It can be a hard, thankless job to be one of the first. In 2006, when rock music was mostly men who were mostly mad at women, Be Your Own Pet released their debut self-titled full-length and flipped the fucking script.
Jemina Pearl, Jonas Stein, Nathan Vasquez and Jamin Orrall were four teenagers from Nashville playing a brand of fiery, no-fucks-given guitar-driven rock that culled all the best parts of punk and rock from the ’70s and ’80s, and they twisted it into something far more fun with hyperactive songs about things like riding bikes as an act of rebellion, or the zombie apocalypse. (This was before The Walking Dead was a successful television show, mind you.)
Onstage, Pearl was confident and explosive, drawing comparisons to Karen O, Courtney Love and Iggy Pop, and the band’s youthful lack of self-consciousness made them easy for young fans to love and relate to. Boisterous and unignorable, BYOP was fed to the hype machine. Be Your Own Pet earned praise from Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, NME and more. The band played Coachella, Bonnaroo, Lollapalooza, and Reading and Leeds Festival, and they made their late-night TV debut on Late Night With Conan O’Brien.
Fans who followed the band in the press — or on MySpace — know how their story went. Months after following up their debut with another stellar release, 2008’s Get Awkward, Be Your Own Pet suddenly, surprisingly, broke up. Pearl agrees when I tell her I believe BYOP was a band ahead of its time.
“Thank you, I definitely feel that way,” Pearl says. “I feel like … just being teenagers, just doing it and going for it, I think that was inspiring to a lot of younger people. Just in the past couple weeks, a lot of different bands, a lot of women have been reaching out to me and being like, ‘You’re one of the first live shows I ever went to, you inspired me.’ That’s just amazing, that’s what I was hoping to do at that time.”
A month before I hopped on the phone with Pearl and her BYOP bandmates Stein, Vasquez and John Eatherly — who replaced Orrall on the drum throne shortly after Be Your Own Pet came out in 2006 — the band announced they were reuniting for a short string of shows. They’re opening for Jack White at Barclays Center in New York, The Tabernacle in Atlanta and Ascend Amphitheater here in Nashville.
“For our age, we were an alternative to the more hardcore, metal or emo acts that get forced down teenagers’ throats,” says Vasquez, recalling what set BYOP apart. “I feel like we were a rarity in that we were really young people making rock music, but we didn’t really have a hardcore edge. That’s what gets marketed a lot towards that demographic: more super-serious, dramatic kind of music.”
Indeed, many of 2006’s most popular rock songs came from drama-inclined acts including Breaking Benjamin, My Chemical Romance, Evanescence, Panic! At the Disco, and Thirty Seconds to Mars. So much brooding, so much eyeliner.
BYOP was dazzling and refreshing, and everyone wanted in on their party. But that’s not always a good thing. Since the band announced their reunion, Pearl has shared stories about how she was sexualized, abused and taken advantage of in her short time in the spotlight.
“I think it’s necessary to call it out and share sometimes brutal memories, but I think it’s unfair for women to have to dig up all their traumatic experiences and put them out for people [in order] to be believed,” she says. “You have to share every intimate detail of the most fucked-up things that happened to you, and it shouldn’t be that way.”
If Pearl wanted to, she could frame Be Your Own Pet’s reunion as a fuck-you to anyone who did the band wrong, a middle finger to prove she didn’t let them win. She says the reunion — which was first discussed back in 2019 or 2020, before the pandemic — is more about having fun. Her bandmates agree.
“Reuniting is definitely coming from a place of joy and happiness,” says Stein. “I think everyone is in a very positive and healthy headspace to be going through with it, and I think a lot of that has to do with all of the time that has passed and the lack of, like, major record label pressure that we had on us to succeed and sell lots of album copies.”
Among the joy and positivity, there’s maybe a little bewilderment, too.
“I would just like to applaud our younger selves for being able to come up with some of this shit, because I listen back and I’m like, ‘What the fuck was I playing?’ ” says Stein, making all his bandmates laugh. “How ADHD was I to come up with some of these parts without being that great of a musician? Going back and relearning some of this stuff … it just feels like it’d be difficult for anyone else to replicate. Even though it’s inspired by a lot of older bands, it feels like no one else could’ve really done it [like BYOP], so I’m proud of our younger selves for being able to come up with our crazy bullshit.”
