When I try and extract what it is about my music that I do or love or try to create, I'm never aware of it at the time. I just make something.
— Kevin Parker
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.
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.
Surely there's a deeper pursuit to music than getting bros to pump their fists in the air.
For 'Lonerism,' I really wanted make a non-psychedelic record. That's why the dominant instrument is the synthesiser, but maybe it didn't quite turn out that way.
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.
I hate when bands make beige, middle-of-the-road music. I guess you can say 'Lonerism' is the war on beige 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.
It's kind of always been a secret fantasy of mine, the idea of writing a song and then not having to be the face of it.
In high school, I was an absolute derelict.
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.
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.
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.
I love to be able to put my hands on a keyboard, to have a guitar and a bass within reach, as well as all the effects.
My mum was quite poor, and my dad was rich. She didn't dig that, so she left him.
I think after a long tour and after an album, your brain feels like it wants to relax, but at the same time, making music for me is something that comes kind of naturally. Just like a brain process.
I used to download music illegally. Everyone has. No one is innocent. Everyone has done that.
I didn't even know that small bands played in Las Vegas. I just thought it was, like, Celine Dion and stuff.
I've played festivals in Australia. If it's a dance music festival or mainstream festival, there's maybe, like, 10 percent who pay attention to the music.
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 make music that surfers dig, but, like Brian Wilson in the Beach Boys, I'm the dude who never gets on the board.
I'm actually in love with all of Scandinavia.
For me, working alone is being able to express, which is the artistic part.
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.
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.
It's a lot harder to reach people's hearts than it is to reach people's brains.
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, for me, music is such an internal thing that to let the outside world influence would be against my modus operandi.
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.'
I don't like the idea that I'm a one-trick pony, even if I am! No matter what else I do, I have to make sure that 'Elephant' isn't Tame Impala's biggest song anywhere.
The inspiration to write a song comes to me when something has happened to me more than once. If it's happened to me more than once, it's probably happened to other people.
What do you call that when you add '-ism' on the end of a word? What is that process? 'Wordism'? Something like that, yeah.
Obviously, artists need to make money and stuff like that, but if you do something good or if you make good art or make good stuff, the wealth will find you in some way.
I guess I'm not saying that I think music should be free, but I do think that if people can get it for free, there's nothing anyone can do to stop them. It's kind of a waste of energy to try and force them to pay for it if they don't have to.
Bands can become absolutely huge and actually be pretty terrible musicians, and bands can be the most amazing songwriters and musicians in the world and never play for more than 10 people. With that in mind, getting successful doesn't mean anything.
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.
I don't really hear the Beatles when I listen to my own music.
I actually think looking to the past for inspiration is pretty redundant.
It's 2013, and you can make music anywhere. We've got laptops.
Making music is all about forgetting about everything around you.
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.
With each award we get, we become a little bit more overrated. That's what it feels like.
When I became a 'rock musician,' I assumed pop music was easy to write and that interesting rock music, or alternative music, was hard. It was only later I realised that writing a pop song is the hardest thing musically.
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.
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.
Listening to my dad playing guitar along to 'Sleepwalk' by the Shadows was probably the first time I discovered emotion in music.
Songwriting has become such a big part of what I do that emotions and the melodies that accompany them blur into one.
I was always putting songs on the Internet, but I was never into pushing them on anyone.
I always manage to keep myself busy.
If someone says, 'Hey man, I love your album, it really got me through a breakup, but I downloaded it for free,' I'll be like, 'Good! That's good!' Maybe he didn't have the money for the album, but if he still listened to it, and it's an important part of his life, that's all I can ask for. I don't want his twenty bucks.
