Kevin Parker

“I write songs every day, but only a few of them get finished.”

“Songwriting has become such a big part of what I do that emotions and the melodies that accompany them blur into one.”

“Making music is so spiritual. I'm not a spiritual person, but music is sacred to me.”

“Making music is all about forgetting about everything around you.”

“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.”

“What do you call that when you add '-ism' on the end of a word? What is that process? 'Wordism'? Something like that, yeah.”

“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.”

“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 make music that surfers dig, but, like Brian Wilson in the Beach Boys, I'm the dude who never gets on the board.”

“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.”

“For me, working alone is being able to express, which is the artistic part.”

“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'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.”

“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.”

“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'm actually in love with all of Scandinavia.”

“Nothing matches the sheer euphoria of discovering a new melody or a new batch of chords that just come out of nowhere.”

“In high school, I was an absolute derelict.”

“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.”

“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.”