Duncan Sheik On Making ‘American Psycho’ Killer Patrick Bateman A Fan of New Wave And Synth Pop

“This is what being Patrick Bateman means to me,” announces the American Psycho anti-hero, delivering a mission statement at the beginning of the new Broadway musical. The 27-year-old investment banker has just emerged from his daily tanning booth visit, his Adonis body adorned with nothing more than a pair of tighty-whities and his prized possession, a high-tech (for 1989, anyway) Sony Walkman with “continuous play.”

In Bret Easton Ellis’ 1991 cult novel and the Christian Bale-starring 2000 film (both were set at the end of the eighties and a commentary on the Me Decade’s debauchery and excess), being Patrick Bateman, in part, meant using his personal stereo to immerse himself in the mainstream pop hits of Huey Lewis and the News, Genesis and Whitney Houston — even Milli Vanilli.

However, in Duncan Sheik’s latest stage show American Psycho (directed by Robert Goold, it opened April 21 at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater), the ’90s pop singer (Google “Barely Breathing”) and Spring Awakening Tony winner introduces the murder-minded Manhattanite to a far cooler oeuvre: Synth-pop and new wave. With his 18 new songs and a handful of rearranged Second British Invasion faves (think: Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me,” Tears For Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World”), the 46-year-old composer — and mega Depeche Mode fan — relished the chance to create music in the vein of the electronic acts of his youth. Thus, he did so not with an orchestra or a traditional guitar-bass-drums band in the pit, but with four players operating era-appropriate keyboards and drum machines while seated in the boxes on the sides of the stage.

“I know for a fact it’s very polarizing,” Sheik tells Idolator, “because there are many people in the Broadway community who find it incredibly heretical.” Indeed, Psycho received only two Tony nods this week, for Best Scenic Design For a Musical and Best Lighting Design. But music fans of a certain age — particularly new wavers who grew up watching John Hughes films and who parked themselves in front of MTV back when it was a 24-hour video-music channel — will find it a way cooler homage to the decade then, say, Rock Of Ages or the Gloria Estefan show, On Your Feet.

Read on, as Sheik tells Idolator what it was like to write an electronic pop-inspired musical that had him channeling his earliest influences — bands like Talk Talk, the Psychedelic Furs, the Cure and the Smiths — and marveling at the fact that, save for Bon Jovi-sized hair and the lack of Twitter and Snapchat, the greed-is-good world of 1989 wasn’t all that different from the one we inhabit today — which, as American Psycho suggests, is even more frightening than the blood-thirsty Bateman himself.

IDOLATOR: When you were first approached with the idea of doing a musical for American Psycho, were you like, “Reeeaally? How’s that going to work?!” Or were you like, “Yes! I get to write in the style of the music I was raised on!” DUNCAN SHEIK: It was the former, for sure. Initially I thought the whole idea of this yuppie, privileged Wall Street banker breaking out into song just seemed absurd, and I didn’t understand any way in which it might work. But I did want to reread the book, because I hadn’t read it since I was in college when it came out in 1991. So, some 18 years later, I re-read the book, and that’s when I had the light bulb over my head: What if he’s always going to nightclubs and he’s listening to all this electronic pop music? What if I went full on in that direction, and did kind of an EDM musical? What if the band in the pit was like Depeche Mode or Kraftwerk? That could be exciting and completely different for a staged musical.

Well, you’re talking to a Depeche Mode fanatic, and I hear a lot of DM and Pet Shop Boys’ influence in your Psycho songs. What was the writing process like: Did you take out your records? YouTube ’80s videos? DS: I started making music as a teenager in the early ’80s. My initial influences were all these English bands, most of which were synth-pop: Talk Talk, the Psychedelic Furs, Tears For Fears, New Order, Depeche Mode — the usual suspects — along with The Cure and The Smiths, [which] were more guitar-oriented. But all the music is completely in my DNA, so it’s not like I need to go back and do any research for it, because it’s still the music I listen to normally. I wasn’t having to check YouTube videos because I think I inherently know how that music is structured and how it functions and what it’s supposed to do emotionally. I like to call it “sad disco” you know?

Like New Order’s “Blue Monday,” one of the darkest dance songs ever made. DS: Exactly! So that stuff was all really easy for me to access. But for the past decade or so I’d been doing a lot of music with string arrangements and acoustic guitars, and real drums and wooden instruments played by human hands. So I spent a few years really digging into Ableton Live, which is an electronic-music production software that was made by DJs in Berlin. I was able to use these synths and drums machines that I’ve had since I was a teenager.

The same machines you had back in the day? DS: Yeah. I’ve used them throughout the years, but in a much more subtle way. But this time, it was like: “Okay, this is my sonic palette, these are the instruments and this is the gear, and I’m going to use technology to create the sound world for this show and I’m going to try to be really strict with myself about it.” There did end up being a few guitars in the show, but it’s definitely mostly synthesizers and drum machines.

When people think about synthesizers and drum machine, we often think of cold, unemotional robots — like Kraftwerk. But synth-pop and new wave could also be very emotional — again, Depeche Mode, OMD. DS: Björk has a famous quote where she says [something like], “It’s not that drums machines and synthesizers are soulless, it’s that the people who make music with them are sometimes soulless.” They’re instruments just like any other: They’re gonna give you as much soul as you put into them. And there are things you can do with a synthesizer made in 1985 that you can’t do with any orchestra, with any modern synthesizer. These are really important bits of technology that have made some of the coolest and most interesting sounds in the history of pop music. But there is also that aspect of Patrick Bateman and his coterie of friends being kind of soulless and only concerned with the surfaces of things and completely into the shiny, gleaming aspect of the late capitalist world, and synthesizers can do that very well, too.

You mention Patrick Bateman being soulless — some might say that’s why he loved mainstream ’80s pop like Phil Collins and Huey Lewis and the News. Huey gets major Bateman love during the show, same as he does during the American Psycho movie. But then, when Bateman goes out to New York’s ’80s mega-club Tunnel, New Order’s “True Faith” is playing, and Patrick says it’s his favorite song. Is it safe to assume that’s one of your favorite songs? It’s hard to imagine a New Order fan also loving Huey Lewis. DS: Yeah. I’m much more of an Anglophile. But Huey Lewis is actually a really great guy, so I don’t want to diss him at all. Huey Lewis we had to use because it’s such an iconic moment [in the novel and the film], and it’s so funny to just see white men dancing to that song. But that song also is very much an outlier in the show because it’s used diegetically; Patrick Bateman is literally just pushing play on the tape machine, and you’re just hearing the original recording. With the other songs, the Phil Collins [cover of “In the Air Tonight”], New Order and Human League [“Don’t You Want Me”], I reimagined them so they sound very different in the show. Tears For Fears [“Everybody Wants to Rule the World”] and “In the Air Tonight,” for example, are these big, choral arrangements. Actually, Phil Collins was there the night before last, and my brother was sitting behind him — he fist-bumped him during “In The Air Tonight!”

Patrick Bateman is a scary guy, but the thing I find really terrifying about American Psycho is that, for all its eighties-ness — it being the so-called “Me” decade, all the greed, the big banks and Wall Street, Donald Trump’s ubiquity — it actually feels very of the moment, very 2016. Did that hit you while you were writing these songs? DS: Oh, yeah. These are issues and problems that have just metastasized over the course of the past 25 years. They’ve just gotten worse in many ways. The banks are doing crazier things than ever; the income inequality is crazier than ever. And the way that this creates a certain kind of psychosis in people is really clear and it’s really a problem. Obviously it’s a piece of musical theater, so it needs to be entertaining, but the show ultimately is a critique of a certain ethos, and a certain way of thinking about the world. I’m glad that you got that. I don’t think anybody in the creative area is celebrating this idea of Patrick Bateman at all, on any level. But you do want to understand him. I think it’s okay to almost be charmed by him or feel for him in some way. This is a person who is a victim of his circumstances and he’s gone crazy because of them.

Has Trump come to the show? Have you invited him? DS: You know, I would love for him to come. But I think he’s a little busy right now. [Laughs]

I saw the show almost two weeks ago, and I still can’t get opening number “Selling Out” out of my head. I observed one of the ushers singing every word and dancing up a storm when the recorded version that you sing came on after the final curtain. But it wasn’t originally written for the musical, right? DS: No. It was the first single from my record that came out in October, called Ledgerdemain. But when I was recording it, I sent it to Rupert Goold, the director of American Psycho, and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, the book writer, and I said, “There’s a version of this song that could be an interesting opening number, and I would change the lyrics so it would be a lyric mostly for Patrick Bateman and the company — what do you think?” And they were totally into the idea. So now there’s, like, six different versions of “Selling Out” that exist. I knew it had the right energy for that moment, and this idea of selling out was so fundamental to that world and to introducing the audience to that world. [Also] we needed something that was a little more intense for the opening. Because in London [for the original, 2013 West End production], we didn’t really feel like we had cracked the beginning 20 minutes of the show.

“Selling Out” is quite the earworm. It brings me back to the fact that you were, before all your Spring Awakening success, a pop music writer. You’ve even made a video for “Selling Out.” Speaking of, music video iconoclasts Duran Duran were in town a couple of weeks ago, and Nick Rhodes told me they were approached for the rights to use “Hungry Like the Wolf,” and I noticed you sampled the song’s guitar riff. DS: Well, no — I didn’t sample anything. Initially the song called “Killing Spree” was like an amalgamated cover of “Hungry Like The Wolf,” but I think that those guys felt it was too, I don’t know — they didn’t like the context that it was being used, and frankly, it was very different from their song. So I had to dilute the “Hungry Like The Wolf”-ness from the piece. But there is a guitar riff that is slightly similar to that, so hopefully they’re not too mad at me about it! I was on an airplane with John Taylor recently, and he’s a really cool guy.

Most musicals have an orchestra or traditional band — guitar, drums, bass, maybe some violins, some horns — in the pit. But Psycho has a four-piece sitting in the boxes on the sides of the stage, playing electronic drums and synthesizers. It seemed the conductor was even directing by Skype. Is this the first time it’s been done this way? DS: Well, in fact, it’s totally normal for conductors to conduct using video cameras now.

But we, the audience, don’t usually see it. DS: Normally, no. But the idea of using this technology of using Ableton for triggering scenes and that being the basis of the music that’s coming out of the speakers, that is quite a novel thing. I know for a fact it’s very polarizing, because there are many people in the Broadway community who find it incredibly heretical. I feel like I’m being sort of punk rock and saying there’s no reason why Broadway shows have to sound a certain way. They can sound any way you want them to sound. People are going to like it or not like it. I’ve taken it upon myself to just sort of expand the sonic power of what a Broadway show might sound like. Even with Spring Awakening, that is what I was doing to some extent, albeit, that was more alternative rock. But electronic music is the pop music of 2016; it has been the pop music of Europe for the past 25 years. So why shouldn’t Broadway reflect that in some way?

I totally agree. When we, thirty-plus years ago, we first heard synth-pop and songs like “Everybody Wants To Rule The World” and “Don’t You Want Me,” there was this sense that it was very disposable music. But there’s not a week that goes by that you don’t hear these songs on the radio, at karaoke, on some TV talent show. Even millennials love them. DS: Because they’re totally classic pop songs. People sort of always poo-pooed those bands. The truth is, Depeche Mode is just as popular as The Who. They’re just as classic in a certain way. I make no apologies for that stuff at all.

Grab tickets to see American Psycho at the the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre here.