The two time Tony Award-winning composer Duncan Sheik, is making his way to Northampton’s Iron Horse Music Hall this Monday night on tour for his new album “Covers 80′s”. You may recognize Sheik’s name from his chart-topping hit “Barely Breathing” or from his hit musical “Spring Awakening”. I got the chance to talk with him about the new album, the tour, and post “Spring Awakening” life.

Mount Holyoke News: What inspired you to do an 80’s cover album?

Duncan Sheik: Those were the bands and artists that I listened to when I was a teenager and when I first started writing songs. They were kind of my big inspiration. It was a little like a labor of love, you know, like here are these songs some of which are pop songs and some of which are maybe not that well known, but they were the things that mattered to me. I just wanted to re-imagine them in a way where they weren’t in that 80’s modality and give them more of a timeless sound.

MHN: What were you up to in the 80’s?

DS: I was going to boarding school. I went to this place called Eaglebrook, and after Eaglebrook I went to Andover, and after that I went to Brown, so basically I was in a bunch of dorms.

MHN: Do you have a favorite song on the new album?

DS: It kind of changes with the weather. I like Stripped, which is the first song on the album. It starts very, very stark and then by the end of the track it gets quite dramatic and to do that without drums and just using acoustic instruments, you know it’s not easy to pull that off and it comes together in a very satisfying way. There are aspects of the Tears for Fears song [Shout] that I really like, that mostly has to do with Rachel Yamagata singing on it and there’s a weird ukulele part on that song that I think is really effective. And then The Cure song called Kyoto Song that is very obscure. I don’t know, today those are the things that I like.

MHN: Out of all your songs from any album, do you have one that is your favorite to play live?

DS: Uh, no, I don’t actually. I mean, I could probably tell you certain songs I really despise, but I probably shouldn’t do that. Yeah, no, anyway I don’t really play favorites you know, they’re just songs.

MHN:  When you perform live, do you find that the audience requests certain songs?

DS: Yeah, yeah they do. They like to hear songs that they heard before so, you know, they want to hear Half-Life because it was in a teen movie, or they want to hear On A High because it was on the radio. Sometimes they want to hear For You or Home because that was the song they played at their wedding. There’s all kinds of situations where people have songs that have a particular nostalgia for them. And I’m happy to play those songs as long as I can remember how to play them! I have about ten albums worth of material if you include the scores and the theater stuff, and so it’s like too much stuff to keep in your head. At any given moment there’s only songs that I can recall when I’m on stage.

MHN: Spring Awakening was and still is a huge success (I’m a big fan of it myself). Do you have any plans to go back to Broadway?

DS: Yeah. Right now there are four theater pieces that are in various stages of development. There are two that are with Steve Sater. We’re doing an adaptation of the Hans Christian Anderson fairytale called “The Nightingale” and we’re doing that at La Jolla Rep this summer and if that production goes well then hopefully that show will come to Broadway. We’re also doing an adaptation of “Alice in Wonderland”.

Separate from Steven, I’m actually the music and lyrics for the stage version of “American Psycho”. We had the first workshop of that piece last month in New York, and it went really well. It’s very exciting, it’s very outrageous, I don’t know how well you know that book or that material but it’s very intense but also incredibly funny at the same time and there’s a really, really interesting musical sensibility. It’ll be my first electronic musical.

MHN: You have a lot of projects going on at once, that must be pretty stressful and time consuming.

DS: You know, it’s ok because theater projects, they’re funny. Like sometimes you’ll work really intensely on them for two or three weeks or workshopping, and then nothing will happen for six months. So you need to have a lot of things on your plate just to make sure that you are keeping busy and that eventually at some point you might be able to pay some bills. But that doesn’t always happen.

MHN: Would you say your life has changed since Spring Awakening?

DS: Not dramatically. I think that Spring Awakening was a really wonderful event in my life and it did help me. There was a moment in 2004 or 2005 when I was really feeling very underappreciated as an artist, as a song writer, and as a composer, and when Spring Awakening became a success that was a really nice acknowledgment that maybe people did like some of my songs after all. So that was really nice. But ultimately- look, I think I’ve been doing the same thing since I was 22 years old which is I wake up in the morning, I have a cup of coffee, I chant (I’m a Buddhist so I chant), and then I try and write a good song, you know, I sit down at the guitar or piano or my computer and I try and write a good song. And that hasn’t changed at all, and that’s probably what my life will be like from now until when I die.

MHN: What started you on song writing?

DS: Well, I started playing guitar when I was a little kid; I was around five years old when I got my first acoustic guitar. Like many five-year-old kids I wasn’t a big music fan, and I wasn’t a particularly good music student. I liked playing guitar and I liked gear, I liked synthesizers and drum machines. So when I became a teenager that’s what I spent all my money on. Any money that I ever had that I made bussing tables, I would spend it on musical equipment. So, I think it’s just something that I’ve always wanted to do. Frankly I had no formal education as a composer, and I was a terrible music student. But I knew I loved writing songs and recording songs, so I just kind of stuck with it, if you spend enough time doing something you do get better at it, at your craft let’s say, and you abilities increase. I feel like it’s taken me 20 years but now I feel like I know what I’m doing when it comes to sitting down and writing a song.

MHN: Did you know that Barely Breathing is listed as one of VH1′s “100 greatest songs of the 90’s?

DS: Is it? Well, there’s no accounting for taste.

MHN: How do you feel now that you know this?

DS: I mean, it’s a pop song. It’s an ok song. It’s one of those things where it’s a song I wrote in probably 20 minutes, and people seem to like it and that’s nice. I play it, I played it last night and people seemed to enjoy it. it’s one of those things where for a long time I really hated playing that song because it was the only thing that people knew of my work. And I guess that the only good thing about Spring Awakening is that at least now people know that there is a lot more to my body of work than just Barely Breathing.

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To buy tickets for tonight’s show click here.

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