as the Tony-winning composer of Spring Awakening, died Thursday in Manhattan. He was 56.
His mother, Suzanne Sheik, confirmed his death to The New York Times and said the cause was heart failure leading to cardiac arrest.
For many people, Sheik will forever be associated with “Barely Breathing,” the deceptively catchy breakup song that became the breakout single from his self-titled 1996 debut. The song reached No. 16 on the Billboard Hot 100 and remained on the chart for 55 weeks, earning Sheik a Grammy nomination and turning the soft-spoken musician into an unlikely star.
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For a generation of millennials, however, Sheik’s most enduring work wasn’t necessarily a song with his voice on it. It was Spring Awakening.
The musical arrived on Broadway in December 2006, just as a new kind of teenage fandom was taking shape online. You didn’t necessarily have to live in New York or have the money for a Broadway ticket to become completely consumed by it. Teenagers passed around grainy YouTube clips and shaky, questionably obtained recordings, memorized the cast album, traded photos and interviews, and followed the young cast, which included Jonathan Groff, Lea Michele, and John Gallagher Jr., online.
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Lauren “Lolo” Pritchard, Steven Sater, Lea Michele, Jonathan Groff, Duncan Sheik and John Gallagher Jr. at the 2022 the premiere of “Spring Awakening: Those You’ve Known” in New York City.
Credit: Cindy Ord/Getty Images
Before Broadway fandom lived on TikTok, Spring Awakening fans were finding one another in the messier corners of the internet. I was one of those teenagers.
In 2007, I was deep in Spring Awakening. I listened to the cast recording obsessively and watched whatever shoddy footage I could find online. Then I moved to New York City that fall and finally got to stand at the stage door, Playbill in hand. Songs like “Mama Who Bore Me,” “The Bitch of Living,” “Touch Me,” “Don’t Do Sadness/Blue Wind,” “Totally Fucked” — I knew them all. These were songs built around the particular intensity of being young, when desire can feel catastrophic, anger can feel righteous, and nobody, least of all the adults around you, seems capable of understanding what’s happening inside your head.
Sheik’s music and score gave those feelings somewhere to go. He made music for young people who felt everything too much.
There was something almost perfectly matched about the material and the way teenagers encountered it. Spring Awakening was a story about young people whose inner lives were misunderstood and suppressed by the adults around them. Online, its young fans found one another and became obsessive about it together.
Nearly 20 years later, many of those same fans are back online mourning the man who wrote the music that soundtracked that period of their lives.
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In the hours after news of Sheik’s death, listeners inevitably returned to “Barely Breathing.” More than 30 years after its release, it’s the kind of song whose opening notes can instantly locate you in another time.
But the Duncan Sheik music I keep returning to isn’t sung by him at all. It’s a group of teenagers singing at the top of their lungs about everything they haven’t yet figured out. I was one of the teenagers listening. And nearly 20 years later, those songs still know exactly where to find me.
