ALUMNI PROFILE
BRENDAN QUINN Bachelor of Arts (Hons)’03 Creative Director
I learned so much from the tutors and professors at King’s... I do think that the foundation was laid in terms of being able create something.
BRENDAN QUINN can’t wait until his new recording studio is ready so he can have his picture taken at the console. A creative director at Vapor Music, one of Toronto’s largest post-production audio facilities, he says the new office and recording studio is not only state of the art, he’s going to have instruments at hand, including his grandfather’s banjo. As one of the key players on the team that works on animated children’s series, the hours are long and the timelines tight. He says the pandemic didn’t help, adding, “I’ve never experienced that level of intensity.” What he loves about long-form composition for animation, as compared to composing music for commercials, is that the dialogue and the soundtrack come first. He says they usually drive the visuals. He likes this new configuration of being involved in the earlier stages of a project. Responsible for entire shows, like the award-winning Netflix kids’ series, Hilda, Quinn isn’t always composing, but he’s still very much a part of the creative process. Quinn says that music is part of his genetic structure. By way of explanation,
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TIDINGS | WINTER 2022
he shares the story of how his grandparents met in England, during the Second World War. His grandmother was a nurse and nurses weren’t allowed to socialize with doctors, but she would go to the piano in the hospital and play Für Elise for everyone to hear. Beethoven’s famous piece was the cue for a doctor, the man who became Quinn’s grandfather, to meet her in secret. Quinn’s musical interests started early. In grade 4, he wasn’t putting much effort into his piano lessons and his mother and piano teacher threatened to call it quits. He says they conspired, knowing how he’d react. “I just had this moment where I realized music was obviously very important to me.” From then on, he became much more respectful of his teacher’s time and effort. After years of Royal Conservatory piano, Quinn started a band in high school with his best friend Jon Ophek, BA(Hons)’03. Several years later, Ophek joined Quinn at King’s and along with Guy Godfree and Dom Hanlon, ’03, they became a band called PDQ. The band takes its name from his father’s initials, which became the friends’ vernacu-
lar for someone who was getting too intense. There’s no malice intended; Quinn says— this is an endearing quality of his father’s. “The first gig we got was to play the Wardroom and it was, basically, ‘just make your friends come out and drink beer and suffer,’” Quinn says with a self-effacing grin. Looking back, he says the Wardroom was ‘magical.’ It’s where they learned to set up equipment, get over stage fright and where they started to perform their own music. It’s also where Quinn held the prized position of happy hour bartender. Wardroom gigs became more frequent, thanks in part to Daniel Shearer, BA’03, who took on the role of unofficial promoter—and PDQ built a following. Eventually, their feel-good, soft rock sound was being sought out by other venues in Halifax, like the Marquee. When graduation came, PDQ decided to go on the road for a year. “That was an amazing trip,” Quinn says, but adds, “It was just very exhausting. By the end of all of it, we were kind of ragged—not making enough money.” Their last gig was in a tree planting camp in Northern Ontario. The beds, along
