Jemina pearl
By Emily Easley
Photos by Matthew Asti
Jemina first toured the world at seventeen as the lead singer for Be Your Own Pet. Now twenty-two, she just released her first solo album, Break It Up, on Ecstatic Peace.
Jemina's back on the road with her new band, which includes her boyfriend and fellow-BYOP-veteran John Eatherly. On stage, Jemina really "has it." Sometimes I'm inspired to dance like crazy, and sometimes she makes me realize I've been living my life like the Cowardly Lion. What use is there in living like that?
The last few times I've gone to the movies I've seen the preview for Pirate Radio. The best part of that preview is when Philip Seymour Hoffman says, "Young men and women have always had dreams, and they've always put those dreams into song," or something to that effect. Anyway, you know what I'm getting at. This chick can wail!
EE: You’re from Nashville, right? What was it like growing up there?
JP: It was very strange. My parents were from California, and we moved to Nashville when I was two, so all of my memories are from Nashville.
How come they moved?
My dad was a musician, and he played guitar for this Christian artist who wanted to relocate to Nashville, cos it was all country and Christian music basically. Almost as soon as we moved, he and the person had a falling out, and he ended up not playing guitar for him.
The early years of my childhood we moved around a lot in Nashville – moving in with other families to sort of make it work. Then eventually we moved to I guess what would be called the “wrong side of the tracks.” And that’s where I grew up.
My parents still live in that house. Now it’s like Williamsburg or something – it’s really gentrified. But when I was younger it was like, drive-by shootings and people burning down their houses cos they were like, making crack, or like, smoking crack and stuff.
Wow. And what did your mom do?
My mom was a seamstress; she still is. She designs children’s clothes and makes wedding gowns, stuff like that. My dad was a musician and a painter and a photographer. So both my parents were artists. It was rough – in and out of work, all the time. But the arts were really important to my parents. I feel really lucky cos most kids it’s not necessarily that way.
Did you go to the local public school in that neighborhood?
Yeah.
Was
it mostly white or mixed or –
No, it was like a minority to be white. There was lots of immigrants – lots of people from South Asia, like Vietnam and Cambodia, and those were most of my friends. There were a lot of people from Africa, and then like, local neighborhood kids – the majority was black, and like, really scary white trash kids, you know? Like this girl was named Ammonia. Like her parents thought that was a –
Ammonia?
Oh man.
Yeah. It was a weird school.
Was there not a lot of academic rigor?
No. I kind of stood out, because I really enjoyed learning as a kid. I think most of these kids came from such troubled homes – they were really mean, but now when I’m older it’s sort of like, “Whoa, they probably came from like, horrible family situations.” But as a kid I was so frustrated.
I ended up getting out of that school to start third grade. Nashville’s split by a river – I lived in East Nashville, and West Nashville’s the nice part of town. So I went to this school in West Nashville, and it was really hard cos I was the new kid in this nice neighborhood, and I was just always this weird little kid. I insisted on having like, old metal lunchboxes – I liked to go to antique stores and thrift stores, because that’s just where we always shopped, cos we were poor.
Then I got into this academic, like “Magnet” middle school. I hated it there so much. I didn’t have friends. It’s like typical middle school – people pretend to be your friend just so they can later like, embarrass you in front of everyone.
Do you have memories of that?
Oh, yeah. Sixth grade was like, coming home and crying every day.
What
would people do?
Oh – you know, throw food at me in the cafeteria. One time this group of girls wanted to be my friend, and I was really suspicious of it, because of all the experiences I had in school – I was already not very trusting of people. I’d hang out with them, and I even got invited to a girl’s sleepover once, and then a week later, they wouldn’t let me sit with them anymore. Then they e-mailed me all these Instant Message conversations they had about me, that were just like, so mean.
Saying what?
Just like, “She dresses so weird!” “She thinks she’s so cool!” They just really hated me. They’d try to do that thing where they call you and the other person’s on the line, and they try to get you to talk shit about the other girl. And I’m like, “I’m too smart to fall for these tricks.”
I found out about punk music when I was in seventh grade. I saw some Sex Pistols thing on VH1, and I was really kind of scared and also really intrigued. I just really fell in love with that music, cos I think I just felt like I didn’t fit in.
What did you dress like when you felt like an outsider but hadn’t like, found punk yet?
I had this bright blue, white and black striped fake fur skirt. It was fuzzy and crazy and it was like, my FAVORITE. I’d wear polyester, crazy printed shirts that I found at thrift stores. I’m sure I looked like a little like, mini raver-kid, even though I had no idea what a rave was, cos I was in middle school. I had two older sisters, and they were really into 90s grunge, so they would kind of influence me.
Was the Sex Pistols the first music that you got into?
No, I grew up with music. My mom loved Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen and Cat Stevens. We listened to Tom Petty a lot. Kind of like, singer-songwriter stuff. A lot of Leonard Cohen, like so much Leonard Cohen that when I hear it now it makes me think of my childhood, haha.
And I really liked musicals. Ever since I was a kid, performing and singing was like, my favorite. I would watch Grease and West Side Story all the time. I was really into No Doubt for a little while. I was like, the perfect age to like No Doubt. I was like, “This is so cool!” Like, “There’s a girl singer!”
Was Gwen Stefani the first female singer you liked?
Probably,
yeah. Now I watch those videos and I’m like, “This is so obnoxious!”
That first single was so irritating. The “Spiderwebs” song?
Oh, yeah. I remember when I was moving here, I was going through my old stuf and I found that CD, Tragic Kingdom. I was like, “I HAVE to listen to this now.” And the production and the music is SO bad. It’s funny how much I loved it, and of course I still knew all the words.
So then I had friends, but they didn’t go to the same school as me. All my friends were like, rich – they lived on the west side and I lived in East Nashville, like, slummin’ it. My best friend Jamin, who started Be Your Own Pet with me – we both got into punk rock at the same time. We’d go to each other’s houses and it’d be like, “I found out about the New York Dolls, who’d you find out about?”
How did you find out about bands?
I
started reading like, MOJO magazine, cos they’d do these CDs that had
all these old bands. I didn’t really like new music. Jamin’s dad had
been in a New Wave band. His dad had like, Clash records and Elvis
Costello. And I guess the Internet kind of, but not really – I’ve never
been a very computer-savvy person.
But I remember I got MTV2 one
summer – my mom got us cable one summer – and there was some series
about punk rock. There were all of these bands, so I got out my
notebook and wrote them down. I only had a certain amount of money, and
so every week, it’s like, going to the record store – I was buying CDs
I guess, then – and being like, “Don’t make a mistake! Get a good CD!”
What were some of the best ones?
The Ramones, of course. And then X-Ray Spex was like, “This
is so cool!” Cos Poly Styrene’s pretty young, I think she’s like
fifteen when she’s in that band. I always wanted to listen to girl
bands, like the Slits. And Jamin and Jonas (the guitar player for Be Your Own Pet), they were like,
“We don’t wanna listen to the girl bands!” They wanted to listen to
Minor Threat.
There was this place called Camino’s Pizzeria
and they would have all ages punk shows there. I’m sure if I saw any of
those bands I used to love, I’d think they were really bad. It was kind
of like, DIY. But it
was cool to be finding out about all this old music and then you’d go
out and be able to see like, basically what it was. It was fun.
Were you getting drunk?
I didn’t really start drinking until – when I first started going to shows I was probably like fourteen, and I was kind of the only girl, so I felt really cool. I could kind of like, hold my own. I’d come home with bruises everywhere and my mom would lose it – just from like, dancing and doing whatever. I don’t think I really started drinking til a year or two later. Once I started high school.
I went to this academic high school called June Fog. They try to scare everyone when you first get there. They have this freshman orientation, and they’re like, “Look in front of you. Look to the left. Look behind you. One of these people is not going to graduate. This school is not for everyone.” And I was immediately like, “Hey, I’m that person, so you guys can all chill out – it’s not you, it’s me.”
I hated it there. I was always really good at school, and then something in my brain in ninth grade was just like, “Fuck this. I know I don’t wanna go to college. I don’t wanna be in this school.” I think also just finding out about punk music – I was just like, “Fuck all this. This isn’t what I want.” My grades went from like, straight A’s to D’s and C’s.
What did your parents think?
I don’t know. They’ve always been really supportive and understanding. But my mom made me go to that school. So I was kind of like, “Hey, I told you I didn’t want to go and you made me. This is what happens.” But I’d always hated school. I just never had friends, never fit in. Most of my childhood was spent like, begging my mom to home school me.
After ninth grade, I got to go to the Nashville School of the Arts, which is a public school, and you have mostly arts classes, but it’s kind of a joke. I would get drunk in the classroom. People would do drugs there. It felt like a school with no rules.
How did you get drunk in the classroom?
You just like, get like a Coca-Cola bottle and pour whiskey in there. I would smoke weed there all the time. There was a cop there, but he would always joke around with me, like “Lemme check your bag!” and I was like, “Nuh-uh!” It’s really stupid now, looking back on it.
It sounds like Foxes.
Totally. It was a big transition though. Growing up, I always did really well in school, and then ninth grade, I just felt like, being such a good, straight girl – like, that’s not me, that’s not who I am. So then I kind of started to party. Be Your Own Pet started when I was in ninth grade. I was fifteen. And then by the time I was seventeen, we were getting courted by major labels.
What was it like the first time you performed, or sang?
In
Be Your Own Pet? Well, I always loved performing – like playing in
school musicals, I always felt really comfortable on stage. I never got
stage fright. So when the show came I already felt like, “YEAH!” I was just like, probably, immediately – if I had any doubts
about what I wanted to do with my life, they were all gone that night.
I
think I just tried to go as crazy as possible – just like spastic
shaking, and dancing. Me and my one girl friend that I had at the time,
we’d always watch old episodes of “Hullabaloo” and “American
Bandstand." They always had Go-Go Dancers, and we’d
try to copy their dance moves. That’s still sort of how I dance now,
like trying to copy girls doing the Crocodile and the Pony and stuff
like that.
Do you know how come you mostly had guy friends?
I still mostly have guy friends. Most of the girls I’ve been friends with have stabbed me in the back. I feel like a lot of girls deal with that. I remember this one girlfriend I had in high school, and I was so excited because I felt like I finally had this girl friend. She liked to go out, and we were kind of into the same music, and we would get into trouble together.
Then I lost my virginity and I told her, and the next day the whole school knew about it. I was just like, “You’re such a bitch!” Like, why would you do that?
Who did you lose your virginity to?
Oh God. I was such a nerd in middle school. I skipped the whole like, going to Spin the Bottle parties. I was never invited to those. I remember I wrote a boy a note. Like, “Would you go to the dance with me? Check YES or NO.” And then he didn’t check anything, he just wrote, “HELL NO” in like, all caps. I was SO hurt.
That’s horrifying!
I know. I was so upset. Then by the time I was in high school, I hadn’t kissed anyone. I was sixteen and I hadn’t done anything. And this one guy liked me. His name was Dylan. He was cute enough, so he became my boyfriend. I think we’d been dating for maybe three months, and I was sort of like, “Fuck this! I wanna get this over with.”
He had this band, too. They were like, emo, and I was always trying to look past that fact. But he made me come to this battle of the bands – they got to the final round, and then they ended up losing. He was like, “What’d you think of my band?” I was like, “I have to be honest, I didn’t really like it.” Music is so important to me, I can't lie about it.
He got really upset. So when he came to the first Be Your Own Pet show, he was like, “I didn’t think it was really good.” Cos he wanted to get me back. But I was like, “I know you’re lying!”
Was it the first Be Your Own Pet show?
Mm-hm.
It was just mostly our friends. People were having a lot of fun, and
dancing. I think it was cool for them to see, cos
we were some of the first people in our group of
friends to get a band together. A lot of people had never been to a show before. Maybe they’d been to like, a big
outdoor concert, but never a show in a club.
It was really fun. But this girl who was my sorta-best friend – she pretended like she got really drunk, even though I knew she was lying. There were all these guys – she wanted them to take care of her. I was so pissed, it was like, “This was supposed to be MY night!” It was funny. That’s the same girl who told everyone I lost my virginity.
So you stopped being friends with her?
And she stole a bunch of my clothes! I wrote a song about it years later. There’s a Be Your Own Pet song called “Becky.” It wasn’t just about her, it was about mean girlfriends you have.
I feel like when you’re in school and you’re kind of an outsider, you just have to be friends with anyone else who’s an outsider, like even though you maybe don’t really like each other, but you’re like, “Shit, well, you’re like, the closest thing to being interested in the same things as me, so like, we have to be friends.”
I’m sure you’ve told this story before, but I was curious how Be Your Own Pet first got big.
It was really strange. We started playing these shows, and the drummer’s dad, who had had a music career, kind of started sticking his nose in it. At first it was cool, he was like, “I think you guys should record a demo.” So we recorded like three songs in the basement. Then he’s like, “Well, we should go somewhere that sounds better.” And we’re like, “Cool!”
Then he got this other producer involved, and things started to get kind of strange. You know, like, they made us sign this contract without even talking to our parents. Just sort of shady. We got pushed to work with all these people, and they would try to hype us up to these labels. Then this guy wanted to be our manager. It was sort of like, “We need a manager? Why?”
But it was so exciting. I was seventeen, and they were like, “You need to go to CMJ! NOW!” So we got to leave school and go play CMJ. It was so awesome, but of course at the same time I was like, really – just scared, I think. It felt like such a big deal, and I’d watched my own father’s career with music, which was really rough, so I was like, “Well, I’m getting this chance now, I might not get another one, so I should probably use this opportunity to like, do this.”
We played CMJ, which is so ridiculous to me now, but at the time it was like, “Oh yeah, we have to go do this. It’s definitely what we have to do right now.” All these labels were there. And we started getting taken out to dinner, like people’d fly to Nashville, or they’d fly us to New York, and we would play shows, and they’d pay for the trip. Or we’d fly to LA.
Was that really weird for you?
It was the WEIRDEST thing. It was so crazy. And at the same time, I was really struggling with school. I was just really miserable there, I didn’t have any friends. I had the guys in my band, but they were a lot more popular than me. They would like, go to the parties. But I wouldn’t necessarily be invited to those things.
You weren’t getting invited to parties?
I think maybe it was easier for people not to be jealous of them than to not be jealous of me? I don’t know, it was really strange.
So you thought people were jealous?
Yeah. I definitely felt a bunch of hatred from a bunch of girls, in particular. I was like, “I don’t wanna go there anymore. I don’t like people there, they don’t like me.” So this whole time that we were getting courted by all these labels, I was dropping out of high school.
There was a lot of drama between the band and the parents. It just felt like we were in the middle of a tornado. Then finally – I know that Thurston had bought our single a way long time ago, and he was putting together this deal with Universal, where his label, Ecstatic Peace, could be an imprint. And when he came, it was like THURSTON MOORE!!! Sonic Youth was such a big deal, to all of us, that it was sort of a no-brainer.
It feels like we definitely made the right decision. I mean, literally any label – like, Capitol – I’m sure in a lot of ways they thought we were really cute, cos we were naïve kids, so they’d want to get us drunk, or take us out, and get us into places where we weren’t allowed. So we would be like, “Oh, those people are so cool!!!”
I think labels think bands are just completely stupid. I think they think human beings are just completely stupid. It’s like, those tricks don’t work anymore! You know, I grew up reading all the books – my favorite subject in high school was rock ‘n’ roll history. I read Please Kill Me. All those books are just about bands getting fucked over.
What was it like to start touring at such a young age?
We had chaperones, haha. Well – my parents are pretty much like, understanding people. When I got caught smokin’ weed, my dad’s like, “Be careful with it cos it’s illegal.” So they weren’t too strict with that kind of stuff. But we used to have to have chaperones – it would be like, one of our parents.
Would you sneak around behind the chaperone’s back?
Of course! I was seventeen, and I think Nathan might’ve even been fifteen? So we were all really young, but we would always try to sneak out. We would tour the UK more than America, and the drinking age is eighteen but most of the places you go don’t even card, so it was like, “YES!!!”
Did you ever get in trouble with your chaperones?
I don’t think I did. My dad got in trouble once, when he was a chaperone, because he let the boys smoke weed. Or maybe he even smoked weed with them. But he got in a lot of trouble for it, and he was like, “What? We’re at the hotel, inside, it was late at night, everyone was going to bed, it was fine!”
The parents found out about it?
Yeah. It was this HUGE thing. They were like, “We don’t think Jimmy can be a chaperone anymore.” I was the oldest in the band, so I was the first to turn eighteen, and I was so annoyed that I had to have someone, like, watching me. But then once Jonas turned eighteen – he was the next one – I think they kinda chilled out. Maybe we shoulda had chaperones, then we would’ve stayed out of all the trouble we got into at the end.
How did you guys get into trouble?
We would get in trouble with the venues – we would always wanna play on the floor, and then we would get in fights about it. There’d be times when we didn’t play long enough. We’d play for fifteen or twenty minutes, and be like, “Okay, we’re done!” and then we’d get in trouble with the booking agent.
We were always breaking things. Bands would never let us borrow their gear cos they were so scared we were gonna break it. Every show – there was always a battle. There were so many places that I used to play, and got in fights with promotors and stuff, and I’m like, “I hope they don’t hold that against me now!”
What was it like for you emotionally?
I definitely felt like my whole life had been leading up to this point, where it kind of hit me last summer, when the band broke up, and I kind of hit rock bottom in my life, like, quite literally. Just like, with drugs, and – I sort of did lose myself. And I climbed back out of it.
There was SO much pressure on me in particular, cos I was the girl, and the lead singer. And the band – no one talked, cos we were all children. We weren’t like, “Oh yeah, we have to communicate to each other to make this work.”
Our drummer quit, we had to fire our manager, and we all wanted to do these separate things. I was sort of the glue being like, “No, we gotta stick together, this is important!” And then I had like, the rug pulled out.
That band was kind of falling apart from the start, which is probably why people wanted to watch it – it was constant chaos. I think that on stage we were all trying to get that out of us. Me and the drummer would be mad at each other, and be like, “Fuck you!” between songs. But people like to see that kind of shit, it’s kind of crazy.
Did you get introduced to drugs while you were on the road?
No. High school was when I started drinking, and smoking weed, and then I started tripping all the time. And things just like, progressed from there. But definitely being on the road made it more appealing to do drugs. Cos if you wanna find stuff it’s really easy to find stuff in the venue.
Everyone wants to show you a good time.
Exactly. We all kind of went into these dark places, like, separately. I felt like the band was lost in a lot of ways. I think we all lost sight of why we became friends, just being around each other so much, and being in such adult situations. I was nineteen, and I bought a house, you know what I mean?
You bought a house in Nashville?
Yeah, I still own it, I rent it out now. But I was nineteen, I was with this guy – we were together for about three years. We lived in this house together. I had this job. I thought I was a lot older than I actually was. It was naïve for me to think, “This is my life, this is what I’m doing.”
So when I could tell that Be Your Own Pet was falling apart, I started to be like, “Shit, what is my life? What am I doing? If this isn’t it, then what’s it gonna be?”
At the very end, I was in a lot of denial, and I cut myself off from the guys. And last June, we were on this tour from hell, this Nylon magazine-sponsored tour.
Oh God. Was that like, Cory Kennedy, and –
Yeah. I just sort of lost it. I knew the band was falling apart, I was miserable. Eighteen people were on one bus. This band we were on tour with, the Virgins – they were sweet guys, but we were like, “Okay, we’re gonna share a bus with this band.”
And then we find out – Havaianas flip-flops was sponsoring the tour, so they had three representatives, who changed every week, and a girl from Nylon, who’d be filming stuff, and then Cory, who’s blogging, our tour manager, the Virgins’ tour manager, and then this guy to watch out for all of us. It was the closest to being on a reality TV show I will ever experience.
It wasn’t like they were filming us 24/7, but it was like – you could not get away, and the shows were horrible. The ticket sales were not as good as they thought, so we were playing venues that were way too big. Whoever planned the tour was not very smart. It was a six-and-a-half-week tour, which is pretty long – we went all over America.
Then, at the very end – we had three or four shows left – the boys came to me and were like, “We don’t wanna do this, we’re quitting.”
I was like, “Are you fucking kidding me?” I was shocked. So then I was fortunate enough to have my band breaking up and me having a life crisis/mental breakdown in front of eighteen people who I didn’t like and wasn’t friends with. It was like, “Cool, Cory Kennedy gets to blog about my life falling apart.”
How do you think you changed as a result?
I’m way more self-aware, which is a painful thing to go through, but a necessary thing. When the band broke up, I didn’t go home for a while. The tour ended in LA, and Steve McDonald, who’s our producer – he’s in that band Redd Kross – he and his wife kind of took me in, and let me stay there off and on the whole entire summer, cos I didn’t wanna go back to Nashville. I didn’t wanna be around all these people. And we had to wait to announce the break up cos of –
You had festival dates, right?
We had a whole year of tours planned. And I was under the impression that we’d just been going too strong for a while, like maybe everyone just needed a little bit of a break and then afterwards we were gonna get back together. But I think that’s just what I needed to tell myself in order to make it for a little while.
It’s like any break-up.
Yeah, exactly. “No, no, no, we’re gonna get back together.” I chopped off all my hair. So it was definitely like a break-up. I went through this process of realizing who I was and what I wanted. And the whole time I was writing non-stop, which is where all the songs for this album now came out of. But it was a very rough year.
How did you and John get together?
Me and John were always the closest in Be Your Own Pet. He didn’t start the band with us, so when he joined, I kind of felt like, “Oh, I’ve gotta protect him from this big, bad rock ‘n’ roll world, and teach him the breaks!”
When we were on that tour, I had all these song ideas that were like, 60s girl-groupy, and he was really into it. After that was done, he moved into my house in Nashville and we started writing songs all the time and staying up all night, and writing and writing and writing and writing. Then we were like, “We gotta move to New York. Fuck Nashville!” It happened really quickly – we started writing songs in September and then by the end of October we’d moved up here.
What did it mean to move to New York?
I felt like it was a chance to start new and fresh. I’d been in this town since I was two. Every place had all these memories and I just wanted to get away from it. I’ve always loved New York. You know, I had such a romantic idea about it…
You thought it’d be like Please Kill Me?Yeah, exactly. I knew it wouldn’t be like that, but I knew there was such an amazing history here of art. And we had friends here. We already knew people at Glasslands and knew about that whole scene. Moving here was probably the best decision I ever made.
How are you feeling about the new album?
I’m really excited. It’s scary in a sense. I haven’t played shows in so long, or done interviews, or gone on tour. I think I forgot about all the bad things and all the things that sucked and only remembered the things I love. Like, “Oh yeah, this is why I was so stressed out all the time.” But I’m still excited. I feel really special to get to travel so much, and I love to travel. So I’ve definitely missed it a lot.
Tell me more about John. Have you mostly dated people who were also musicians?
All the people I’ve ever dated have been musicians. I think it’s just cos that’s what I’m around, and that’s so much what my life is about.
And now, being with John – we have so much shared history. He already knows all the horrible things about me, and I already know all the annoying things about him. It’s nice to have someone where it feels easy, and you just kind of flow together. I’m excited about getting to travel with him, and be like, in a relationship.
He really helped me get out of this sort of dark place I was in. I usually have a pessimistic view and he usually has an optimistic view. You get two pessimistic people together, you just drag each other down. But to be optimistic all the time I think is not, like, reality. It’s good for us to kind of keep each other in check.
It’s funny that we ended up together. When he moved into my house in September when we were writing songs I was kind of freaked out. I was like, “I like, have feelings for John and this is really strange cos we’ve known each other for so long, and he’s always been my closest friend.” I was like, “No, just ignore it!”
Was there like, a crazy first kiss?
Yeah. We’d both been dating people up here, but we’d both kind of get jealous. But I was like, "I don’t want to date this person who I’m in the band with, that’s really stupid." I’d already called my best friend Brynne and been like, “I think I’m in love with him.” And she’s like, “No you’re not!”
Things kept building up, and Valentine’s day, everyone got pretty drunk. Me and him got in this really heavy conversation, kind of testing each other. Like, “What if we dated?” And, “If we do this, we can’t go back!” And yeah, it was Valentine’s Day, like, outside of this stupid bar, and we kissed for the first time. It was really sweet. After that, I tried to tell him, like, “No, no, no, we can’t do that ever again.” But then two weeks later we were together.
Aw.
But it’s pretty funny. Valentine’s Day. It’s cheesy.
You guys are so cute though. I feel like every time I see him, you’re like, making him go get you pizza.
I’m probably trying to convince him to like, “PLEASE go get me pizza.”
It always seems so punk-rock.
Aw. Yeah. We have a funny relationship. But it definitely works for us. When we made the record, John played everything on the record – we didn’t have any studio musicians or anything. It was just me and John, and the producer, and an engineer.
It was just me and him together every day, and it felt kind of like we were escaping the world, just the two of us. Once it was over, he was like, “No matter what – you know, if we stay together or if we don’t, I feel like I’m always gonna look back on this as one of the most fun, most special times in my life.” And it’s really true. To get to be alone with someone that you really care about and just have the freedom to create all day? That’s such a luxury.
Tell me about working with Iggy.
I didn’t even really work with him. Like, we weren’t in the same room – it’s sort of bittersweet. I mean, Iggy Pop’s been my hero ever since first finding out about punk music. So when I first started working on this solo stuff, I was like, “It’d be cool to try to get Iggy to sing on something.”
And I’d written like, the first love song I ever wrote, which actually isn’t about John – I have all these love songs on the album and they’re not about him. Like, “Sorry!!!” But I wrote this love song, and the producer, John Agnello, was like, “I think that’d be a good song for Iggy to sing on.”
So we sent it to him. It took him a really long time to get back. We were already making the record. I was like, I’m not gonna get my hopes up, cos there’s a strong chance he’s gonna say no. But then he said yes. We were trying to see if we could get him to come up to New York, or if we could go down there, but he just did it in Miami – he lives in Miami.
So then we wanted to hear it, and had to wait a while. I finally heard it, like HIM, on the song. And I just cried. Cos I was so excited, and I felt so lucky. And it was sort of like this childhood dream come true. My life is sort of like a childhood dream come true or whatever. But uh – it just felt like – it was really special, like, “Holy shit!” And every time I listen to that song I still kind of don’t believe it’s real or something.
Yeah, I listened to it. He sounds great.
He sounds so good. I was like, “Our voices sound good together!” Maybe if we play Miami he’ll come sing with me or something.
Have you ever played Miami before? Bands don’t usually go to Florida.
That’s because there’s tolls, and people don’t come out that much. Florida’s really weird. I’ve played Florida a bunch, actually. Miami’s probably one of my least favorite places to play. I’ve never been to a third-world country, but I kind of imagine Miami’s the closest thing. The rich people are so rich – it’ll be like these huge fancy condos – and then there’s all of these homeless people. We had to bring all our stuff in, cos when we got to the venue they were like, “Yeah, the band last night got robbed at gunpoint.” We were like, “Cool, can’t wait to play!”
But as soon as we pulled up to the venue our tour manager’s like, “Okay, be careful, this is a really bad part of town – even though there’s a really nice condo over there.” It’s like a zombie movie – while she’s telling us “be really, really careful” this homeless man starts banging on the driver-side window, like, “GIVE ME MONEY!” And then this dude kept banging on the back door, like trying to get in. Saying, “SOMEBODY’S GOTTA LISTEN TO ME SOMETIME!” There was like, five people in the audience. Like, WHY did we come here? And I’d tripped mushrooms the night before, so I felt like a huge piece of shit the whole day. I was like, “That was so stupid.”
