Brian McTernan

McTernan was born in Bethesda, Maryland. During his youth, he spend some time in a psychiatric hospital due to depression, which he addressed on Battery's 2017 song "My Last Breath".[2] He dropped out of high-school at the age on 17 to tour with Battery.[3]

He comes from a family with many hardcore punk music ties. His brother Mike McTernan is the singer for Damnation A.D. and When Tigers Fight. His brother Peter played drums for Good Clean Fun for a short period of time.

McTernan joined Ken Olden, Matt Squire, Toshi Yano and Zac Eller to form Battery in 1990. Originally called "Fury", the band released their first record in 1991 on Deadlock Records.The band broke up in 1998 but reunited briefly in 2012. In 2017, the band reunited for good, releasing a new compilation, For The Rejected By The Rejected, and embarked on a tour of Europe.[2]

McTernan was also a songwriter and guitar player for the rock band Miltown, which was signed to Warner Brothers. Miltown broke up in the studio before the debut album was completed.

In 2005, he joined From Autumn To Ashes drummer Francis Mark, Every Time I Die bassist Josh Newton and Cornbread Compton of Engine Down as a bassist to form Biology. Signed to Vagrant Records, the band released one album, Making Moves, produced by McTernan, in 2005 and broke up in 2008.

In 1995, McTernan moved to Boston to be near his future wife who studied at Harvard University. He started his recording studio "Salad Days", naming it after a song by Minor Threat from their 1985 EP of the same name, in the basement of the house he shared with six roommates.[3] The first recording produced by McTernan was the eponymous 1995 EP by New York City based post-hardcore band Texas Is the Reason for Revelation Records.

In 2000, McTernan and his wife moved to Beltsville, Maryland, where the studio was again located in the basement of their house which also housed the musicians who lived there during the recording sessions.[3] McTernan specialized in recording up-and-coming unsigned artists who, when later signed by major labels, told them about McTernan's work, the word-of-mouth advertising gaining him contracts from major indie labels such as Equal Vision Records, Vagrant Records, Epitaph Records or Fueled by Ramen.[3]

At the insistence of his wife, McTernan moved the studio again in 2005 by converting an empty house in the Fells Point neighborhood of Baltimore into a state-of-the-art recording studio with spacious living quarters where the musicians still live in McTernan's studio while recording, a rarity in modern times.[3]