Be Your Own Pet, from left: Nathan Vasquez, Jemina Pearl, John Eatherly, Jonas Stein
It’s been almost a year since Be Your Own Pet released Mommy, their first album since 2008. The influential Music City garage-punk outfit reunited in 2022 at the behest of fellow Nashvillian Jack White, who handpicked the band to open a few shows on his Supply Chain Issues Tour. BYOP eventually signed to White’s label Third Man Records, leading to their triumphant return on wax.
But more than 20 years after the band first formed at Nashville School of the Arts, the members — singer Jemina Pearl, guitarist Jonas Stein, bassist Nathan Vasquez and drummer John Eatherly — all have even more going on. We caught up with multihyphenate Stein, whose other projects include now-defunct band Turbo Fruits and much-loved dance party Sparkle City Disco, in advance of BYOP’s show Saturday at Eastside Bowl. Our interview has been edited for length and clarity.
BYOP has been back for several years now, and it’s been almost a full year since Mommy came out. Does it feel like you’re back in a groove with the group?
Yeah, man. It’s been a nice little treat. We’re in as much of a groove as we can be given the circumstances — and the circumstances are that we spend a lot of time apart and we all have other lives going on. It feels very fun and exciting, and we’ve been very grateful for getting to experience all this again.
All of you have a lot of projects going on outside of the band. How do you balance that with touring and recording as a group?
We have to be flexible with each other, and we have to be sensitive to the fact that we all have other things going on. We all have our own other artistic projects, and Jemina has a full-on family; John lives up in New York. There’s quite a few moving pieces that we have to navigate, but it’s been manageable. I think having realistic expectations of how much time we can put into it is something good to be considerate of. Given all those circumstances, we’ve been having a lot of fun, and working with each other has been a lot smoother than it was when we were kids because we’ve all grown a lot and matured a lot. So it’s a lot easier to work together now.
Nashville is now a lot better known for rock and other non-country genres than it was when BYOP debuted. What does it feel like to be part of establishing Nashville’s modern rock legacy?
It feels pretty cool. Sometimes I forget how instrumental our band may have been in kind of helping mold the musical influence that Nashville has. Growing up around country music and being in Nashville, I think — whether it was subconscious or not — we all gravitated toward alternative punk and rock music as kids.
Sometimes I get reminded by people, “Oh, I guess we had some influence on shaping what Nashville has become outside of the country music world.” It’s fun to take some of that credit. But the people that I give credit to are the slightly older generation before us who were putting on punk rock shows at house parties and places that we were welcomed to come in as young teenagers, and be exposed to stuff that we otherwise probably wouldn’t have been exposed to.
I ran into Charles [Kaster] from Hans Condor recently, and we were just going through all the shows that we remember seeing at Guido’s Pizzeria. … It was people like them who helped mold my tastes. So I have to give credit to that crowd — Matt Walker, the guys from Snakeskin Machinegun, Asschapel, bands like that in that era.
Be Your Own Pet, from left: Jonas Stein, Jemina Pearl, John Eatherly, Nathan Vasquez
Can you tell us what’s next for Sparkle City Disco? I know y’all just had another one of your legendary Basement East shows.
We just finished working with our buddy Ken Sable, producer and DJ around town, on a remix for Cody Belew on one of his latest singles called “Horseshoes and Hand Grenades.” It’s a really good song of his, and we had a really good time remixing it with Ken Sable at his studio.
Beyond that, we’ve got some more gigs coming up, and we’re going to try to get back in the studio. Whether we do some more remixes or do some more original stuff, we’re just going to try to continue to slowly pepper some tracks out there. It’s kind of hard for us to stay consistent with that, but we know it’s important, so we’re going to keep on trying.
BYOP has several connections with Jack White, and when you were in Turbo Fruits, you worked with Patrick Carney. What does it feel like to be one of the few artists who crossed the Nashville rock star Cold War line between those two?
[Laughs] Honestly, I haven’t really thought about that, but I’ve had very positive experiences working with both of those guys. It’s been in different ways. Jack White and Third Man Records has been much more of a record-label experience, but his support has been so great, and we’ve been so appreciative of it. He’s one of the reasons that the band got back together, because he heard we were rehearsing and then just randomly asked Jemina if we wanted to come open some shows for him. And then working with Patrick with Turbo Fruits was more, like, hands-on in the studio, and that was also a really special experience. I’ve got positive things to say about both of those men and both of those experiences.
I’ve heard you’re a big hockey guy. Are you still officiating? Are you a Preds fan?
I am still officiating, not as much as I used to. I’m absolutely a Preds fan. I think I went to the very first game during their inaugural season.
I also play in a men’s league, or some might call it a beer league. You get to see some cool people at the rink. There’s fellow people in the music business, other musicians. … I get to referee and sometimes play against some of the ex-Predators. There’s some really high-quality men’s league hockey, and it’s a lot of fun.
