Brad Fiedel

Who is Brad Fiedel?

Brad Ira Fiedel is an American movie music composer. Raised in the Village of Bayville, on Long Island's fashionable North Shore, Fiedel graduated from The Barlow School in upstate New York.

After college, he became a popular and progressive composer, and in the 1980s, he worked on several successful movies, predominantly in the action and thriller genres, and pioneered the use of electronic instruments and synthesizers—almost disappearing from the mainstream at the end of the 1990s. He has also served as the keyboardist for Hall and Oates.

He began his career in film in the late 1970s, and wrote extensively for television films and minor cinema releases, until director James Cameron hired him to score the science fiction film The Terminator in 1984, setting the wheels in motion for a successful career. The metallic, pounding main theme has since become the defining work of his career.

Since then, Fiedel has scored many popular and successful movies, including Fright Night and its sequel Fright Night II, The Big Easy, The Serpent and the Rainbow, The Accused, Blue Steel, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Blink, and True Lies, although in recent years, Fiedel has moved on to other creative areas, writing original musicals and designing and building a surf resort in Saladita Mexico. His last major theatrical score was in 1995, and although he enjoyed a brief period of renewed interest following the release of Terminator 3 in 2003, when Marco Beltrami wrote an orchestral arrangement of his theme, he shows no sign of returning to the movie music field.