In Conversation: Brian McTernan of Be Well
In his work with Be Well, Brian McTernan has expanded the boundaries of what it means to be open about your mental health in hardcore. He's got to admit: It's getting better.
Few people can claim to have had such an outstanding diverse impact on the last 30 years of hardcore’s recorded history than Brian McTernan. As a producer, he has stewarded countless canonical records for some of our most influential artists, including Converge, Turnstile, Snapcase, Cave In, Angel Du$t, The Movielife, 108, Hot Water Music, Thrice, Circa Survive, and my own band, Texas is the Reason—and that’s just scratching the surface. If that weren’t enough, he’s also been playing in bands since he was thirteen years old, starting with D.C. straightedge torchbearers Battery, then with proto-emo architects Ashes, and most recently with Be Well, whose compelling blend of melodic hardcore and hardcore introspection is easily his most realized work to date.
It’s also his most complicated and ambitious project. More than just a band, Be Well has been a vehicle for Brian to sort out the residual effects of childhood trauma and a lifelong struggle with depression. It’s also been a way to tell the story in real time: Far from being a “downer,” Brian emits a sense of light in the darkness that few before him have been able to communicate with such clarity and the same unwavering commitment to openness.
I don’t feel like I’ve ever talked to you about becoming the singer of Battery when you were thirteen years old. I probably didn’t meet you that much further down the line…
BRIAN: I was probably sixteen when we met.
Right, and so I think what’s capturing my attention right now is the fact that when we met, you did not strike me at all like the kind of person whose personality would say, “Yes, please, let me go out in front of people and be the center of attention” [laughs]. Was there an attention-seeking part of you when you were thirteen or was it something else?
BRIAN: It was definitely not attention-seeking. I just loved hardcore. I loved music. I was dating this girl whose brother played drums in a band with [Battery guitarist] Ken Olden when I was in sixth grade, so they would let me come and watch them practice. And from that second, I was completely fixated on how songs got put together and how lyrics were written. Watching the process was literally all I thought about. That band was called Strength in Numbers. They were this kind of skinhead band, but at one point Ken told me he was starting a straight-edge band with this guy Zac Eller—who went on to play drums in Worlds Collide, Bluetip, and a lot of others.
Looking back on it now, it’s kind of crazy to think my parents would even let me do this. Ken used to pick me up after school when I was like twelve years old and we would go to his house and I would spend the whole weekend watching them write the songs that would become Battery. There was never any intention that I would sing in the band, but after they would jam the Battery stuff, they would play covers and I would just sing those at practice. I loved it. It’s hard to explain, but it was the first time that I really felt any release from what I know now is depression, but back then I thought was anger. It was the first time I felt like I’d ever been good at anything. I wasn’t good at soccer or swimming or anything like that, but I felt like I could do this.
Finally, they scheduled studio time to record a demo to find a singer. We went to Upland Studios, which was run by this guy Barrett Jones, who was Scream’s sound guy and went on to produce the first Foo Fighters record. It’s funny how one little decision changes your life, because we were about to wrap up for the day and Barrett says, “Who sings at practice?” I said I did. He was like, “Well why don’t you just lay down what you do and I’ll run off a version with vocals and a version without vocals?” So I went in there and did it. I did one take for each song and it sounded awesome. At this point, they were still not like, “This guy should sing in the band!” But what I did was I duped a demo and I went to the promoter of the Safari Club at the time and said, “Here’s my new band.” He said, “Oh. We have a show with Sick of it All coming up. Do you wanna play?”
Well, that’s one way to get in a band [laughs].
BRIAN: At that point, I feel like I was too young to be self-conscious! And the thing about me being withdrawn and not liking attention is definitely something that has become more and more the case, not less and less. Early on, I was just like, “Oh my God, I’m going to play with Sick of it All.” There was nothing that was going to deter me from that.
At that point in your life I know you were perceived as a “troubled kid.” But looking back on yourself now, as an adult, how would you describe yourself?
BRIAN: As a troubled kid [laughs]. I mean, it’s kind of interesting how it all played out because I think a lot of people just look at it like, “Oh, Brian played this show when he was thirteen and then look at what happened from there!” But that’s not how things played out at all. We only played two Battery shows. I was really fucked up at the time. I was getting into fights and doing graffiti and running around and staying out. Sometimes I wouldn’t come home for days on end. Between the first Battery show and the first Ashes show, I ended up going to six high schools—in a year and two-month period.
One night, the drummer of Damnation [A.D.], Dave Ward, and I stole his parents’ car. We wound up getting pulled over by the police at two in the morning. He was smart enough to tell the cops that he was his brother—because he knew his brother’s birthday and address and he looked a lot like him—but the cops were like, “We don’t believe you, but we’re going to let you go and we’re going to tow the car.” So we were standing on the street at two in the morning with no cell phones back then. This is like 1990 or 1991. Dave says he knows this kid Noah that lives two blocks away, so we ring his doorbell in the middle of the night. His parents answered the door, and we were like, “Oh, we need a ride” [laughs].
Three days later, I get into this crazy fight at school and I get kicked out. My parents feel like I am out of control at this point and they tricked me into going into a mental hospital for a period of time. But a couple of things happened there: First, I taught myself how to play guitar when I was in the hospital because there was a guitar there and that was the only thing to do. I would just sit there and play and play and play. And then, a week after I got out of the hospital, there was that super-famous Fugazi show at the National Mall, and I bumped into Noah—who was the guy that I had only met because we stole a car and ended up at his house. He says to me, “Are you still singing in Battery?” And I said no. He was like, “Well, I have a band with this guy, Matt Squire, who’s a genius, and we need a singer.” So we got on the Metro and then took a bus to Matt’s house so they could play me the four-track demo. I was like, “Oh, I can’t sing over this because it’s too melodic, but I can play guitar.” The crazy thing is that two months after we started doing this band together, Noah gets struck by lightning and dies—which was not only a huge deal in my life, but it was also the cover of the Washington Post. And then all of the sudden, we’re playing acoustic versions of our songs at memorial services. So that summer, I think it was the first time my depression was manifesting as sadness, not anger. That’s when I really started writing lyrics and writing music. And at the end of the summer, we all got together and decided that we still wanted to play music and we didn’t want to add someone new, so our second guitar player moved to bass and that became Ashes. It’s funny how little things grow, because had any one of those things not happened, I definitely wouldn’t be sitting here now.
Whenever I think of my own “troubled” start, I often think about how I stopped feeling like a kid very early on. I really started feeling like I was on my own in the world way earlier than any kid should maybe have to start feeling. Did you ever feel like, “Fuck, just let me be a kid?”
BRIAN: I definitely didn’t feel like “let me be a kid,” but I completely relate to that sentiment of growing up too fast. My parents would let my brother and I get in a car with a bunch of kids we didn’t know and drive to New York City when I was in seventh grade. Compared to what my daughter and her friends are doing… She’s sixteen and she wouldn’t be doing that now, you know?
I think I wasn’t that good at being a kid in some ways. Like, I grew up with some really nice kids, who had really nice lives and whose parents brought Gatorade to the soccer games, but my reality was a whole lot of screaming and yelling. Our house was completely chaotic and messy. My dad has Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, so there would be stacks of a document that he’d photocopied 200 times piled up. And instead of talking to us about what was going on, he would leave notes. Like, it’s kind of a joke now, but when I was young I did tags on the basement walls, and instead of talking to me about it, my dad left a note on the door that just said: “DON’T WRITE ON WALL” [laughs]. Or when I was in eighth grade, I would hide and not get on the school bus, and then when my parents left for work, I would steal their car and drive to middle school. And when they found out, instead of talking to me about it, my dad put a chain and a padlock on the steering wheel. If it tells you anything about what my home life was like, I once got home from a three-week European tour with Battery and my dad didn’t realize I’d left. As crushing as that is, it just shows the dysfunction of my life at that period of time.
Eventually, I came to you in 1995 to record what we thought was going to be the first Texas is the Reason demo, but what became our first 7-inch. I was doing some reading up on you this week and I found something you said about this experience that I thought was really interesting. You said, “Because I started so young as a producer, I wanted to be taken seriously. So I’m eighteen years old, and producing Texas is the Reason, and I just felt, ‘I can’t show any weakness here. I need to be the captain of the ship.’ What happened is as time went on, I just did that more and more.” You talk about projecting that strength and control in your daily life, regardless of where you were internally. Did that actually make you feel like you were more in control?
BRIAN: I don’t know that it was ever about me feeling more in control. I think that early on, I felt like it allowed people to take me more seriously. And the interesting thing about it is that in the early phase of my production career, that would go on to cause problems, you know what I mean? Because when you are not being your true self, sometimes the things you say and do don’t come across the way you intend them to. There were times when I would come across as unsympathetic to someone’s vulnerability or just cocky or a dick or whatever. But it took a lot of energy to keep myself together. A lot of it was impostor syndrome.
When I think back about the Texas stuff, I was working in a video store during the day and then recording bands until three in the morning every night in my cellar. I was making it up as I went along. And I was trying desperately to not have it appear that way to everyone else.
I think it’s also possible that all five of us, including you, didn’t know how good we actually were [laughs]. Because even when Jordan [Cooper from Revelation Records] got the demo, he called me up immediately and was like, “I want to put it out just like this. Exactly how this is.” I was like, “Wait, what?”
BRIAN: That record changed my life. The first time I met Steve Reddy [from Equal Vision Records] was when I came down to New York for your first show. He was like, “You’re the guy who recorded this?” And then he called me after that and asked if I wanted to record 108, and I was like, “Umm. Yeah, I do” [laughs]. Again, they were a perfect band because I knew Rob [Fish] and he was a sweetheart and made me feel really comfortable. It’s just funny how all these chance things come together.
So I feel like we need to talk about 2014 for a second, which is when you made a decision to step back from music entirely. I want you to walk me through that for a second, because in the same way that I didn’t see the Brian I know as being the guy who wanted to be the center of attention, I also didn’t see the Brian I know to be the guy who wanted to work for a construction company.
BRIAN: I think a couple of things happened, all at the same time—which were that the music industry pretty much collapsed, and then my daughter was born. You never saw it, but I had this amazing 7,000 square-foot studio in Fell’s Point, which is my favorite neighborhood in Baltimore. Things had just been going so amazingly well. It was just great record after great record after great record—and that never actually stopped. It’s just that what people could afford to spend to make those records more than cut in half. It was the first time in my career where I was like, holy shit. It didn’t matter how much I worked, I just couldn’t keep up with all of the expenses of this. I was never the kind of person that would be like, “I don’t want to do this because the money isn’t there.” A lot of my favorite records I’ve ever been involved with hardly paid anything. I would just figure it out.
But at the same time, my daughter was born. And then all of the sudden, I have to wake up at five with my daughter, I have to get her dressed, I have to get her to daycare. I’m trying to see if bands are OK with starting at 10 a.m. instead, and maybe wrapping up by eight. And bands were open to it, but they didn’t love it. I started to notice that some bands were not coming back, you know?
How did construction become an option?
BRIAN: Well, a couple of things. I had always built my own studios. Like that studio where we recorded the Texas/Promise Ring split, [my wife] and I actually framed that space out and hung the drywall and built that when I was nineteen. I lived there, too. So I always had an affinity for it. Building things scratches the same itches for me that making music does. I love how all the little details of something can go on to become one finished piece. So when the music industry started to contract, I started buying houses and fixing them up and selling them—and that was supplementing the studio. So when I wanted a change, I thought, a huge part of being a producer is project management. And dealing with colorful personalities. That’s also very true of construction: Identifying talent, nurturing it, gently pushing towards the ultimate goal. So I applied for a job as a project manager at this company, and I didn’t think I would get the job, but I did. The funny thing about it was, at that point, in that last year that I was making records, I actually made three records that I fucking loved and that were amazing experiences. I did the second to last Fireworks record. I did Turnstile. And I did Angel Du$t. Actually, this is kind of a sidestep, but you know how I was saying a lot of bands didn’t really like stopping at 8 p.m.?
Yeah.
BRIAN: It became my least favorite part of the day because every day at that time I had to turn around and go, “OK, guys, I think I gotta head home,” and everyone would be bummed out. So the funny thing about the Angel Du$t record—which was one of the last records I did before I took a break—is that I did not think I would love Justice [Tripp] the way I do, you know? [laughs]. I mean, just from the lore. The stories. Whatever. He was like nothing I imagined him to be. We were having lunch on the first day and he was like, “What’s it like having a kid and trying to do this?” And I told him that the hardest thing for me is the end of the day, when I need to go home. Because if I don’t leave, I’m not going to see my daughter at all. And so either my wife and I are gonna be bummed or the band is gonna be super bummed. After telling him that, every fucking day of making that Angel Du$t record, at 7:30 every night, Justice would say, “It’s time to start wrapping up! You gotta get home and see that baby!” He saw how much that mattered to me and he took that on so it was never me having to be like, “It’s time to wrap up.”
I fucking love Justice.
BRIAN: I will tell you that, to this day, I will always appreciate him. But anyway, yeah, I applied for that job and I got that job. I think I had this idea that I could be like a normal person. I could be like the other dads at the bus stop. But I approached this job like a hardcore kid—like everything I do in my life—which is like, “OK, let’s do this, let’s do this. That’s never been done before? Let’s try it.” And I was really, really successful there. So within six months of getting hired as a project manager, I became the COO of this multimillion dollar company and hiring everyone [laughs]. The thing is, I tried to make it something I could love. And man, I’ll tell you, I just didn’t. It was the first time in my life that I was completely financially stable. They paid me very, very well. But that was the darkest time in my life, too. I had never processed how important it was to have amazing people all around me all the time, and how much of a hole in my life that left when it was gone. And I never really thought about the fact that from the time we recorded the Texas stuff up until this period, I was almost never physically alone. I worked so much, and even when I had days off, bands were in town and we’d be hanging out or they’d be coming to our house, and then all of the sudden, that wasn’t the case. It wasn’t because the bands didn’t love me and care about our friendship; I was just not a part of their day-to-day life anymore.
It was pretty scary to be alone a lot, to be faced with not only the hole in my heart from giving up this thing that I worked so hard for, but also the years and years of never talking about my mental health issues. I couldn’t escape it anymore. I was alone and I had nothing to sink my teeth into that I really cared about. I felt like how I felt when I was a little kid again, like I’m from some other planet, and I was not prepared to face it. So I think that my reaction to that loss was that, for the first time ever, I started drinking in a way that was very unhealthy and I was doing almost anything I could to avoid feeling what I was feeling.
You’ve often credited that Battery reunion song, “My Last Breath,” as something like a fulcrum in your life that swings into the genesis of Be Well—an incredible song about growing up, feeling unloved, dealing with childhood trauma, and owning your mental health. Be Well kind of takes that mantle and expands on the theme as a band. I’m wondering if that expansion of the theme was conscious or not.
BRIAN: Both, in a sense. “My Last Breath” was really interesting because we never talked about doing new Battery music. It was not at all on my mind when we agreed to do some reunion shows. And I hadn’t written my own music since 2000, maybe even 1999. But I woke up one morning and Ken had sent me the music for that song, a demo, and I literally just sat down and it just poured out. I’ve never written a song so fast in my life. It was clear that those were things I needed to say for my own reasons. After we did “My Last Breath,” it was like, just working on it, going to the studio, and having the tour to look forward to, I remember my wife saying to me, “You seem better. You should write, even if it isn’t for a band or whatever.” So I just started to write. I had a notepad in my truck and I would write down thoughts throughout the day. I would try to write a riff every day. I was just so desperate to be creative again.
What happened was, I wrote a ton of stuff. I had never written music for Battery before, but I sent it to Ken. And he didn’t like it. I respect this about him. We had this funny meeting that is burned into my brain in the food court at Montgomery Mall—which is the mall where I had my first job, working at the yogurt store—and I said, “I sent you sixteen ideas and you’re telling me that there’s not one of them that you like?” And he said, “No” [laughs]. So I really had to ask myself: Why am I doing this? Because it would have been a lot easier to just have it be Battery. But then it’s like, do I want to do this because I want to be able to tour and kind of relive my youth in a way? Or do I want to do this because I have something inside myself that I really need to get out? And I just said to myself, I would rather make music that feels like me and is representative of who I am in my life right now, even if that means I don’t get to do the tours and the festivals and the other stuff. So it was a scary thing. And I appreciate that Ken was honest because he also knew it meant that maybe there wouldn’t be another Battery record either.
So I just kept writing. I never really like to think about how it all goes together. But it was when the same things kept coming up—the same themes that were in “My Last Breath”—when they started showing themselves over and over in the Be Well songs I was writing that I finally realized I was not in a good place. I was actually in a scary place. Looking at the lyrics for the first Be Well record was the first time I ever fully accepted that I wasn’t OK. That the way I felt about myself and the way I felt about my life and the way I was living my life was not healthy. I wasn’t suicidal, but I had no will to be alive in any meaningful way at that point. I didn’t have anything except a well-paying job. I felt like I wasn’t a good father. I felt like I wasn’t a good husband. I wasn’t doing the thing I loved professionally anymore. And I wasn’t sure there was a way out. So again, my wife ended up saying to me, “You need to quit your job. There’s so little you can control with what’s going on with your mental health, but one thing you can control is stopping doing something that’s making you feel worse.” Like, when you’re in a hole, the first thing you gotta do is stop digging, right? And that was pretty scary. I didn’t think I was gonna do this new band that nobody’s ever heard of and that’s going to give me a livelihood. I hadn’t produced a record in five years. How is that going to work? But I didn’t feel like I had a choice. It felt like if I kept on that path much longer, I’m not sure where things would have ended up.
When I spoke with Pat Flynn from Fiddlehead, we were talking about how that band has become a vehicle for Pat to process some complicated feelings about his father’s death, about becoming a father, and whatever else kind of falls into that nexus. And at one point I asked him, being three albums deep, if there was ever a point where he saw a new Fiddlehead record not being about that. And from his perspective, he said no. So now that Be Well has made a couple of records where the themes of depression and anxiety have really carried through, I’m wondering how you see it. Can you see this evolving into something else?
BRIAN: I definitely don’t see it evolving into something else. I realize that may very well put a ceiling on what the band is capable of doing, or how many records we can sell. I remember talking to someone about how it felt like we weren’t doing many interviews on the last record, and he was like, “Well, you need to write different lyrics. Everybody knows you’re depressed” [laughs]. Well, he didn’t say it like that, but he did say, “This isn’t new news now.” And so again, you have to ask yourself: Why am I doing this? And it’s like, the thing for me about music in general, and specifically hardcore—what I love about it and what made me fall in love with it—is not only the immediacy of the music, but reading the lyrics and feeling like I’m not the only person that feels this way. In keeping with that, I feel like I want to be able to look at the songs that I write and feel like they’re authentic to me and that they document where I truly am at that period in my life. The thing that I’m most proud of with the Be Well stuff is that it’s exactly how I feel. If you listen to the Be Well record, you will know me better for it, and that is what I aspire to have it be.
Is there a point where you’re uncomfortable with talking about your own personal mental health in interviews?
BRIAN: I don’t mind talking about it. I have found, though, that sometimes people wanting to talk about it feel lazy and voyeuristic, you know? Like, they want to ask about it but they don’t know much about who I am besides that—and I think without that context, none of this really makes sense. If people have meaningful questions, like the way we’re talking about it now, that feels good. If people are just like, “You write about being depressed. Are you depressed?” I don’t know how to answer that.
One thing that’s interesting for me is how the lyrics have evolved. When I look at The Weight and The Cost, our first record, I am in the tornado. I am super fucking scared. And I was legitimately scared at that time. But on Hello Sun, I’m in a much better place and I’m seeing that and I’m processing it. And the newer stuff is much more of a sadness over how much of my life I missed because I never dealt with these things. That’s where my mind is now. I’m not scared. I’m doing much better. I’m just kind of sad about it all. To me, those feelings are very different. If people see that as more of the same, that seems a little lazy, or like they’re not taking enough time to really listen.
OK, I wanted to end with something you said about Turnstile, who you’ve worked with, that brings me back to that first question about you being a 13-year-old who probably didn’t want to be the center of attention. You were talking about their success and said, “It couldn’t be happening to better people, but I wouldn’t want that for me.” That’s the Brian I know! [laughs].
BRIAN: Right.
But I guess I wanted to know more specifically, what is it that you really don’t want?
BRIAN: I mean, I don’t want to be anywhere and have somebody come up to me and say, “Are you Brian McTernan?!” [laughs] I have to imagine that those guys often feel like people want something from them, you know what I mean? Along with that success and that fame, there is a weight to that.
I am happy being in the background. Being a producer is perfect for me in that sense because I get to create all these things and be around all these amazing things and then I get to watch it all unfold without having to be the spokesman for it and without having to sell anything. If I could do this band and never take a promo shot again in my life, and never have to take a picture of me, that would be an awesome goal [laughs]. So when I think about Turnstile, it’s awesome. They’re the best guys and they’re the best kind of success story because they haven’t changed. They’re still just really fucking great human beings that have stayed grounded and never let it get to their head. But I mean, I have to imagine being Brendan and going to see your friend’s band is punishment, you know what I mean? Everybody is going to want to talk to him. Everybody is gonna want something from him. I’ve never wanted that. I remember watching Fugazi at the Wilson Center with Verbal Assault and seeing every single person in the room moving, and thinking, this. But that's really different from playing under Foo Fighters at RiotFest or whatever it is.
So what do you think is the ideal reward for your work?
BRIAN: As a producer, it’s when I know that the bands know I gave everything I had. There was probably a period of my career where I started worrying about what a record Soundscanned or where it debuted and all that, but that was the least rewarding phase for me. I kind of had to say to myself, what can I control? I can control how much I care and how hard I work. So for me, if a band leaves and ends up feeling like they don’t like the snare drum on a record, I can live with that. But I could never live with a band feeling like I phoned it in. When I have a connection with people, and I know how hard they worked, and they know how hard I worked, and we have that common bond—that’s the most rewarding thing for me as a producer.
As a songwriter and a band member, I once met someone who told me, “I brought the Be Well record into my therapy session so I could explain how I feel.” I take no joy in sharing the burdens I have carried. But when people end up feeling like a song I wrote expresses something that they could never find the words for themselves, that to me is the most meaningful accomplishment, because that’s what records did for me when I had things I was feeling that I couldn’t understand either. And so then I feel like this thing that is very hard for me to do—which is to put myself out there—has not only been meaningful to me, but it’s been meaningful for someone else. It makes me feel like it’s not just a catchy song. It’s like, these words matter.
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"...what can I control? I can control how much I care and how hard I work."
Well said.
Brian has always been a sweet, talented, passionate and extremely supportive person in our East Coast scene over the years... a legend. Great read!
"And it’s like, the thing for me about music in general, and specifically hardcore—what I love about it and what made me fall in love with it—is not only the immediacy of the music, but reading the lyrics and feeling like I’m not the only person that feels this way."
Absolutely 100% this. I don't know that a single band saved my life, and the community where I was didn't either, but the music in general helped me feel less alone and...not less like a freak, but like being a freak wasn't a bad thing and that it was their problem, not mine. Which probably was lifesaving.