“Musicals are really something I don’t like,” Duncan Sheik says. “I can watch ‘Porgy and Bess’ or ‘West Side Story’ and get something out of it, but the idea of shoehorning something that’s supposed to be dialogue into song makes me insane.”

So how did 35-year-old Mr. Sheik come to compose a score for “Spring Awakening”? The show, written with Steven Sater, will be performed in concert on Wednesday at Jazz at Lincoln Center at the Time Warner Center, and it is by almost all accounts a musical. All but one, anyway: Mr. Sheik calls it an “anti-musical.”

His road to “Spring” wound through stage fright and pop stardom. The one-time Grammy nominee recounted the story over French onion soup at a restaurant near his TriBeCa home and studio.

Though he has loved music since his grandparents gave him a guitar at age 5, Mr. Sheik used to be embarrassed by his voice and refused to sing in public for years. As a teenager he created purely instrumental recordings, and later, when he started to record vocal pieces, he was crippled by anxiety during his small live gigs. “I couldn’t sing in public at all, it was like a nightmare,” he says.

At Brown University, Mr. Sheik played guitar for bespectacled singersongwriter Lisa Loeb, a fellow student. And yet, “I didn’t want to be someone else’s guitar player,” he explains. “So I started singing in the privacy of a little recording studio.”

After graduation, he moved to Los Angeles and got one of those tapes into the hands of a receptive executive at Immortal Records. Mr. Sheik was “the token white-guy guitar player” at a label that at the time handled mostly hiphop groups.The fit wasn’t right. After a few years in “music-business limbo,” Mr. Sheik inked a deal with a larger label, BMG, in which he was paid to write songs and built up a repertoire, but rarely performed in public.

Ultimately, Atlantic Records released his eponymous first album in 1996. A month later he was opening up for the folkie pop singer Jewel in front of 2,000 people. The album went on to sell 551,000 copies and that year he was nominated for a Grammy for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance. It wasn’t quite overnight success – he had been composing for years – but it appeared that way to the general public.

Though his follow-up album, “Humming,” was less successful, Mr. Sheik continued to compose and perform.

Mr. Sheik, a practicing Buddhist who chants regularly and volunteers at a downtown Buddhist center, met playwright Mr. Sater through Buddhist connections.

He asked Mr. Sheik to read poet Ted Hughes’s translation of Frank Wedekind’s 1891 play “Fruhlings Erwachen” (Spring Awakening). The dark drama follows a group of young teenagers who enter puberty with no guidance from their remote elders. What they don’t know ends up hurting them: The play tackles both heterosexual and homosexual sex, masturbation, abortion,and suicide.It was scandalous in its time and still raises eyebrows more than 100 years later.

“Spring Awakening” was not produced in an uncensored form until long after Wedekind’s death. The play was banned in England until the 1970s. Lately, however, it has become popular with college theater groups, whose actors are both fresh-faced and of legal age. (Coincidentally, Oscar nominated actress Laura Linney worked as a grip in a 1985 production of “Spring Awakening” at Brown – although not with Mr. Sheik).

Mr. Sheik, upon reading the play, was dubious. Even now,he says that the play is “bizarre.” He asked Mr. Sater, “You want to do a musical version of this?”

He agreed to compose some songs, provided that the result could be “antimusical.” He explains: “There’s a play that’s going on and then when a song happens it’s just a song. The song can exist on its own.” The tunes are “music that people in our generation would listen to as opposed to that other style. It’s great for what it is but it’s not so interesting to me.”

In its current incarnation, “Spring Awakening” is still set in the 19th century, but the music is modern rock. “It’s a difficult things to conceptualize,” Mr. Sheik conceded. “Luckily, Baz Luhrmann exists,” he added, referring to the success of the period rock musical “Moulin Rouge.”

“Spring Awakening” was workshopped at the Sundance Theater Workshop in 2000 and twice at the Roundabout Theater in 2001.”Roundabout was supposed to be the break,” Mr. Sheik says, “but it just never happened.”

“It’s expensive. If you do a musical with 16 actors and six or seven musicians, it’s a $5 million investment for someone. Especially for new work – It’s one thing if you’re doing a revival and you know people are going to come see it. It’s daunting.”

If the performance at Jazz at Lincoln Center is well received, the hope is for a full production and a longer run at another theater. Mr. Sheik says that Roundabout, the Public Theater, and the Atlantic Theater are all interested.

In the years between the musical’s conception and its performance Wednesday, Mr. Sheik has kept busy. In 2001, Nonesuch released his album “Phantom Moon,” with lyrics by Mr. Sater. The record is an ode to Nick Drake, whom Mr. Sheik unabashedly adores (and to whom he is frequently compared).He also composed the score for the Public Theater’s 2002 “Shakespeare in the Park” production of “Twelfth Night.” Michael Mayer, who directs “Spring Awakening,” asked him to write the score for the 2004 movie “A Home at the End of the World,” which starred Colin Farrell and Sissy Spacek.

Mr. Sheik is still best known for being a solo musician, though. He hasn’t left that world behind. In December, he recorded tracks for a new record that he has been working on for two years. “It’s probably going to be another six months ’til it’s done,” he says. When asked if the result will be a pop album, he balks.

“I’m kind of uncomfortable with the word ‘pop’ these days.”

May we suggest “anti-pop”?