I used to hate iPhones. Before I got an iPhone, I used to be like, 'What are you doing, sitting there on your phone. Join the real world, man.' I categorically disliked iPhones. When my friends got an iPhone, I was like, 'Oh, we lost him.'
Kevin Parker
I've spent a lot of my life forcing myself to do the right thing, and nowadays, I've just forgotten about all that. It's far more romantic just to let all your vices and fetishes come out and shine.
I've always argued that all Tame Impala melodies are pure pop. It's just that 'Lonerism,' for example, is a completely rumbling, fuzzed out psychedelic rock album. But for me, it was just pop music produced the way that I like to produce it.
My brother Steve, who was a few years older than me, had 'Bad' on tape, and I remember listening to 'Smooth Criminal' and just thinking it was the coolest thing ever. I must have been five or six at the time, and I remember walking around school by myself thinking I was Michael Jackson. I wasn't dancing, exactly - more like walking musically.
Nothing matches the sheer euphoria of discovering a new melody or a new batch of chords that just come out of nowhere.
Surely there's a deeper pursuit to music than getting bros to pump their fists in the air.
It's a lot harder to reach people's hearts than it is to reach people's brains.
I've always loved listening to music on my own, but there's another side of me that is just fascinated by... like Goa trance, for example - just a rave on a beach in India, you know? Where there's someone that's spinning the music, and it's just this free-flowing, continuous energy.
My brain has a weird way of turning pressure into other things. I make a point to myself of shrugging it off - of going the other way and doing something for myself, wanting to do something better. For example, I know that I could have made 'Lonerism 2.0' in a day, but it wouldn't have satisfied me.
I've always made music on my own, but I didn't think there was a platform for that, so I thought I had to pretend it was a band.
Making music is all about forgetting about everything around you.
One of the first albums I can remember hearing was a Supertramp best of, with mostly 'Breakfast in America' songs on it. It's kind of the same thing as the Flaming Lips, where there are these really melancholy lyrics and melodies, yet it's extremely uplifting. They're like a nonfuturistic version of the Flaming Lips.
That's how a lot of Tame Impala songs start out - as ideas for songs I could potentially give to someone else. I think of them with a different persona in mind; it's just a subconscious way of not being bound by what you think you are as an artist.
In the end, I'm lucky enough to travel the world and make albums and not have to worry about not having a job.
I have almost no memory of my parents ever speaking to each other. They split up on bad terms. I assumed that's what family life was like. Just essentially a soap opera.
At different times in life, I've felt like it's time to say goodbye from some form of myself that's been hanging around for a while - you just feel this urge to move on, like a herd of antelope. They're just standing there in a field eating grass. You feel like that as a person sometimes. Where's it's just time to move on.
When I was 14 or 15, I was dead-set on becoming a rock star - the same as anybody who picks up a guitar at that age.
I've always liked pop music. I love what it does to my brain, and I've shut it out for a long time.
I've always been of the idea that is doesn't really matter where you are geographically - with 'Lonerism,' we made half the album in Australia, half the album in Paris.
I've always had these morals I've sort of put on myself: that excess is bad. I used to be into Buddhism and stuff. I was vegetarian. I was all about shutting things out.
I make music that surfers dig, but, like Brian Wilson in the Beach Boys, I'm the dude who never gets on the board.
I like a messy hotel room. It's a little slice of home.
Listening to my dad playing guitar along to 'Sleepwalk' by the Shadows was probably the first time I discovered emotion in music.
I don't think you can reach the same highs working in a band as you can on your own.
For me, it's always been draining to be around people for too long because I'm naturally a pretty expressionless person. From an early age, I found being alone incredibly liberating.
Grunge gave me a sense of identity, and I remember really associating with 'Silverchair,' who were these chilled-out Australian teenagers. The fact that they were teenagers was a big deal for me. It was like, 'Oh, man, you don't have to be a 30-year-old to do this.'
The more confidence I get with making music, the more I feel like I can just rely on myself to fulfill me.
I used to think interacting with people in the audience, touching people in the crowd, was a total ego-based thing. I never realized how fulfilling it would be. It's more about being on the receiving end - it's people giving. That's a powerful realization.
In high school, I was an absolute derelict.
The worst time for me is in the final few hours of taking a track that you've worked on for two years and bouncing it down to the final stereo mix. The overwhelming emotion for me is complete and utter fear that I've made a mistake. I'm scared. Afterward, I obsess endlessly about it.
I don't really hear the Beatles when I listen to my own music.
I wanted to make something that, from the sound of it, could be down at the club. I just realised that I'd never heard Tame Impala played somewhere with a dance floor or where people were dancing.
After my grunge phase, I started opening my horizons and listening to more electronic stuff. I got into Radiohead, specifically 'Amnesiac' - my brother gave me that album.
I hate when bands make beige, middle-of-the-road music. I guess you can say 'Lonerism' is the war on beige music.
I grew up in the grunge era. I've always resisted the idea of being part of a machine, wanting just to be an artist in my own right. But at some point, I just realized shutting things out took more energy than just letting it in.
There's so many people doing interesting things with the Internet and technology, there could be so many ways of making music and listening to it.
Sometimes you really rely on the audience to have a good time playing live, and sometimes you could have zero people or a thousand, and you'd feel exactly the same.
There's all this talk of music needing a monetary value, this ownership of music, even that it needs a physical form. But intrinsically... it's music. It should be better than that.
Tame Impala has two lives. One is the album, which is like a producer, and the other life is like a band: more of a live incarnation where we're basically a covers band for the albums that I produce.
The more I question myself about why I think pop is taboo, the more I realize it's not.
I don't think I've ever listened to 'Sgt. Pepper's' the whole way through.
The first time someone asked us for an autograph was the moment we realized we were doing something that most people spend their teenage years dreaming about, for sure.
It's largely a misconception that Tame Impala is a band. We play as a band on stage, but it's really not how it is at all on the album. The album is just me.
Some of my most important musical experiences were from a burnt CD with songs my friend downloaded for me at a terrible digital quality.
My personal life, my musical life, my life as an artist - almost everything has pointed all these little arrows that make up which way I go as a person and what I feel comfortable as my identity.
With 'Innerspeaker' I was trying to do these hypnotic '60s grooves, but it was so hypnotic and repetitive that they sounded like they were sampled. It was making electronic sampled music but using real instruments to do it.
Tame Impala is kind of psych-pop.
Making music is so spiritual. I'm not a spiritual person, but music is sacred to me.
Songwriting has become such a big part of what I do that emotions and the melodies that accompany them blur into one.
To me, rock and roll is like an ethos or a state of mind.
