Cover Story: Heavy Petting

There is absolutely nothing typical about Be Your Own Pet. The quartet hails from Nashville, not exactly a hotbed for their brand of hyper-caffeinated Punk.

They’re impossibly young — drummer Jamin Orrall just turned 18, bassist Nathan Vasquez follows in the fall, while guitarist Jonas Stein and vocalist Jemina Pearl will soon celebrate their 19th birthdays. Stein and Orrall doubled up on their class load in order to graduate from high school a year ahead of schedule.

BYOP have been together for three years, making a name around Nashville but actually getting their big break in England. They lobbied their UK label hard for their first single to be “Let’s Get Sandy (Big Problem),” which clocks in at just less than a minute. And those are just the highlights.

Ladies and gentlemen, hold onto your wigs and keys and meet Be Your Own Pet. When BYOP rolls into town this week, it will be the first date of their first sustained American tour.

“We’ve been on a couple of tours before, but they were overseas and not incredibly long,” says bassist Vasquez.

“This will be our first straight month.”

It seems that everything would be a first for BYOP, considering the band’s oldest member is still two years away from being able to drink legally in some of the venues they play. And yet the quartet has been together since late 2003, rising from the ashes of a previous band called Night Shift Nurses, with Pearl on vocals and Orrall on drums. As young as they all are, they already have solid credentials.

BYOP was launched when the Nurses were left with just Pearl and Orrall, who started scouting for new members. Vasquez and Stein were both drummers but switched to bass and guitar, respectively, to fill the positions.

“We met in late 2003 and we all talked about music and decided that we all liked a lot of the same bands, like the Buzzcocks and that kind of stuff,” Vasquez says. “We just started jamming together — I had never played bass before, but it was easy enough — and we wrote like seven or eight songs. It was pretty neat.”

The chemistry between the foursome is clearly evident on their eponymous debut CD, produced by former Redd Kross guitarist Steve McDonald and set for release Tuesday. Stein’s guitar snarls and thrashes with squalling Punk abandon, Vasquez and Orrall create a manic pulse underneath and Pearl rises above it all with a voice that encompasses the chirpy appeal of Gwen Stefani, the mature melodicism of Chrissie Hynde and the rafter-rattling power of Debbie Harry.

Even with all that energy going for them, the band members weren’t overly excited about their new affiliation.

“I’ve always been in other bands at the same time and this just seemed like another band to play with on the weekends,” Vasquez says. “Then we started getting a lot of little gig offers from other bands to open for them. We rarely had to book our own shows, and we had a lot of opportunities to play out live.”

At one of those little gigs, the U.S. A&R rep for Rough Trade Records made an appearance and it was obvious that BYOP was headed for broader horizons.

“We were all really stoked,” Vasquez says. “That’s when I first figured out that this was more than just a band to keep around while going to high school.”

The year following their formation was monumental for BYOP. The band self-recorded and released a CD-R called Damn Damn Leash in 2004, which found an early champion in Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore, who found the band on the Internet and bought their EP. Zane Lowe of BBC Radio One tracked down MP3s of Damn Damn Leash, and the rabid response to airplay convinced XL Recordings in London to reissue the disc with a bonus track, followed by a single release for Rough Trade.

BYOP then went on to become one of the buzz bands at the 2004 CMJ Convention. They repeated the feat at the 2005 South By Southwest.

This year sees BYOP signed to Moore’s Ecstatic Peace imprint through Universal Records. The band recently released the aptly titled Summer Sensation EP as their label debut, featuring the three songs from the Fire Department single on Rough Trade plus a handful of others not found on the new album.

When BYOP started work on their first full length, they’d just rented a rehearsal space ahead of entering the studio and were going in with three newly written songs.

“Once we got into the rehearsal space, we wrote three or four more,” Vasquez says. “We had six or seven new songs before we recorded. It was kind of weird, because we hadn’t played them live before we recorded them. Now they all sound mutated and kind of fucked up when we play them live. But those songs just kind of happened. There are some songs from early 2004 on there … it’s kind of a hodge podge.”

Be Your Own Pet plays their songs and manages their career along the same lines — fast and loose but never sloppy. Vasquez notes that there was no grand design behind the making of their first album, just a desire to have fun making music and letting that joy shine through in the process.

“We didn’t have any specific statement to present,” he says. “Just record our songs and hopefully people will like it. There was very little thought about the whole thing. Just go and do it.”

In a similar vein, although Be Your Own Pet has been tagged by any number of media outlets (including, now, CityBeat) as one of the hot bands to watch in 2006, Vasquez says they don’t pay a lot of attention to the attention. They’re more interested in the show.

“Oh, great,” he says with deadpan grace about BYOP’s “Hot Issue” designation. “I don’t even realize, I guess. I rarely ever do. I have a shitload of fun when we’re touring. It’s super awesome playing live. That’s definitely the best aspect of it.”

This article appears in May 31 – Jun 6, 2006.