No drum roll, please

Internet fame isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Especially when it happens at age 16 on a global scale.

Sean Quigley was a student at Oak Park High School in 2011, when he posted a YouTube music video of himself playing a rollicking rendition of the Little Drummer Boy in the snow. The video went viral and he was dubbed “Winnipeg’s Little Drummer Boy” by national media.

“Try living in the shadow of that for the rest of your life,” says the now 30-year-old, sipping a large black coffee. The word “BOLD” is tattooed across the knuckles of his right hand.

Quigley is a coffee fiend and regular at Thom Bargen’s mahogany-lined Tuxedo café, stopping in often for a break from his nearby home office or for a jolt of caffeine on the way to a client meeting.

His life and career path have been shaped — for better and worse — by that early brush with celebrity.

The Drummer Boy cover was inspired by a film-class assignment and the Christmas with Boney M. album in his parents’ record collection. Quigley was excited to shoot and edit a fun music video to accompany his own mix of the holiday classic; starring in said video, which now has four million views, was secondary, he says.

Online virality was a new concept at the time and no one, including Quigley, knew exactly what to do with the attention. While the success translated to CD sales and travel opportunities, it also left him feeling socially isolated and professionally pigeonholed.

“They typecast me as a musician and a singer, but I’m just not,” he says. “I learned how to play instruments and make art, but I was always interested in the technology side of it.”

Quigley tried the musician thing for nearly a decade, performing alongside his wife Karli in Bold as Lions — a faith-based pop-rock band with two full-length albums and two-dozen slick, self-directed music videos.

Production was still a passion, so he started honing his offstage skills as a concert audio technician and videographer for other artists, the latter of which he loved.

While the pandemic took live performing off the table, it also offered a chance to pivot. In 2020, the couple launched a digital media business, called the Quigley Dream Company, and began winding down the band.

Karli is the company’s “creative genius,” says Quigley, while he handles much of the behind-the-scenes work. Together, they’ve built websites, organized photoshoots and filmed videos for the Winnipeg Jets, Jenna Rae Cakes, performer Fefe Dobson and others.

Earlier this year, Quigley stepped back into the spotlight as host of his new longform video podcast, the Quigley Dreamcast. In it, he discusses the highs and lows of pursuing lofty goals with musicians, entrepreneurs and otherwise accomplished individuals.

The latest episode — which can be found at thequigleydreamcompany.com, on YouTube and most major podcast platforms — features a conversation with Rachel LaMont, winner of Survivor Season 47. Other guests include guitarist Ariel Posen, Aaron Gillespie of Underoath and Adam Schmidt of Activate Games.

“The tagline was: chasing big dreams and surviving the mess along the way,” he says. “Because you don’t get just dreams, you get a lot of mess, too.”

The podcast is a way to promote the company while pushing Quigley out of his comfort zone. Thanks to negative past experiences with public notoriety and online trolling, he’s been hesitant to attach his face to his work.

“We live in a world where people can say the most outrageous things to you and never have any ramifications for it. It’s terrifying,” he says.

“But I think this is me shedding that skin a little bit and letting people into a part of my life that I find really interesting, which is my interactions with awesome people doing awesome stuff.”

eva.wasney@winnipegfreepress.com