Following the sad news that Be Your Own Pet will soon cease to be a band, we dug up this amusing conversation with BYOP singer Jemina Pearl. Enjoy.
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If girls are really made of sugar, spice and everything nice, please don’t tell Jemina Pearl. The petite 20-year-old lead singer of Be Your Own Pet just might punch you in the face.
Pearl and her bandmates—Jonas Stein, Nathan Vasquez and John Eatherly—may have only recently graduated from high school, but they already have a hit album, four top-10 singles on the U.K. charts and a frenzied following in Japan. Last month, the band released Get Awkward, its second record on Thurston Moore’s Ecstatic Peace imprint. Moore himself signed the band after being seduced by Pearl’s snarling vocals and the band’s old-school punk sound, reminiscent of punk pioneers like the Ramones and the Stooges.
Paste caught up with the band’s new drummer John Eatherly, who joined the band just in time to work on Get Awkward. The band’s manager woke him up as he slept on the tour bus, en-route from Milan, Italy to Bourges, France in the final days of Be Your Own Pet’s month-long European tour. Despite being shaken from a few stolen hours of precious sleep only moments before, Eatherly graciously chatted with us about touring, songwriting, the new album and a hypothetical zombie apocalypse. And the best part? They’re all connected in the hyperkinetic world of Be Your Own Pet.
Paste: Your new album Get Awkward was released March 18. Where did the title come from?
Eatherly: Actually, it came from when we were recording in the summer. It was actually our producer’s idea; he’s like a good friend of ours. He just said it, and at the time we were all just kind of throwing around ideas, and we thought that it fit pretty well, seeing as how we’re all pretty awkward teenagers. It just fell into place, and we dug it.
Paste: Jonas called Get Awkward Be Your Own Pet’s “first second album,” and said the band felt more pressure recording it than your debut. Why was recording the second album harder than recording the first one?
Eatherly: I didn’t record with the band on the first record, but I don’t think that on the second record, we… I think that as the band as a whole, we didn’t feel much pressure to make it sound any… like… I mean, it was pretty. It wasn’t really like a tense songwriting experience. It was more just like hanging out and having guitar riff ideas, and just jamming on a song for a long time while Jemina would write lyrics. But I don’t think we really felt… I personally didn’t feel any pressure, and I don’t think the rest of the band did.
Paste: Be Your Own Pet’s songs are littered with film references, including not-so-subtle nods to Heathers (“What’s Your Damage,”) Robocop (“Bitches Leave”) and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (“The Kelly Affair.”) Are you guys big movie buffs?
Eatherly: We’re all really big movie fans. Those are a few of Jemina’s personal favorite movies, but we like those movies, too. Heathers is a pretty ridiculous, funny movie. Robocop’s pretty awesome.
Paste: And zombies pop up twice! “Ouch” from your first album was inspired by Dawn of the Dead, and “Zombie Graveyard Party” from the new album pays homage to Return of the Living Dead. Have you approached George Romero to direct a video yet?
Eatherly: I wish! That’d be pretty amazing. It’s safe to say that we all really love zombie movies. I think it’d be pretty cool if the zombie apocalypse happened, and like, we all had to fight for survival every day.
Paste: Would the band live on? With the apocalypse happening, that might be difficult, you know.
Eatherly: We’d continue more as a gang. I don’t know if we’d have time to play music.
Paste: That might have to take a backseat to fighting off the undead with a baseball bat, scavenging for food and whatnot.
Eatherly: Yeah, maybe. I don’t know where I’d go first.
Paste: Universal Records opted not to release the songs “Black Hole,” “Becky” and “Blow Yr Mind” on the U.S. edition of Get Awkward less than a month before the album’s release, citing their violent lyrics. How did the band feel about that decision?
Eatherly: We felt pretty, pretty horrible about it because it wasn’t our decision at all. There’s nothing we could do about getting those songs back on the record. It’s more like the head suits at the top of Universal Records that we don’t even communicate with at all. Apparently, they just read the lyrics and they didn’t even listen to the music at all, so they really didn’t get the contrast between the lyrics and how it could be… It’s not like we’re seriously saying… I don’t know. We’re not telling 16-year-old girls to go kill their best friend, or something.
Paste: They definitely missed the tone. Who’s next? The Shiny Toy Guns?
Eatherly: Exactly! Exactly. It’s just a huge bummer because now the American version is just like… I’m never going to put on the American version and listen to it. Ever. If I’m giving friends an album, I would never give them that version of it. At 12 instead of 15 songs, it’s pretty ridiculous. It didn’t really hit me until I saw the package for the U.K. version that has all 15 songs on it. You open up the record and it lists all of the songs on the inside, and it looks completely different. It looks so much more full. It was just a huge bummer that that happened, and there was nothing we could do about it. It’s pretty unfair.
Paste: Universal is also home to artists including Eminem, 50 Cent, and …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead. Do you think the label is sending a bit of a mixed message here?
Eatherly: That’s why it’s completely unfair!
Paste: Do you think it has anything to do with Jemina being a cute 20-year-old girl?
Eatherly: That definitely could be it. I mean, I guess it’s who they think might be buying our records, but I think white suburban kids who could be buying our record could definitely be buying any one of those artists’ records as well. It could definitely be a sexist thing, it probably is, but it’s definitely a mix of who they think and what they think. Maybe they just don’t care. I don’t know.
Paste: The band started touring nationally while you guys were still in high school, and has shared the stage with the Arctic Monkeys, The Raveonettes and the Black Lips. Do you ever have to step back and pinch yourself?
Eatherly: It is pretty surreal. That’s the number one word to describe it. Especially for me: this is my first European tour. They’ve all done it quite a bit before, like with the last record and stuff. So it’s kind of just like really, really exciting. The first tour I did was with the Black Lips, and that was super fun, and they were all really cool and really nice. So I guess it’s surreal, but it’s good that the other bands we’ve toured with have all been really nice. We haven’t toured with any band, from my experience so far, that have been stuck-up assholes. It is pretty insane. I was listening to these bands before I was in this band, and now we’re playing with them.
Paste: You’re currently in the middle of a three-month international tour with She Wants Revenge. Somewhere in Germany by the looks of your schedule.
Eatherly: Yeah. And now I think we’re on our way to Bourges, France?
Paste: How is the tour going, and what has been the reception of your new album?
Eatherly: I think it’s been going really well. The audiences seem to be pretty energetic and into it, especially in the U.K. And this is like… I think we have this show, and then we go to Barcelona, and then Madrid, and then that’s it for the tour. Then we go home for, like, two weeks or so, and then we go back out. So we’ve been on tour for like a month or so. We’re nearing the end of it, and all of us are getting a little tired, but we’re hanging in there.
Paste: You guys are all from Nashville?
Eatherly: Yeah.
Paste: When was the last time you were home?
Eatherly: I guess… We started this tour over here right after SXSW. We had the Raveonettes tour, which was like West Coast stuff, and then we went home for a day, basically, like, to do laundry, and then did SXSW, and then we flew, like on the Saturday of SXSW, to London where our first show was. And now we’re way over here.
Paste: In addition to your fan base in the U.K., Be Your Own Pet also has a huge and very devoted following in Japan. To what do you attribute thia popularity?
Eatherly: I don’t know, really. They’ve all been to Japan before and they said it was really insane because, apparently, when they got off the airplane at the airport they had fans at the airport. That sounds pretty, like, I can’t even imagine that. That’s just really strange to me. I don’t know. I guess we have some crazy fans in Japan. I think we’re going to do Summer Sonic in Japan. I guess I’ll see then.
Paste: Jemima’s vocal style has been compared to PJ Harvey, Kathleen Hanna (Bikini Kill), Kim Shattuck (the Muffs) and, most frequently, Karen O (Yeah Yeah Yeahs). How do you feel about those comparisons?
Eatherly: I think that’s because there just other rock ‘n’ roll bands with a girl lead singer. Yeah Yeah Yeahs definitely don’t sound like us at all. It’s a pretty bad comparison, really. I think she kind of sounds like…her personality is just like yelling and hitting the notes.
Paste: What’s next for Be Your Own Pet?
Eatherly: I guess we’re going to be touring until like next December or so, all for this record. But we’ve started writing more music, so I guess just writing new songs, just so we can play more new songs live. I’m sure by December we’ll have a number of new songs that we can play live, that are new songs that aren’t on any of the albums. We’ve kind of started to write songs during sound checks and stuff so far on this tour. So I guess lots of songwriting. I don’t know. Recording, eventually, maybe in the summer.