If I'm really jet-lagged and need to get to sleep, I just try and watch cartoons. As long as it's animated, I don't care - it has to have that distance from real life.
— Kevin Parker
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.
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.
Once I've got something that I feel is strong, if I get long enough to think about it, it'll turn into something. I'll start thinking about the drums - what the drums are doing, what the bass is doing. Then, if I can remember it by the time I get to a recording device, it'll turn into a song.
Trying new things and experimenting is something I push myself to do. It's one thing to have love for all different kinds of music; it's another thing to bring them together seamlessly and make them coherent.
I'll write songs wherever I am.
'Lonerism' is such an insular, detached album.
I love the Beatles, but I don't listen to them at all regularly. Most of my friends are bigger Beatles fans than I am. I respect them, and I love them - 'Abbey Road' is probably one of my favorite albums, but I don't think I've ever listened to the 'White Album' the whole way through.
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.
For me, pop melodies are their own thing that have their own emotion, but they don't necessarily belong exclusively in a pop song.
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 had this weird fetish for making the guitar sound like it wasn't a guitar to try and trick people into actually thinking it was a keyboard. I don't know why that was such an obsession, why I didn't just get a keyboard. I guess it was because I had no money.
I just record whenever I can, whenever I'm home, whenever I have access to something that can make music.
In the end, I'm lucky enough to travel the world and make albums and not have to worry about not having a job.
Some of my most important musical experiences were from a burnt CD with songs my friend downloaded for me at a terrible digital quality.
For me, I'm just too bad at remembering the details of lengths of parts of songs, so if we had backing tracks, it would be a recipe for disaster.
It's funny how concert dreams are such a recurring thing among musicians. It's like how everyone has that dream of their teeth falling out? Except musicians have this dream of just standing onstage and there being all these people out there, and for some reason, the song isn't starting.
Nothing matches the sheer euphoria of discovering a new melody or a new batch of chords that just come out of nowhere.
Whatever it is that my heart wants, I'll do it, which is different than I used to be. I used to tell my heart what it wanted.
Even if people say you look cool and you did well, it's extremely cringey to watch yourself rocking out. It's like listening to your own voice on an answering machine times a hundred, because you're hearing your voice through a microphone outside of a PA at a hundred decibels.
Making music is so spiritual. I'm not a spiritual person, but music is sacred to me.
The more confidence I get with making music, the more I feel like I can just rely on myself to fulfill me.
I don't think I've ever listened to 'Sgt. Pepper's' the whole way through.
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.
I like a messy hotel room. It's a little slice of home.
To me, rock and roll is like an ethos or a state of mind.
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.
I never know when a record is finished until it's almost finished.
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.
I write songs every day, but I don't necessarily get to record them.
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.
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 is kind of psych-pop.
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.
I don't think you can reach the same highs working in a band as you can on your own.
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.'
One of my mottos for 'Currents' was 'Give the song what it deserves.' How would this song flourish? If the song could tell me what it wants, what can I give it? I tried not to dictate it with any sensible or logical decisions.
I wouldn't say making psychedelic music is my focus. That's not the modus operandi for Tame Impala. It's about making music that moves people.
Michael Jackson's one of my favorite artists of my whole life. In fact, I think he is my favorite. It's one of the first things I fell in love with before I learned about genres and before I knew what was cool to like.
I'd say most of the rest of the world are bigger Beatles fans than me. They'd know more of the songs and more of the lyrics - I don't really know that stuff. I just respect them.
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.
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.
If I'm recording a song, and it's kind of fuzzed out, but I've got this super candy melody, I feel nothing but freedom that I can just sing over the top, and it will be appreciated. It won't be like, 'What is he doing?'
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 write songs every day, but only a few of them get finished.
I'm always working on new music.
The way I do it is there's never recording 'sessions.' One finishes, the next one starts. It's just continuous.
For me, the value of music is the value you extract from it.
I feel like music will be free sooner or later, and I think I'm all for it.
