Introducing…. My Pet Rhino
We spoke with My Pet Rhino, the one-man project whose debut album Arrows translates two decades of quiet songwriting into an ambitious, mathematically adventurous, emotionally grounded listen. From layered chants to asymmetrical grooves, every note is deliberate—even the odd ones.
Click Roll Boom: Tell me about how you got started
My Pet Rhino: I have been writing songs on guitar for the best part of 20 years now, and decided a couple of years ago to finally sit down and work out how many good ones I had. It turned out that I had 13 songs that I really liked and thought it would be a shame to never finish them off! Those songs are all the ones that made it to the album.
CRB: How would you describe your sound, and how has it evolved since you first started?
MPR: I would describe it as a good blend of alternative rock, progressive rock, and pop, but always with a big focus on balancing unique elements with remaining catchy and memorable. I am a huge fan of hearing a diverse range of ideas when listening to music, whether that is within the one song or when listening to an album as a whole. When I first started writing, I would say my writing tended to be simple rock-based tunes that were on the darker side. As I started developing my songwriting, I was more willing to explore writing upbeat tunes and songs with more softer elements, and as my skills progressed on guitar I started adding in some more interesting and progressive ideas to my tracks.
CRB: Who or what have been some of your biggest influences, musically and beyond?
MPR: I am strongly influenced by bands like There Will Be Fireworks, We Were Promised Jetpacks, This Town Needs Guns, Queens of the Stone Age, Radiohead, The Killers etc., among other bands of that ilk. I am drawn to bands that maintain their own unique sound while still producing music which is catchy and captivating. I also love hearing really well executed skills on instruments. This does not necessarily mean super-fast and technical playing – that can form part of it, but people who can nail the simple things well also fall into this category. Someone like Jack White is a great example of that. Seven Nation Army has to be the simplest, most bone-headed riff ever imagined by a human. In theory, it is something every teenage guitar player should be able to come up with in their own bedrooms, and most would dismiss it as not being all that interesting even if they did. But when he plays it, it hits like no other riff in history! There must be more riffs like that around just waiting to be discovered, so that is definitely a motivation for me to go and try to find them in my own songwriting (to varying and debatable degrees of success!)
CRB: What does your songwriting process typically look like – is it a more individual or collaborative effort?
MPR: Very individual! I have never really had much success writing with others. I think I am too suborn and rigid in how I think ideas should be fleshed out, and I just want to hear them done my own way. Especially now I have taken the step to put my songs out there into the world, I think it would have disappointed me if I went to all that trouble only for someone else to add something into the songs that I did not like. At least if I do it my way, I will have no regrets or excuses regardless of if the songs are successful or not.
CRB: How do you approach experimenting with new sounds or ideas when creating music?
MPR: There are many ways to do this, and anything I say here would just be the tip of the iceberg, so I will just focus on one simple method that I tend to use a bit that has given some good results. I am very much a numbers person, and it has always been curious to me that pop-based music has almost always been focussed on grouping bars or parts of songs into lots of threes or fours. In many other traditional forms of music, other numbers are much more common, so just restricting things to threes and fours cannot possibly be the only way to do things that achieves results people want to listen to – there must be other catchy music out there with other numeric groupings! So, a great way for me to start experimenting with new sounds is just by trying to come up with something simple and repetitive that either has an odd number of beats or repeats an odd number of times. There are plenty of examples on the album, Arrows, of using time signatures like 5/8, 13/8, 17/8 etc., and parts of songs that have 5-bar repeated chord progressions, or something else numeric along those lines. Just by shifting things slightly in that manner opens up the door for an expansive new world of melodies and rhythms which basically have not been explored in popular music.
CRB: What’s been one of the most memorable moments in your journey so far?
MPR: When recording the song, Is This Really How It Ends?, during the Arrows recording sessions, I needed to get a crowd chant done for the ending of the song. I invited a whole bunch of family and friends down to the studio, and layer by layer they all sang the chant and built it into the epic song and album ending I had dreamed of. It was such an honour to have so many people I know and love turn up and be a part of the process of putting my music together, and I could not be happier with the results!
CRB: How do you prepare for live shows, and what do you aim to bring to your performances?
MPR: At the moment, My Pet Rhino is just a recording-only project. I outsourced the parts of the tunes I could not record myself (drums and vocals) to some fantastic session musicians, and then filled in all the rest of the parts myself. While this had the benefit of giving me the freedom to complete the songs exactly as I wanted, the consequence is that it is a bit tricky to play live shows as a five-piece band with only one full-time member! Hopefully in the future I will be able to put together a skilful and energetic live band to belt out the tunes live, but as it stands that is some distance into the future.
CRB: How do you balance creative expression with staying connected to your audience?
MPR: I don’t! My aim with My Pet Rhino is to just put out my songs, my way, with no compromises. I would love for audiences to come along for the ride, and I would like to think there are many people out there that might be excited by what I am doing and how I am doing it, but ultimately that is secondary to ensuring I am personally happy with the music I am putting out. If I am doing my job properly and making good, interesting and compelling music, then hopefully it is not too much of a stretch for the audience to enjoy that just the way it is.
CRB: What do you hope listeners take away from your latest single ‘Knots’?
MPR: I hope they take away the desire to share it with all their friends! Knots is probably one of the best examples in our catalogue of a catchy tune which has just had the song structure tweaked in a creative way to give it a unique feel. It is not your standard ‘verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus’ type of tune, but that does not preclude it from being memorable, and it gives it a charm that really stands out when you listen to it in the context of a playlist with other artists, for example. It is a distinctive yet approachable track that I think represents what this band is about really well.
CRB: What does the future hold for you – any plans or goals you’re excited about?
MPR: Ideally, I would love to record some follow-up tunes to keep the catalogue growing. Ultimately, that will depend on a combination of how much traction the first album gets with its audience, as well as how quickly I can save up enough funds to be able to afford to go again! But I am very hopeful that I can begin to get some new tunes out there in the not-too-distant future.
