By Jim Bessman
The Songwriters Hall of Fame is thrilled that Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater will inaugurate its new Words About Music series on February 20th, 2008, focusing on important songs and songwriters that span the rich history of the popular song.
Sheik and Sater, of course, are the creators of the Tony Award-winning musical Spring Awakening, which playwright (and poet) Sater based on the controversial 1891 German play by Frank Wedekind and deals with the yearnings and frustrations of young adulthood. But while alternative rock singer-songwriter Sheik had earned a Grammy nomination for his 1996 hit “Barely Breathing,” Sater had never even contemplated writing songs until his fateful meeting with Sheik in 1999.
“It was completely serendipitous,” says Indiana-born Sater, who like New Jersey native Sheik is a devoted Buddhist. “He had moved to New York from L.A. and I went to his loft in Tribeca to chant with him, and found out that he’d wanted to be a musician since he was five years old—and I wrote a novel when I was five! So it turned into a profound meeting—the mystic exchange of a lifetime.”
They communed deeply over many things during a marathon conversation, including songwriting.
“I had a play going into rehearsal, Umbrage, about an aging would-be singer-songwriter who was getting nowhere, and Duncan asked if I’d written a song,” continues Sater. “I did have a lyric, and faxed it to him around 1:30 in the morning. He called me the next day and gave me a CD of the lyric set to music and it was beautiful.”
And so began an extraordinary partnership. After composing music for two songs for Umbrage, Sheik co-wrote his acclaimed 2001 album “Phantom Moon” entirely with Sater. But Sater had a more ambitious idea.
“I said we should create a theatrical piece together and gave him a copy of Spring Awakening. He said that if we did it, he wanted the music to be as relevant as the songs people listen to outside the theater.”
Their ensuing achievement was hailed universally, with The New York Observer’s critic offering representative praise: “Once in a generation an unexpected new musical comes along and changes everything.”
As Duncan Sheik remarked in an interview, “For me, what was amazing about it was opening up to the idea of what role music could play in the context of the narrative and seeing musical theater as a form [that] has all this amazing potential.”
Sheik and Sater have since further mined that potential on the musicals Nero (“a dark, wicked, political and fun piece,” says Sater) and The Nightingale (“based on the Hans Christian Anderson tale about a young man’s search for enlightenment and the power of culture during a time of political repression”), as well as songs for movies including “A Home at the End of the World” and “The Cake Eaters.”
“We’ve become very close friends, and our songwriting relationship is so easy,” concludes Sater. “I give him the lyric—and he sets it to music! Ninety-five percent of the time it’s verbatim, so there’s very little back-and-forth other than me emailing him a lyric and he emailing back an MP3. There’s really no discussion: He just understands what I write and hears melodies in it. It’s pretty remarkable!”