POP Montreal Portraits: Quaker Parents
Mark Grundy. Quaker Parents.
Montreal is a mecca for so many out of town musical sorts to find a home. Stars, Wintersleep, Owen Pallett, Braids. It isn’t just the fripperies, poutine, and cheap rent. It’s also an opportunity to connect with a very diverse and interconnected music scene.
One of the most recent imports to the 514 is Quaker Parents, a Halifax band with Mark A. Grundy and a line up that changes constantly. With killer lyrics set over lo-fi music, Grundy creates folk music of meaning and substance. I asked Grundy a few questions about starting Quaker Parents.
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Grundy is a songwriter, more so than a song recorder. “I write a lot of songs but record most of them infrequently,” he says.
Some people may know Grundy from his other band, Heaven For Real. Quaker Parents, though started in 2009-2010 when he began playing with his brother J. Scott Grundy and their friend Brad. “Quaker Parents was the first band that Scott and I travelled around with,” says Grundy.
The line-up changes frequently, though it usually includes his brother. “It’s not always for sure who’s gonna be there,” Grundy says. “This time [at POP Montreal], it’s Me & J. Scott Grundy & Graeme Stewart.”
The lyrics are complex and meaningful in most songs. Grundy does listeners the service of writing them out on the bandcamp page. The words play a role in the song composition. “It starts in groups of words and I go and get the little words to act as a glue of meaning and then the glue dries and it doesn’t really all stick together usually, so I use some other adhesives to make it feel somewhat all enmeshed hopefully,” he says of his process. He’s “Happy about most of them, but there are a few stinkers. Usually the newer and more complete, the better I feel about them.”
Grundy looks forward to playing with the other bands on his bill at POP Montreal. Those who come to see the show can expect to see “Three people moving songs around a stage at Brasserie Beaubien.”
“It’s been a good few years of playing it,” he says of POP Montreal. “I have been living in this city for a year now. My birthday is happening during it again so that provides a nice structure to that ‘event'”
Quaker Parents plays on September 24 along with Not You Hand Cream, Dorothea Paas and blue odeur at Brasserie Beaubien at 8 p.m. $10. Click HERE for tickets.
