Be Your Own Pet
Be Your Own Pet is a phenomenal group of punks who exploded into Nashville’s rock ’n’ roll underground while they were still high school students at Nashville School of the Arts in the early Aughts, and became an international sensation in short order before disbanding in 2008. Last year, they reunited for a progressively longer string of gigs, which included opening some dates on Jack White’s Supply Chain Issues Tour. Friday, the band will release Mommy, their first new album in 15 years, via Third Man Records.
Album titles aren’t necessarily meant to be taken literally, but when I catch up with three-quarters of the band on a videoconference, singer Jemina Pearl is in her minivan with her two kids — a dramatically different vibe from the bombastic stage presence that’s been her calling card from the beginning. Within a minute or two, guitarist Jonas Stein and drummer John Eatherly join us; bassist Nathan Vasquez can’t make it this time.
“We didn’t know we were going to necessarily make a record,” says Pearl. “But when we got together two years ago and met up, Nathan was kind of like, ‘I only want to play shows if we write new music.’ And none of us had really thought about that.”
For anyone who missed Be Your Own Pet’s arrival circa 2004, it’s hard to imagine a parallel. The group, which originally included Jamin Orrall on drums, had chemistry and chops well beyond their years, which they channeled into buzzing guitar hooks, hip-jerking beats and rowdy live shows. They commanded the attention of a new generation of rockers in Nashville and far beyond, touring internationally and getting ink in publications of every size including NME, Rolling Stone and Nylon; not always for the best — Pearl has discussed being objectified and abused. Via Thurston Moore’s imprint Ecstatic Peace in the U.S. and international label XL Recordings, they released 2006’s Be Your Own Pet and 2008’s Get Awkward. Between those albums, Eatherly took over for Orrall; he left to focus on JEFF the Brotherhood, his much-loved band with brother Jake Orrall, and Infinity Cat, the label the brothers started with their dad, which released BYOP’s early singles. Still, that much time under a bright spotlight that never seemed to turn off brought new stresses that the young quartet wasn’t prepared to navigate, and they called it quits about five months after Get Awkward came out.
“It was kind of like lightning in a bottle,” Stein says of the band’s success. “And it was all just really quick, and fast, and crazy, and difficult, and really fun, and really shitty and — it was just a little bit all over. And I think that those are some vague reasons why we kind of burnt out. We had a lot put on our plate from the get-go.”
All the members continued making music in various capacities around various life commitments. Stein had a long run fronting rocking punks Turbo Fruits; Vasquez’s projects included fantastic noise-pop outfits Deluxin’ and Road Block; and Pearl released her solo LP Break It Up in 2009 and co-founded punk outfit Ultras S/C. Eatherly played with Pearl and Vasquez and also started rock group Public Access T.V. in Brooklyn. Third Man, which was co-founded by Pearl’s husband Ben Swank along with Jack White and Ben Blackwell, approached BYOP about reissuing their albums, but Vasquez’s stipulation that they write new music if they were going to be getting onstage lit a creative fire under the band.
Be Your Own Pet
“We had discussed the idea of getting together and writing for a couple of days, and demoing some songs with Jeremy [Ferguson] from Battle Tapes,” Stein explains, noting that all four members brought songs to the table. They worked quickly at Ferguson’s studio, recording three tracks that Stein played for Swank. “After those three demo songs we did — which aren’t demos anymore, they’re actually on the album — that’s when shit started becoming more realistic as far as writing a whole new album.”
What was most important for Pearl was for her voice to represent who she is today, nearly two decades after BYOP took off like a bottle rocket.
“Now I’m not just 20 years old, going crazy — feeling insane because I’m not on medication,” she says, referencing the bipolar disorder she grappled with. “Now I’ve kind of got my shit together. But I’m also a mom, and so I kind of wanted to figure out how to write punk rock songs about where my life is now.”
Hard-hitting lead single “Hand Grenade” examines how Pearl found a path to healing from past trauma, and “Goodtime!” is a hardcore shout-along about how, as a parent, it can be hard to get to hang out with other adults. Meanwhile, opening groover “Worship the Whip” and choppy disco track “Rubberist” take on fetishistic themes, much the way The Velvet Underground did with “Venus in Furs.”
“I also tried to think about how back in the day, we would just pick like a random topic to write a song about,” says Pearl. “Like, ‘Oh, we love riding bicycles. Let’s write a song about riding our bikes!’ Like, ‘Oh, I love latex. I’ll write a song about my love of latex!’ Same vibe, only now I’m 36.”
“Drive,” near the end of the record, is one of its most intriguing songs. It’s about speeding through your hometown with the windows down, and its first three lines resonate with the weird duality of nostalgia and shame that can come with having a long relationship with a place: “Back in the city that I call home / My past is everywhere I roam / Don’t want to be the same person each day.” I ask Pearl about the differences between her relationship with Nashville when she was a teenage musician and her relationship with it as an adult musician who has kids of her own.
“I feel a lot more love in Nashville, and support in Nashville, now than I did then,” she says with a smile. “I don’t know if it was, like, a Southern thing about being a really loud, brash young woman … that rubbed people the wrong way, but I felt like I got a lot of shit in Nashville all the time growing up. So I don’t know — maybe Nashville is just catching up. We’re meeting each other in the right place, right time, right now.”
