Duncan Sheik says he revisited these songs out of nostalgia, not to try to fix them. KT Auleta

Duncan Sheik's dinner-party repertoire is now complete. When a guitar would be thrust into his hands at such gatherings, the singer-songwriter turned Broadway composer felt awkward playing his own material, and could only do the odd Oasis song on demand. So he went looking for sing-along material in the music of his 1980s youth. He eventually gathered songs by New Order, Tears for Fears, the Smiths and others, on an album, "Covers 80s," due Tuesday.

Some of his choices, such as the Thompson Twins' 1983 hit "Hold Me Now," are inextricable from the glossy over-production (and overblown hairdos) that were standard in that era. To strip away those connotations, Mr. Sheik came up with acoustic arrangements that "spin the songs on their axis so you're seeing the other side." For instance, at the core of "What Is Love?" by Howard Jones (with whom he toured last year), he discovered "odd and eccentric" key changes. In his upstate New York studio, he recorded the songs with guitar, ukulele and harmonium.

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Listen to a full song from "Covers 80s"

Mr. Sheik says he's not on a mission to rehabilitate the music's legacy. He was motivated by nostalgia for his adolescence. But the work unexpectedly merged with one of his several looming theater projects. Four years after winning two Tony awards for his score to the "indie rock" musical "Spring Awakening," Mr. Sheik has written 14 new songs for a musical adapted from the Bret Easton Ellis novel "American Psycho."

The show, being developed in London, with a script by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa (who recently retooled "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark"), will likely feature some of the same "egregious examples" of '80s pop that were satirized in the novel, including numbers by Genesis and Huey Lewis and the News. While Mr. Sheik's album is acoustic, he envisions an electronic instrumentation for "American Psycho," atypical of musical theater. He wants "the musicians at a bank of synthesizers, just like the way I saw Depeche Mode do it in 1986."