Waiting to Exhale : ‘Barely Breathing’ Singer-Songwriter Duncan Sheik, Busy Touring, Can’t Wait to Get Back in the Studio

Bright and soft-spoken, singer-songwriter Duncan Sheik is about as congenial an interview subject as a pop-music journalist is likely to encounter.

But ask him if he really is the melancholy and sensitive introvert that some of his songs suggest, and Sheik, who performs at the Coach House tonight, flashes enough exasperation to cause the inquisitor to recoil.

“I don’t like to get too much into the cult of personality side of things, like what I may or may not be like [as a person],” he said. “It’s more important how the song affects the listener and what’s happening in the music.

“A lot of people ask me, ‘Were you the kid in high school who always wore black and wrote poetry in the corner?’ That’s not at all who I was or who I am.”

Sheik’s debut album is heavy with wintry folk-pop songs that are sometimes infectiously melodic and often soothingly introspective. Pronounced string arrangements and breezy vocals color songs such as the pastoral and lightly galloping “She Runs Away” and the baroque ballad “Days Go By.”

Sheik specializes in artful, plaintive music that is as much responsible for the strong female contingent at his concerts as the 27-year-old’s willowy good looks. He acknowledges his substantial female following with slight embarrassment. He appears more comfortable talking about interest from musically savvy colleagues.

A lot of musicians, he said, “are into the arrangements and my guitar playing. That’s cool. I’m not just playing G, C and D chords. Harmonically, even though some of the things sound pretty simple, which is definitely a conscious decision, there’s still some pretty complex things going on in the music.”

Sheik’s introduction to music came early. Thanks to his grandmother, who studied piano at the Juilliard School in New York, he was tinkling the ivories before his sixth birthday. After his mom, a single parent, moved the family from New Jersey to Hilton Head Island, S.C., Sheik received the instrument he had long coveted: an electric guitar.

By age 12, Sheik was playing Def Leppard and Van Halen tunes in a cover band otherwise comprising high school students. But even at that age, Sheik’s musical interest wasn’t limited to heavy-metal bands. The Beatles and, in particular, florid progressive-rock groups including Yes and Genesis were early influences. In summer music camp, he studied jazz and classical.

In his teens he gravitated toward such dreamy and atmospheric ‘80s British pop figures as the Cocteau Twins, the Blue Nile and David Sylvian.

As a freshman at Brown University in Providence, R.I., Sheik began to focus on singing, though he also played guitar in a band that featured fellow Brown student Lisa Loeb. He spent endless hours in the college recording studio honing his original material.

Despite his deep desire to make music a career path, Sheik majored in semiotics, the study of signs and symbols in language.

“If I had to major in music I would have gotten burnt out on it,” he says. “I wanted to study something more general in terms of cultural scope where I could get into fine arts, literature, psychoanalysis.”

After graduating in 1992, Sheik headed for the record-industry capital of Los Angeles. Within a year, he had a deal with Immortal Records, which is distributed by Sony-affiliated Epic Records.

Sheik, however, said that he wasn’t prepared creatively to make an album and that the label was ill-equipped to promote an artist with his adult alternative rock orientation. Immortal is home to combustive Orange County band Korn, a heavy-guitar group with some hip-hop influences, as well as a number of rap artists. They soon parted company.

In 1995, Sheik signed with Atlantic Records. Ten months after its release, his single “Barely Breathing” is doing well on sales and radio charts.

He has been touring nonstop for eight months and figures to be on the road worldwide at least through the beginning of 1998. “The amount of work you have to do when you have a hit record is insane,” he said.

Sheik would rather be in a studio working on new material.

“It’s not really in my personality to say, ‘Hey, I’m up on stage; it’s great.’ I’m very uncomfortable in that situation--so much so that it sometimes gets in the way of my performance,” he said. “With all the variables that exist with playing a live show, a lot of times things just don’t sound the way I want them to. That’s very frustrating to me because you can’t really do anything about it because you’re in the middle of performing a show.

“But it’s a process I’m going through,” he said. “I’m trying to become the best performer I can be.”

* Duncan Sheik appears with Jill Sobule tonight at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. 8 p.m. $13.50-$15.50. (714) 496-8930.