Taking a mental health break in Arizona’s Santa Catalina Mountains a couple years ago may have saved actor/pop star Kevin Quinn’s life. At least, his creative one. For Quinn, 26, who auditioned for American Idol just two weeks after his 15th birthday and rose to fame thanks to his work as an actor on the Disney Channel, it was a chance to get out of the public spotlight and change and reframe his future.
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While checked into a facility in Arizona, Quinn says he was able to wake up free of professional responsibility, go for jogs, take in the air and witness the majesty of the mountains. Now, that recent refresh has helped him write his new EP Real Me, which is out Friday (January 19).
“The break I took for my mental health was life-changing, for the better,” Quinn tells American Songwriter. “It was right after Winter Jam 2022, and I think part of where it stems from is I had a really tough time putting on a face all the time for fans. I think that the truth is—the amount of eyes on me mainly because of Disney … I had a tough time getting used to the celebrity of it. It got to my head after a while when I started to feel I couldn’t be myself.”
Of course, when you’re a well-known personality, most of your relationships with your audience are one-sided. Expectations grow for your persona more than they do for who you are. What if personal goals conflict with professional ones? What if a character you play is completely different from who you are when you’re at home? What’s more, if you begin your career in showbiz as a teen, how do you know who you are outside of it? Quinn is the midst of answering those questions and has been for the past year-plus.
“I would feel a lot of the time—these fans come up to me and I feel like I have to be a certain peppy version of myself in order to appease them and it was just unhealthy for me,” Quinn says. “But like I said, that’s kind of the blessing and the curse of something as big as Disney. It gave me a career and it gave me a platform, but at the same time with that comes all the trimmings. It creates this pressure of having to deal with that celebrity.”
So, Quinn says, he had to “take a step back.” He focused on mental health, went away and took some time at the facility in Arizona to rediscover himself. He says he’d wake up in the morning and see the Santa Catalina mountains every morning. He’d jog, breathe in the air and find himself again. “It was so peaceful,” he says. “And I was alone. I didn’t have to be anything for anyone.” Being able to recharge, work for himself and not any onlookers—that created a re-steeled sense of self. “It was what I needed,” he says, “and I’m a healthier and happier person because I took that break.”
But this now begs a question of Quinn: What is he going to do, creatively speaking, with his talents? If his new album Real Me is any indication, he’s going to make music for himself and his fans, but with a new bent—one of honesty, vulnerability and clarity, but with a pop feel, too. A photogenic young man, Quinn is prime position to take advantage of his commercial appeal as well as his insights into what a healthy mind can mean. One might ask why he continues to tread in the waters of entertainment, given the hardship he faced, but Quinn has an answer for that, too.
“It’s because I finally felt, after a long time, that after this experience I had something really profound and impactful to say,” he explains. “And I needed to get that out in the music. That’s what Real Me is about. It’s a lot of that journey I went through with the mental health.”
Song titles on the new EP point to this—“Learning to Let Go,” “Blessed,” “Rise Above,” “I’m Not There Yet,” and more. These songs discuss themes of resilience, change, personal growth. But they do so not through melancholy downtempo ballads, but instead pop music that is digestible for people of all ages. Reflecting the change in his life, Quinn has recently enrolled in classes at New York University, where he is studying to get his master’s degree in social work and become a licensed clinical social worker.
“I have all these plans I didn’t have before,” he says.
All he is studying, too, seeps into his music, as evidenced by his new EP, which was written because of his recent mental health journey. But Quinn is not purporting to project that his journey is finished. To wit, the EP’s final song, “Give You Up,” doesn’t resolve at the end nor offer that satisfying chordal conclusion in the melody. Instead, it’s almost a “to be continued …” note, as if to say, there’s more to come from him personally and professionally.
Quinn was born in Chicago and it was in his home state of Illinois where he got his feet wet in musical theater. From there, the seeds were planted for both acting and music careers. Today, he says, he considers himself a musician and songwriter who acts, not the other way around. Much of his life is dual-pronged. On his new EP, he offers pop and acoustic. As a professional, he’s both musician and actor (performing in movies like Adam Sandler’s Hubie Halloween as well as Disney properties). It makes sense. His birth sign is a Gemini, and he has a “very supportive” twin sister. For Quinn, who boasts more than 1 million followers on Instagram, dualism is in his blood and stars. That foundation is now finding its way into his catchy songs—though Quinn knows how to walk the line.
“Part of writing something sticky,” he says, “is not trying to go too deep. It’s important to be vulnerable but as soon as you start to go too deep, it starts to take on a more melancholy vibe.”
Now, with the EP coming out, Quinn is looking to the future. What that means is having goals, but also taking things “day by day.” He says he once thought he could control his life and career but now he sees that’s impossible. Instead, it’s about learning to let go and live in the moment. He says he’d also like to tour more and play live dates. He’s taking acting classes now, too, working on his craft. And he’s constantly writing, which usually begins with voice memos on his phone. In the end, Quinn says, he’s found his balance.
“I am my most authentic self when I’m singing,” Quinn says. “Everything that I feel or everything the fans see is me. It’s this takeaway [of] everything else and it’s this raw, bare, vulnerable version of me that I don’t’ have anywhere else. I feel that’s what makes it art.”
Photo by Paul C. Rivera / RCPMK
