“No one gives a fuck about Be Your Own Pet,” she says over Cokes at Duke’s, a Southern-themed restaurant on East 19th Street. “[In Nashville], it was a deal and people liked to pick fights with me in bars, but here no one gives a shit. Everybody’s got a band, so it doesn’t matter.”
That could all change this week when Pearl puts out her first solo album, Break It Up. A collection of 13 sugary, spunky songs, the record—released on Thurston Moore’s Ecstatic Peace label—builds on the punk legacy that Be Your Own Pet left but also showcases Pearl’s voice in a way that should cause a lot more people to listen up.
“I think with the songs and what we wrote, Be Your Own Pet was singing, but it was more like shouting,” explains Pearl. “With these songs, I wanted to push myself to be more melodic. Fortunately, I’m blessed with a voice that sounds like it should be in a musical.”
She’s not kidding. From the opening lines of the record’s first track, “Heartbeats”
(“It’s not all the cocaine/ not the chemical imbalance in my brain/ that’s making my heartache pain/ that’s driving me insane”), the album saunters, snarls and spasms. It sounds like what would happen if Joan Jett wrote a Broadway show. Anyone who’s seen Pearl live, whether solo this summer at the Williamsburg Waterfront or with Be Your Own Pet at any of its New York Shows, knows the whopping, booming, Little-Orphan-Annie-meets-Elastica formula. (Pearl’s first local show post-album release will be Nov. 5 at Bowery Ballroom.) And whether it’s the Blondie-ish “Nashville Shores” or “I Hate People”—Pearl’s much-talked-about duet with Iggy Pop—the singer has taken the piss and vinegar of her previous act and turned it into lemonade.
This alchemy, though, didn’t happen overnight. “Once the band broke up, I threw myself into writing just to deal with it. I had to keep myself busy. I didn’t know what the project was going to be, I was just writing lyrics and ideas for songs. Then me and [collaborator and boyfriend] John Eatherly hooked up over the summer, and he told me he was writing music and had some demos, so I listened to them and thought, shit, I have to convince him to let me use these. And I guess his mindset was that he had to convince me to sing on them.Then it naturally evolved from there. Once I put lyrics to a couple of the songs he wrote, it just really clicked.”
Once Pearl and Eatherly moved to New York—she’s now living in Greenpoint—she set to work on the new album, picking up the slack for Be Your Own Pet, which owed one more record to Ecstatic Peace (part of Universal). Pearl recorded demos for the songs in Northampton, Mass., with Moore and eventually went to Hoboken studio Water Music to record Break It Up with producer John Agnello (Murder City Devils, Patti Smith, Dinosaur Jr., The Kills).
“I knew she was one of the greatest rock singers I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a lot of great rock singers,” says Moore. “I wanted to do records with Be Your Own Pet a few years ago, [so] I went to this little club in Nashville to see them and she to tally
scorched my senses. She was only 19 and wasn’t out to impress anybody; she was just kicking total ass. I became a huge fan and started to put their records out. When the band split up, I immediately asked her to get together and do some solo work. She isn’t an Avril Lavigne; she represents a girl playing rock ‘n’ roll who’s not playing to the lowest common denominator. She’s intellectual and just punk.”
But with the major-label machine behind her—the copy of Break It Up that New York Press received was marked “College Edition”—Pearl’s going to have a hell of a time hanging onto the rag-tag cred she’s built up over the years. All of those people who act like they don’t give a fuck can be quick to take out their knives when they smell something like success in the air. Just ask Karen O.—or anyone else who’s been built up by the local indie scene only later to be torn down by the same people.That doesn’t seem to weigh heavily on Pearl at the moment.When asked about moving on to playing bigger venues, she shrugs and mentions that the curtains at Park Slope’s smallishSouthpaw always make her a bit nervous.
“I grew up playing pizza places, so I always feel more comfortable in DIY spaces or house parties. So I guess it will be an interesting transition,” says Pearl. “I’m so used to being punk, and this stuff isn’t quite that. I’m just trying to find my footing.”
