INTRODUCING: Be Well
To be honest, it’s a bit of a weird one doing an ‘introducing’ feature for a band like BE WELL. With members from groups as revered and established as BANE, DARKEST HOUR and FAIRWEATHER, and fronted by veteran producer Brian McTernan, these guys are hardly newcomers. That said, the project itself is still relatively young. They released their debut full-length The Weight And The Cost to critical acclaim back in August 2020, and have now followed that up with the equally excellent Hello Sun EP.
Picking up where its predecessor left off, Hello Sun reveals a band who have well and truly found their purpose, particularly through McTernan’s unflinchingly honest lyrics which chart his personal struggles with depression, anxiety and addiction. Like many of the best projects, it seems to have taken on a life of its own without any real pressure to be one thing or another, with McTernan explaining, “honestly, when we started writing I wasn’t even sure it would ever come out, so it was more just like I want to make music that I want to listen to.”
The music in question? An emotive brand of melodic hardcore that pulls from McTernan’s past experiences in bands like BATTERY and MILTOWN, and of course his impressive CV as a producer. “I’ve literally spent my life in rooms with the most incredibly talented songwriters, artists and musicians you could ever imagine,” he smiles. “And I definitely think that by osmosis it sinks in. I also think it’s cool because you can hear a little bit of me in their records. I love song-writing and as a producer it’s the thing that I kind of value the most about what I bring to projects, like arrangements and colour and feel and things like that. So yeah I think that there is a clear benefit to having been around all these incredible people and seen how they’re putting songs together.”
It’s easy to hear this in the record too, not least in the way it journeys from the high-energy attention-grabbing opener Treadless to the hard-hitting yet hopeful conclusion of In The Shadow Of Who You Thought I Was. As expected, attention to such details was a “big part of it” for McTernan, who clarifies “actually there were a lot of songs that existed but these songs together felt like a complete thought and the right next chapter in the story. Some of my favourite songs just didn’t fit with these, so we are saving them for if there is another – I’m trying not to get ahead of myself!”
All part of the journey then, and listening to Hello Sun it’s clear McTernan has already come a long way from the place he found himself in on the band’s debut. “Writing The Weight And The Cost was the biggest wake-up I could ever imagine having in my life,” he emphasises. “The thing that’s interesting with lyrics is while you’re writing them it’s not like you’re thinking so much about it, it’s just things are coming, but when I kind of zoomed out and saw it all together and the same sorts of things kept popping up I was like ‘oh my God, I’m not in a good place’. I think that the perspective has definitely changed.”
“I think the biggest thing is I’m really tired of feeling awful,” he continues. “And the thing that came from The Weight And The Cost for me was I felt like nobody would ever understand and I was just so wrong. There are so many people that relate directly, or sometimes indirectly – I’ve had people say like ‘oh my God, my husband’s struggled with depression for his whole life and this record has really helped me understand him’. But also I think you don’t have to have mental illness to experience regret or loneliness or sadness – there are things that everybody experiences that you can find in the lyrics.”
He’s absolutely right, of course, and throughout our conversation he repeatedly emphasises the importance of facing up to our darkest of demons in order to find that often elusive catharsis. “A huge thing for me is I’m just tired of being ashamed of myself for things that I have no control over,” he stresses. “I think all the time about how many people hide things that are intrinsic to who they are as people, whether it’s depression, addiction, their sexuality, whether they’ve been raped or abused – these things that we need to share most, we hide, and it ends up growing inside of you and it’s corrosive.”
All that said though, when asked if he sees hope the answer is a clear affirmative. “I’m saying things out loud that I’ve spent 40 years of my life completely ashamed of and I’m being loved and embraced and respected for doing it, and that is a big change on my little micro level. And then I think about my daughter and how much she is accepting of people’s sexualities and pronouns and things that when I was a kid were never accepted. There is a lot that’s awful, but there is a lot that’s good, and I think things are moving in the right direction in terms of accepting people’s essence.”
Turning lastly to the future of BE WELL, McTernan is similarly optimistic, albeit completely willing just to allow things to develop naturally. “I don’t think anyone in the band aspires to be some massive band that takes over the world,” he concludes. “I just want to make meaningful honest music that makes me excited to listen to, and I hope that people want to come along for that ride. This content is not for the masses, and I’m completely ok with that. It’s easy to say this as a small band, but I’d rather have 100 people that completely love it and get it than 1000 people who just think it’s a catchy song.”
Hello Sun is out now via Revelation Records.
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