2 posts tagged “duncan sheik”

Duncan Sheik is in the air: I heard "She Runs Away" at Rite Aid on Monday, then again at Citgo on Tuesday.  Now that I think about it, I hear him in the grocery store a lot.  He must be making a tidy sum on royalties, and he certainly doesn't need more exposure from a no-name blogger, but I like him so much I'm going to present the video for "She Runs Away" anyway:

I discovered Duncan Sheik back when his first album came out.  I heard "Barely Breathing" on the radio (who didn't?) and liked it, and when the CD showed up on the BMG website for five or six dollars I went ahead and ordered it.  From the very first track ("She Runs Away"!) I was hooked, because it was apparent that Sheik was a David Sylvian fan and was carrying on the song-oriented work that Sylvian had abandoned (at the time) in favor of ambient music (yawn).  The snare drum sound on "She Runs Away"--that's straight out of Secrets of the Beehive!  The chord changes in the bridge of "Barely Breathing"--pure Sylvian!  So I became a fan (because I was a Sylvian fan; there's another post to write), and I roped Mrs. Veneer into my fandom, and we had the pleasure of seeing him from a front table at the Birchmere in August 2005.  It was a wonderful show, we got to meet him afterwards, he was incredibly warm; the whole thing was such a great experience that when he played the Birchmere again in February 2006, we took the kids to see him, he played their favorite song of his ("Serena"), and my favorite ("Such Reveries") in the encore, and he did another meet-and-greet afterwards so the kids got to meet him too, and it was a fabulous and memorable night all around.  Not only that, his lead guitarist of choice, Gerry "Spooky Ghost" Leonard (in the video above) is a treasure in his own right, and I'll expand on that proclamation at some point.

Duncan doesn't play "Serena" very often, so how was it that we were treated to it?  It was all the work of a group of drunk girls at the next table, who between songs kept shouting "Play Serena!"  Then at one point a waitress, in her passage along the front of the stage, passed Duncan a note, which he read aloud to us: "It's our friend's birthday, and her name is Serena, so could you please sing Serena?"  At which point another audience member piped up, "I have a sister named Half-Life!" (another of his songs) to the general amusement of everyone.  No one in the room believed the Serena birthday story, but the band played Serena anyway, and really rocked out on it.  Doug Yowell even broke a drumstick (not a regular drumstick, but one that looks like something you use to clean a wok)!  They didn't play "Half-Life," though, and Duncan merely wagged a finger at a request for "Barely Breathing."  Oh, well.  I'll close with a "video" for "Serena"--

Speaking of the Mellotron (as I was yesterday), the advent of digital synthesizers around 1980 was the death knell for electromechanical keyboards such as the Mellotron and the Birotron.  Of course there are still some in use by instrumental fetishists, but their days of production are over.  On the other hand, there is now a whole universe of virtual musical instruments, or softsynths, available to anyone with a computer and an Internet connection, and the Mellotron is well represented.

Duncan Sheik made the revolutionary move of releasing his last album, White Limousine, with a bonus DVD containing the individual instrumental and vocal tracks of every song on the album.  The idea was for fans to remix the songs any way they wanted to, send them to Duncan, and the best ones would be featured on a website and eventually issued on a CD.  About five or six remixes did appear on a dedicated website, but the site seems to have disappeared, and indeed Duncan has all but abandoned his performing career now that he is a renowned Broadway composer (and good for him!).

The connection between the two previous paragraphs is that for my first remix attempt I've added some Mellotron (and Clavinet, percussion, and a new bassline) to "Nothing Fades:"