Singer-songwriter and Broadway composer Duncan Sheik has died, according to a post on his Instagram account. He was 56.
His mother, Suzanne Sheik, told The New York Times that he died of organ failure on Thursday night. She did not provide any other details about his condition or what led to the organ failure.
“The world has a lost a singular talent, and deeply influential voice in music and theater. From his Grammy-nominated hit ‘Barely Breathing’ to his groundbreaking, Tony and Grammy Award-winning work on Spring Awakening, Duncan’s artistry touched many and leaves an indelible mark on the cultural landscape,” the Instagram statement said.
“Duncan was a father, husband, son, brother, and friend. He will be remembered for his sensitivity, wit, inteligence [sic], and depth of spirit he brought to those who knew and loved him,” it continued.
“We are deeply grateful for the outpouring of love from his fans, friends, collaborators, and the artistic community,” the statement said. “His musical legacy will continue to inspire generations to come.”
“Duncan passed away last night surrounded by love,” the statement added.
Sheik had recently been receiving medical care, with his family saying in a statement on Wednesday that he was in “critical but stable condition.” At the time, it was not immediately clear what he was being treated for or where.
Sheik shared a daughter with his longtime girlfriend, Nora Ariffin, and was a practicing Buddhist.
Sheik exploded onto the pop music scene in 1996 with the hit single “Barely Breathing.” The song earned him a Grammy nomination for best male pop vocal performance.
He went on to release nine studio albums over his career, but “Barely Breathing” remains at the top of Sheik’s Spotify page. His most recent album was released in 2022.
In 2020, he told HuffPost that he used to resent performing “Barely Breathing” because “it lived on the radio far longer than it should have,” he said. “And then other things that I was hoping would make it onto the radio never got a chance to, so I was being cock-blocked by my own song at the time.”
Breaking out on Broadway
Sheik also found his footing composing for the theater. His first gig for the stage came in 2002, when he composed the music for the New York Shakespeare Festival production of “Twelfth Night.”
Sheik saw his biggest theater break in 2006, when he and Steven Sater wrote the music for the breakout Broadway musical “Spring Awakening,” an adaptation of a German play from the 1800s.
The show proved to be a big break for many: Actors Lea Michele and Jonathan Groff got their first major Broadway jobs playing the starring roles.
Sheik went on to win two Tony Awards for the “Spring Awakening” music, including best orchestrations and best original score, which he shared with Sater.
“Spring Awakening” also won best musical that year at the Tony Awards and earned a Grammy Award for best musical show album.
According to a 2012 Broadway World article, Sheik said he had been working on the music for a film adaptation of “Spring Awakening.” It is unclear whether that project is still in the works.
The show’s off-Broadway revival, however, is set to begin previews on Nov. 27 and officially open on Dec. 17.
Sheik told freelance music journalist Daniel Van Auken that he met Sater through Buddhism. He said it was Sater who pitched turning “Spring Awakening” into a musical.
“So, Steven said, ‘Why don’t we adapt this show [Spring Awakening] as a musical?’” Sheik recalled to Van Auken in 2024. “Initially, I was like, ‘It’s a f-----g terrible idea. I don’t want to write a musical!’ But then we did it! And that’s how it went down.”
Sheik penned the music for several other shows throughout his career, including “Alice by Heart” (2012), “American Psycho” (2013), “The Taming of the Shrew” (2016) and “The Secret Life of Bees” (2019).
Sheik told Billboard in 2016 that writing the music for “American Psycho” “became very exciting and cool to create a piece of musical theater where you had the initial emergence of house music and early techno and then all the things that came out of it.” He said that at first, “the main thing was understanding the world Patrick Bateman was living in and what that music might have sounded like.”
Personal life and struggles with alcohol
In 2011, Sheik canceled tour dates in support of his album “Cover 80s.” In a since-archived post from Sheik’s Tumblr account, the artist told fans he had been receiving care for alcohol addiction at the time.
“While this episode may sound like a low point, the experience actually confirmed for me how much I want to go forward in my creative life, and how much I sincerely value all of those who have supported me,” Sheik wrote in the post.
After receiving treatment, Sheik wrote he was working on music for several musical theater projects while spending time in Jakarta, Indonesia.
As for Buddhism, Sheik said it made him more comfortable with his life as a performer.
He told ABC News in 2016 that a form of mantra meditation, a practice of Nichiren Buddhism, is what helped him conquer his nerves.
“I was an incredibly self-conscious performer and singer,” the singer-songwriter told ABC News. “And there was something about chanting where you’re just sitting on one note kind of continually that really taught me how to sing one note. If you know how to sing one note, then possibly you can learn how to sing two notes, and then three, maybe four, and there was something really great about using my voice in this very calm and specific way that helped me a lot in terms of becoming someone who could actually get on stage and sing.”
Buddhist themes appeared frequently in the art Sheik created, including in “Spring Awakening,” a show about a group of German teenagers discovering their sexuality in the face of 19th-century repression, he explained.
“In Buddhism, there’s this idea that at any given moment you’re kind of shifting through these 10 different life states, so hell, hunger, anomaly, anger, tranquility, rapture, learning, realization … compassion and enlightenment, and at any given moment … you’re inhabiting one of these states,” he said, according to ABC News. “And certainly in ‘Spring Awakening’ you do have all of these life states represented in terms of what happens to these kids and their kind of reaction to it.”
In 2024, when asked what he was proudest of in his career, Sheik told Van Auken, the freelance journalist, that it was “the fact that I don’t feel like I have too many things that I’ve released that are embarrassing to me.”
“I’ve been able to do what I wanted musically, which feels very gratifying,” Sheik said. “Even very obscure and deep album tracks that probably very few people have heard, I’m really proud of that stuff.”
