How did it change? He is a perfectionist, verging on control freak, who thinks his best music is born in moments of unbidden inspiration. It's this, I guess, self-confidence thing that plagued me. Everyone was telling us, “Don’t bother going after them because in China copyright law is heaps more loose. There was so much pressure on him to deliver an album that was going to perform the way it did after Birds In The Trap. That’s just what this was. But it won't stop me trying. Converting something that I do by myself into something that five people stand on stage and perform in front of people is fun. “I think five years ago,” says Kevin Parker, the man who to all intents and purposes is Tame Impala, “the thought of sitting in a room being dissected by journalists would have horrified me.” She’s obviously a busy person, so no, I didn’t chat with her. I heard a soundalike of “Someday” by the Strokes on the new Ricky Gervais After Life trailer. PARKER: No, they voluntarily compensated me. Occasionally he’ll be bummed out by a calendar reminder on his laptop alerting him to which city Tame Impala should have been playing that night, but overall he’s been in good health and good spirits. It’s one of those things that… I literally can’t deal, or whatever it is. He is, admittedly, on earth to spread a kind of salvation. The Slow Rush is released worldwide in 14 February. Has success brought more confidence or do you worry about how things are going to be received? "It was around the time I was so inside my own head and just completely lacking in perspective," he says. In our interview, we hopped and skipped across his career, discussing various superstar collaborations and bizarre twists in the Tame Impala story. And then fuckin’ two months later he was at my house in LA, shooting a video! I find that slightly surprising, because there's definitely a disco, dancefloor feel in The Slow Rush. PARKER: We did “Sundress” and his song “LSD,” which was really fun because we got to practice just doing that, just taking a hip-hop track and doing it in a live band sense. That’s all that matters. KEVIN PARKER: He just got in touch and said he was doing this project. I mean, it's funny cos that that one, the putting the chords on loop and going to sleep, I didn't think of that as an experiment. But we’re also both into the way that old music could be used in a modern sense. A new tour is pending. But it has to be on my terms. Tame Impala was recently nominated for 2 Grammy awards — “Best Alternative Album” and “Best Rock Song” for the single “Lost In Yesterday.” This marks the third nomination in the Alternative category for Parker, having previously been nominated for Currents and Lonerism . Tame Impala seem to buck that trend, instead using the studio to help widen their scope, revealing new vistas and propelling the listener further into a sun-stroked, dream like state. And he was really into it the whole time as well. But even at larger scales, you can sense his aura. テーム・インパラ (Tame Impala) は、オーストラリアのミュージシャン、ケヴィン・パーカー（Kevin Parker)によるサイケデリック ミュージック プロジェクトである [1]。ケヴィン・パーカーによるソロプロジェクトではあるが、ライブではバンド編成で演奏される。 86.0k members in the TameImpala community. Do you feel trepidation when you share something you've worked on alone with other people? "Months later I listened back to it and I was like, ah, kind of sounds like Seventies rock. I was like, 'You're fucking worthless, you're pathetic', but I guess the fact that it is me doing it all, there are more ways that it can grind to a halt. It was so much fun. Because he wasn't courageous or he was only looking out for himself in a particular situation. We were particularly closed off. I mean COME ON guys at least put some effort in. Then, nothing. It was still just like all he wanted to do was make an awesome album. "There's no one in the world that I've felt as creative with as I do when I'm alone". It’s funny because that’s the song he ended up sampling for “Sundress,” which was like six or seven years later. We were immediately really pumped for it. I really, really hope that we are given an opportunity to finish it and release it. Not just better for me, this will make it better for everyone. Hey r/tameimpala!My name's Austin and I run the website for We Write About Music. But it took me a long time. I wanted people to hear this hilarious version. It's usually the stuff that I do in between working on the music that I'm passionate about, like, just fucking around the studio is kind of what I do. There’s some bits and pieces on top of it that I played, which was funny because I hadn’t played along to a recording of that song since InnerSpeaker, which was like 2010. He played me the song he’d been working on, “Sundress,” which had the sample, and we messed around a bit in the studio. He likens it to Lego, the idea of "creating something from nothing." I always assume that people will enjoy it more if I kind of just don't do anything else to go along with the music. Pax Narco: Life and Death in the City of El Chapo, Why Prince Charles Is the Best Dressed Royal, What We Know And Can Agree On: Wikipedia At 20, Jessie Buckley And Charlie Kaufman In Conversation, Welcome To The Age Of The All-Electric Hypercar, Josh O'Connor On 'The Crown' And Prince Charles, How Rubber Bullets Kill, From Belfast To #BLM, styling by James Sleaford | Photographs by Danny Lowe, ESQUIRE, PART OF THE HEARST UK FASHION & BEAUTY NETWORK. But you could have that. Let's start with an indisputable fact: Kevin Parker is not Jesus. I honestly believe that. And usually you just kind of press a couple buttons and give them whole sections, but I gave them every little bit of it. Which is what makes it difficult". 964 votes, 25 comments. Obviously on the scale of things to feel guilty about it’s obviously not something that I should, but it is. In those moments, I wish I was just a pop artist who had people buzzing around doing all these kinds of things around me. Because there’s zero second guessing. They taught me so much about storytelling in songwriting and having such a strong personality in your music. Tame Impala ‘s Kevin Parker thinks Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion ’s hit track ‘WAP’ is a “perfect song”. When I became a teenager I got the shyness thing pretty hard. I was working on some other different pieces too that he didn’t use. And in that way it's always a letdown but that's part of it. And then, when the time came to tour it, he'd teach his mates how to play the songs he'd written. PARKER: Yeah. In that same interview, Parker said that his biggest takeaway from making both the previous Tame Impala album, 2015's Currents, and this one was to trust his gut instincts. But the biggest thing was as soon as I realised that I was doing people's enjoyment of the music a disservice by being kind of shy and just being severely understated. That's seven months after your Coachella slot. Matt Fink ( Under the Radar ): The last time I talked to you, you explained that your songwriting process eventually breaks down over minute details that most listeners will never even be able to hear. He has amazing insight into things. Not always taste-wise as in being into the exact same artists, but we just think the same things are sick. Distorted guitars and hip-hop sometimes go well, like Kanye and Mike Dean, and they can also be a disaster. STEREOGUM: With “Sundress,” was that strictly a sample, or did you have some creative input on that track? I was writing lyrics up until the hour that I finished it. At the beginning of this decade Tame Impala were a beardy psychedelic rock band operating out of Perth, Australia, one of the more isolated cities in … STEREOGUM: And then he came out and performed with you at Coachella. PARKER: I just did the drums. @sonyatvaustralia #Lawsuit #nowitsmyturn, A post shared by Tame Impala (@tameimpala) on Apr 27, 2017 at 8:01pm PDT. STEREOGUM: How did you find out about this? It makes me dream, you know? https://belongmedia.net/2020/02/08/tame-impala_the-10-songs I can’t work on music at low volumes — it’s like, why am I doing this? "I've never been able to separate making music with other as a social time from it being a creative time," he says. And he has that hair and those warm eyes and the little beard, which combine to make him look like he should be sat at the centre of Leonardo's Last Supper. It was more just like, 'I'm just gonna do this because it seems like a good idea'. How long does it take before you're comfortable enough to just snap into it? It has to be good, which is what makes it difficult. The Tame Impala stuff I’m playing the drums, and with hip-hop I’m programming them. He is perhaps Australia's most famous rock star, but has spent most of his career hiding behind a band that doesn't really exist. When he joined bands later, using music as a way to make new friends, he struggled to draw the lines between fun and work. But that's why I desperately wanted to have the album out because I wanted to play new music. But like I said, me playing my music to other people is a time of the sun coming back down to earth. That's not to say it wasn't fun and fulfilling. We just have really similar perspectives on music and taste. He’s just really into what he does and is so dedicated. ‘Cause you know, John’s a good interview, and he’s obviously a great guitarist. I'm not going to tell them to ram it. How different was the creative process from your own? Like when A$AP Rocky got in touch the first time, I didn’t know who he was. I don’t know. I'm not gonna say anyone because I don't want to jinx it, you know? We were just starting out, young guys from Perth, all fairly socially inept, so everything was pretty intimidating — which I wish it hadn’t been. Not just release [it], but let's go to the studio. But Parker's falsetto and his shimmering synths are gossamer things that seem like they might blow away if you focus on them too hard. But I know in my heart that the music would suffer. The scaling up of your live shows has happened in conjunction with you taking ownership of Tame Impala more, accepting your rock star-ness, at least more than you used to. It was almost like karaoke. Ahead of the album's release, Tame Impala's auteur Kevin Parker sat down with Zan Rowe and opened up in an in-depth interview about the many aspects of his third full-length album. It was quite abrupt.". 'Glimmer', especially, sounds like a house record. It's different every time. It hasn't changed my songwriting, but I guess everything else it has. I think Kanye West said a while ago that people hating you is the same as people loving you. On the album, 'Borderline' has taken a new form, one closer to the version that had first materialised in Parker's mind. But, look, he's not Jesus, OK? It's one of the parts of everything that I do that is just unabashed fun. For me it’s everything in a song. If you play that, there’s a soundalike of “Someday” in there. He wanted to have new songs to play, but they weren't ready. All the songs that I've worked on with people have been things that I've started on my own and brought to them. It’s just choosing where to put beats and where not to put them. And then I finished the whole album the next morning. I hate my voice too much, and my producer brain just immediately wants to flood it with sounds and noises and drum sounds and shit. It’s kind of like ever since then, now I see that as like the ultimate studio environment. In a decade, the psychedelic rock torchbearer and musical flagship of Perth, Australia, polymath Kevin … It's a song for the sake of the song right, you know? And I used to be the biggest Streets fan. It's important that they disagree with it. When I'm working on something that I've written myself, and no one in the entire world has heard it, I feel like the first person who does is gonna burst into tears of joy and tear off their clothes and run into the ocean. Yeah, he just got in touch and asked me to do something. I don't think I left my house in LA in about two weeks. So 'Posthumous Forgiveness' is one-sided in that way. I mean, yeah, first TV thing, we were just kind of like “What the fuck is going on?”. Which at the end of the day is the same whether you’re playing drums or programming them. Like, if I just made an album in a week. But I felt like they overstepped. To be honest, this is another thing that I dragged myself kicking and screaming into doing. Because with programming things, it has nothing to do with how good you are at playing the drums. Fans got edgy. And we programmed a bunch of other stuff. But the awkwardness endures. I guess it's like artistic fulfilment. Take 'Let It Happen', the breakout single from his breakout 2015 album, Currents. It didn't occur to me that he actually made decisions that were because he was weak. And maybe the music wouldn't suffer and maybe it would just be better because I wouldn't be – I have all kinds of thoughts like that, with this album at least. Although Parker would rather be touring in support of this year’s grand return The Slow Rush, the Fremantle Harbour vicinity is a good place to be right now. You have to shake the snow globe up. At the end of the day, I think it was right at the time when SZA’s career was taking off. 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