Somebody That I Used to Know

After many years, hardcore has earnestly taken up the conversation around depression and mental health. But just because we’ve opened a conversation doesn’t mean that we've figured out how to have it.

I have a portrait of Elliott Smith, taken from a summer afternoon of hanging out in his Brooklyn apartment, still hanging in my bedroom.

I.

A few weeks ago I was approached by a writer who is currently working on a book about the late singer-songwriter Elliott Smith. I wasn’t really expecting it. Aside from a handful of posts on Instagram over the years, I haven’t really spoken so much about my friendship with Elliott in public, and that’s almost by design: I feel very specific about my memories with Elliott and I’ve always been nervous about playing a part in painting a picture of him that I feel like he would have hated.

Although we technically met in 1996 (and then again in 1997), Elliott and I didn’t really start getting to know each other until 1998—specifically at a time when we were both going through some difficult-to-navigate growing pains. In Elliott’s case, he had just recently moved to New York and was both only a few months removed from a life-changing appearance at the Academy Awards, and a few months away from releasing his first album for a major label, XO—and he was having complicated feelings about these things. As for me, I was on the other side of a messy band breakup, having just declined a seven-figure deal with Capitol Records in favor of the life of an under-employed and over-caffeinated character on the Lower East Side who was fairly certain he never wanted to make music again. My feelings were also complicated. Sitting at the nexus of all this was a nagging sense of public scrutiny and the fear that we had lost control of our narratives. It was something Elliott and I talked about more than once, and it’s something I’ve been sensitive to ever since he passed away in 2003. But when a few of my friends from Elliott’s New York orbit vouched for this writer, I agreed to hear her out. And while she is the first person I’ve ever agreed to speak with about Elliott, admittedly, I’m still being cautious.

That said, there are things already on the record—like the interview I did with him which appears in the Anti-Matter book—that I am more than willing to talk about, in part, because I knew them to be real slices from our private conversations. For example, Elliott and I sometimes talked about “being bummed out.” We didn’t always call it “depression,” and there was a reason for that: Being “bummed out” is a condition. It’s a feeling that you simply have to endure, and it’s a feeling that passes. But “depression,” especially back then, was often treated like an identity, and we were both dealing with how it felt to be repeatedly and primarily identified in that way by friends and strangers alike.

For Elliott, it meant opening up a newspaper and seeing yourself called “Mr. Misery” for the umpteenth time. He hated that. For me, it meant opening up a magazine that year and being surprised to discover that the writer used an entire paragraph to deconstruct the fact that I wore an all-black outfit to our interview—while alluding to that Smiths song about how I might possibly “wear black on the outside because black is how I feel on the inside.” (In reality, I was kind of just wearing black.) None of this is to say that Elliott and I were “good-time guys” in 1998, nor that we wanted to be perceived that way. But we were more than just “depressed people.” We were both really trying, like almost everyone else we knew, to work on our problems—many of which, we acknowledged to each other, were deeply embedded from childhood—and frankly, some days were just better than others. Neither of us denied our struggles with trauma and depression, but neither of us wanted to be defined by them either.

“I don’t want to draw people in with my sad story of this or that,” Elliott told me in that interview that ran in the Anti-Matter book. “It doesn’t make it a better or worse song if someone had a really bad time growing up or if they had a really bad drug problem. I know that the press has to do with a cult of personality, but I don’t have any interest in that. It’s uncomfortable to know that people you’ve never met know shit about you that you haven’t even told your roommates.”

Brian McTernan, live with Battery. Asylum. Washington, D.C. Summer 1993. Photo by Mark Beemer.

II.

In recent years, the conversation in hardcore and elsewhere around “opening up about mental health” or “removing the stigma of depression and anxiety” has certainly reached a critical mass. It really wasn’t even that long ago when I famously expressed surprise at the moment in 1994 when Into Another’s Richie Birkenhead “admitted” in an interview that he was going to therapy. But that’s the way the conversation went back then: We didn’t talk about depression or going to therapy because these things were looked upon as admissions of weakness, sickness, or at the very least, vulnerability. And frankly, no one wanted to identify with any of those things—especially in a hardcore scene where, for many years, the best known rendering of mental health struggles that we had was “Institutionalized” by Suicidal Tendencies. In that climate, telling someone that you went to therapy felt sort of like coming out. Thankfully, the conversation around the value of finding professional help has changed a lot since then, too.

But just because we’ve opened a conversation doesn’t mean we actually know how to have it, and part of that is acknowledging that just because someone talks openly about their mental health, it does not mean that you are entitled to know everything about it. It means that we must find a way to allow each other to talk openly about our mental health without making it our entire personality or speaking about others with a one-dimensionality centered around this facet of their experience. It also means that we should approach these topics with a legitimate interest in each other’s well-being at heart—or we should leave them alone.

In recent years, no one in hardcore has been more forthcoming about his experiences grappling with depression than Brian McTernan. Although Brian is perhaps better known for his “day job” as a record producer—having stewarded landmark albums for Thrice, Hot Water Music, 108, Angel Du$t, and Turnstile to name only a few—he’s also spent a great portion of his life as a writer and performer, beginning at 13 years old when he started singing for Battery, then later as the guitarist for Ashes, and currently in his role as frontman for Be Well. That the name of his latest project is “Be Well” is no accident: Over the band’s two records, both The Weight and the Cost for Equal Vision and Hello Sun for Revelation, Brian has gone all in—singing explicitly about the turmoil of living with depression for as long as he can remember and committing to this topic as a lyrical focal point for the band. What’s particularly special about Be Well, though, is the fact that their more recent material doesn’t feel dark or indulgent; the songs are delivered from an aerial view that Brian worked hard to achieve. Which is to say that if Brian’s public personality ever gets flattened into that of “a guy with depression,” it is not a caricature of his own doing.

“I don’t mind talking about my mental health,” he tells me, for an interview that will be published in full on Thursday. “I have found, though, that sometimes people wanting to talk about it feel lazy and voyeuristic, you know? Like, they want to ask about that but they don’t actually know very 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. But when people are just like, ‘You write about being depressed. Are you depressed?’ I don’t know how to answer that. [Because] the lyrics have evolved. When I look at The Weight and The Cost, 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. So 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.”

Which raises a question. For as much as we talk about “opening the conversation,” we very rarely discuss the other end of that, which is arguably more important: Are we really listening?

III.

It is perhaps telling that we had to invent the word “emocore” as a way to describe hardcore songs that discussed our own interiority in some way, and even more telling that the word was coined—and continues to be used—as an epithet. That severance, by implication, suggests that many punk and hardcore kids in the 1980s didn’t believe that talking about your emotions was truly hardcore; by and large, they chose repression over depression. (Songs like Black Flag’s “Depression” only slipped through the cracks because lyrics like, “I don't need any of your fucking sympathy,” substantiated our punk stoicism.) Over the next few decades, however, many of the scene’s more traditional hardcore bands began rejecting those limits and taking bigger swings with songs about depression or other mental health struggles—including personal favorites like Burn’s “Drown,” Blacklisted’s “What’s Wrong With George?” and Fiddlehead’s “The Deathlife”—and, in my opinion, these developing attitudes about openness have saved lives.

The irony of that period in 1998 is that I wasn’t particularly open about any of these things at the time. Most of the issues I confided in with Elliott were things that I wasn’t ready to talk about then—topics that I talk about in public fairly regularly now. But people could see I was suffering, and it was becoming clear to me that many of them were starting to conflate my depression with my very self—even to the point of overanalyzing an all-black outfit. I cannot begin to overstate how dangerous this kind of thinking is. Because once you believe that you are your depression, the idea of finding help feels futile.

“I’m just as happy as all the other people I know, for whatever that’s worth,” Elliott once told me, and I feel like I know what he was trying to say. Neither of us were “Mr. Misery.” Both of us could be incredibly joyful human beings at any given time. We loved to laugh and we loved to connect over music and we loved our friends dearly. We also both struggled, privately and sometimes publicly, with complicated feelings that we were beginning to understand might be impossible to fully and cleanly resolve. But just like “all the other people we know,” who we are cannot simply be boiled down to any one of those things. We are all of those things, all the time, and we deserve to be able to live in our full complexity—even if we make sad songs. Maybe especially if we make sad songs.

The last time I saw Elliott was in May of 2000. I was living in Chicago when he came through town for a show at the Metro. We met at the venue after soundcheck and then walked over to a nearby laundromat to pick up some clothes he’d left in a dryer. On the way, I told him how I’d been going to therapy, how I’d finally been living as an out gay man, and how I’d been doing so much better since those days we spent on the Lower East Side. Elliott was genuinely happy for me, and in fact, appeared to be genuinely happy throughout the short time we spent together that day. That’s the person I knew. All that misery business, to me, is still just noise.

Coming on Thursday to Anti-Matter: A conversation with Brian McTernan of Be Well.

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