As Duncan Sheik began his fourth album, the South Carolina singer-songwriter made a conscious decision to try a new way of working. Due out August 27th, Daylight was inspired in part by the songwriting styles of Sheik favorites PJ Harvey, Bjork, Doves and Coldplay.

"My other records kind of start with an idea that's melodically and harmonically pretty far out there, and then you kind of reign it in during the recording so it makes some sense to the listener," Sheik says. "This time I made sure that the song was totally a pop song, and then tried to see how interesting I could make it in the recording process, with the arrangements."

That approach extended to Sheik's lyrics as well, with the song "Magazine," fulfilling his goal to write about more universal topics. "It's a song about walking past a newsstand and seeing somebody you know in a bit of a compromising position and psychologically what it does to you when all of a sudden your private life is made very public," he says. "Instead of writing a lyric that's introspective, poetic meditation on your internal life, it's about magazines, something we all experience and are constantly bombarded by the images and stories and that kind of hot media sensation you get from magazines."

Also included among the album's eleven songs is "On Her Mind," a collaboration with Foreigner guitarist Mick Jones. "I'm good friends with his step-daughter, Samantha Ronson, and I'm going to be producing her debut album," says Sheik, who acknowledges having been a Foreigner fan growing up. "In the midst of that process, I was hanging out with Mick a fair amount. He was over at my place one day and grabbed a guitar and he found a little acoustic guitar riff that I thought was very cool, and then I kind of sketched out some chord movements around that riff and we took it from there."

COLIN DEVENISH
(July 15, 2002)