Duncan Sheik
Within the music circles I appreciate, “Top 40 Radio” is a very bad phrase. It’s not respected, and it’s seen as over-marketed, throwaway crap. I grew up buying things like 4AD import records—the most obscure kinds of art-rock I could find—and suddenly people were calling me a pop singer. That caused a lot of cognitive dissonance, to put it mildly. When I made the Phantom Moon album in 2000, I was thinking, “I’m going to make a record that’s only acoustic instruments, with strings and woodwinds. And the lyrics are going to be written by a poet/playwright [Steven Sater] whom few people know about.” It was the most anti-Top 40 thing I could do. And all it did was cause confusion. The audience I already had didn’t understand what I was doing, and the audience I was trying to reach, at that point, just wasn’t interested.
From Performing Songwriter Issue 115, Jan/Feb 2009
Category: In Their Own Words
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