A biography for Kevin Parkerhasn’t been written yet.
“I don't think I've ever listened to 'Sgt. Pepper's' the whole way through.”
“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.”
“The more I question myself about why I think pop is taboo, the more I realize it's not.”
“I don't really hear the Beatles when I listen to my own music.”
“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?'”
“In the end, I'm lucky enough to travel the world and make albums and not have to worry about not having a job.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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 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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“It's a lot harder to reach people's hearts than it is to reach people's brains.”
“To me, rock and roll is like an ethos or a state of mind.”
“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 used to download music illegally. Everyone has. No one is innocent. Everyone has done that.”
“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.'”