"There's a whole wide world of mystery and intrigue out there. I felt like, if I wrote another love song, I was going to go crazy." |

So says Duncan Sheik, spokesman for the heart, articulator for the loved and the lost, guest star on Beverly Hills, 90210. It's not that he's given up on the art of the love song on his new album, Humming, it's just that he's taken it down to another level, one that lies beneath the surface rather than on the sleeve. "It's very hard to write a love song without being cliche," Sheik confesses. "And I felt that [with Duncan Sheik] I had a lot of important things to say, a lot of weighty ideas, but I didn't want to get on my soapbox with my first album."

While many sophomore albums themselves fall victim to cliche, compromising raw originality for over-production or precious orchestration, Humming moves in the opposite direction. Though Sheik hasn't completely shirked the predilection for lush instrumentation that characterized his debut, he's comfortable this time around balancing the London Session Orchestra with alternative guitar tuning and social commentary. In other words, he's no longer simply the poster-boy for the sensitive Nineties guy.

"I always tried not to be dogmatic," explains Sheik of his maturing songcraft. "But then I looked at Bob Dylan, and I thought, he was putting out very important messages." Not that Sheik's vying for Dylan's throne, but he took Dylan's early work as a nod, allowing him to say what he'd always felt. "'Varying Degrees of Con-Artistry' is a song about the tragedy that continually occurs in the world, and it is a bit angry," says the ten-year veteran of Buddhism. "But I think my attitude is more sadness than anger."

Raised on Hilton Head Island, S.C., and the recipient of a much-touted Semiotics degree from Brown University, Sheik cut his musical teeth playing lead guitar in a college band with fellow student Lisa Loeb. Branching off a year later, he fine-tuned his delicate vocals, intricate guitar and piano work, and headed West after graduation. Soon after, he was signing on the dotted line and heading off to France to make his solid and articulate debut. These days, Sheik explores his world-weary sadness in his Tribeca loft in New York City, where the foundation of Humming was written. "I was living in Los Angeles, and I went to France to record the last album," says Sheik of his nomadic nature. "And when I came back, I flew through New York. I just never took the next flight. I stopped here."

To build upon the skeletal structure of Humming, Sheik picked up again and headed to El Cortijo, Spain. There, Duncan holed up with producer Rupert Hine and arranger Simon Hale for two months, and spent time with records by Steve Reich, Mark Hollis and Belle & Sebastian. Overlooking the Mediterranean, he busied himself creating eleven lush, gorgeous meditations on sadness, inspiration, bitterness and the death of Jeff Buckley.

"Grace was the record of the Nineties. Jeff definitely had the voice of the Nineties," says Sheik of the hero he never got the chance to meet. "That song ["A Body Goes Down"] is sort of a funeral procession song." Asked what he makes of such a young person losing his life, Sheik waxes Buddhist. "I believe that everything in life happens in a strict cause-and-effect method, and while both happen concurrently, the weight doesn't hit simultaneously."

Given that he accepts life's unfortunate happenstance as fate and karma, it's not surprising that Sheik is comfortable with his place at the forefront of the sensitive singer-songwriter "trend." "If they want to make a trend out of it, that's fine," Sheik admits. "But I'm not going to change who I am just to make myself more appealing."

HEIDI SHERMAN(October 6, 1998)