According to a 2012 Broadway World article, Sheik said he had been working on the music for a film adaptation of “Spring Awakening.” It is unclear whether that project is still in the works. The show’s off-Broadway revival, however, is set to begin previews on Nov. 27 and officially open on Dec. 17. Sheik told freelance music journalist Daniel Van Auke that he met Sater through Buddhism. He said it was Sater who pitched turning “Spring Awakening” into a musical. “So, Steven said, ‘Why don’t we adapt this show [Spring Awakening] as a musical?’” Sheik recalled to Van Auke in 2024. “Initially, I was like, ‘It’s a f—ing terrible idea. I don’t want to write a musical!’ But then we did it! And that’s how it went down.” Sheik penned the music for several other shows throughout his career, including “Alice by Heart” (2012), “American Psycho” (2013), “The Taming of the Shrew” (2016) and “The Secret Life of Bees” (2019). Sheik told Billboard in 2016 that writing the music for “American Psycho” “became very exciting and cool to create a piece of musical theater where you had the initial emergence of house music and early techno and then all the things that came out of it.” He said that, at first, “the main thing was understanding the world Patrick Bateman was living in and what that music might have sounded like.”Personal life and struggles with alcohol In 2011, Sheik canceled tour dates in support of his album “Cover 80s.” In a since-archived post from Sheik’s Tumblr account, the artist told fans he had been receiving care for alcohol addiction at the time. “While this episode may sound like a low point, the experience actually confirmed for me how much I want to go forward in my creative life, and how much I sincerely value all of those who have supported me,” Sheik wrote in the post. After receiving treatment, Sheik wrote he was working on music for several musical theater projects while spending time in Jakarta, Indonesia. Duncan Sheik performs in 2023.Al Pereira / Getty Images fileAs for Buddhism, Sheik said it made him more comfortable with his life as a performer. He told ABC News in 2016 that a form of mantra meditation, a practice of Nichiren Buddhism, is what helped him conqure his nerves. “I was an incredibly self-conscious performer and singer,” the singer-songwriter told ABC News. “And there was something about chanting where you’re just sitting on one note kind of continually that really taught me how to sing one note. If you know how to sing one note, then possibly you can learn how to sing two notes, and then three, maybe four, and there was something really great about using my voice in this very calm and specific way that helped me a lot in terms of becoming someone who could actually get on stage and sing.”Buddhist themes appeared frequently in the art Sheik created, including in “Spring Awakening,” a show about a group of German teenagers discovering their sexuality in the face of 19th-century repression, he explained. “In Buddhism, there’s this idea that at any given moment you’re kind of shifting through these 10 different life states, so hell, hunger, anomaly, anger, tranquility, rapture, learning, realization … compassion and enlightenment, and at any given moment … you’re inhabiting one of these states,” he said, according to ABC News. “And certainly in ‘Spring Awakening’ you do have all of these life states represented in terms of what happens to these kids and their kind of reaction to it.”In 2024, when asked what he was proudest of in his career, Sheik told Daniel Van Auke, the freelance journalist, that it was “the fact that I don’t feel like I have too many things that I’ve released that are embarrassing to me.” “I’ve been able to do what I wanted musically, which feels very gratifying,” Sheik said. “Even very obscure and deep album tracks that probably very few people have heard, I’m really proud of that stuff.”