Top 100 Quotes & Sayings by Kevin Parker
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an Australian musician Kevin Parker.
Last updated on September 17, 2024.
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 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.
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 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.
Songwriting has become such a big part of what I do that emotions and the melodies that accompany them blur into one.
Nothing matches the sheer euphoria of discovering a new melody or a new batch of chords that just come out of nowhere.
What do you call that when you add '-ism' on the end of a word? What is that process? 'Wordism'? Something like that, yeah.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 actually think looking to the past for inspiration is pretty redundant.
I hate when bands make beige, middle-of-the-road music. I guess you can say 'Lonerism' is the war on beige music.
I was always putting songs on the Internet, but I was never into pushing them on anyone.
It's a lot harder to reach people's hearts than it is to reach people's brains.
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.
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've always liked pop music. I love what it does to my brain, and I've shut it out for a long time.
My mum was quite poor, and my dad was rich. She didn't dig that, so she left him.
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.
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.
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.
In high school, I was an absolute derelict.
Making music is so spiritual. I'm not a spiritual person, but music is sacred to me.
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.
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 didn't even know that small bands played in Las Vegas. I just thought it was, like, Celine Dion and stuff.
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 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.
For me, pop melodies are their own thing that have their own emotion, but they don't necessarily belong exclusively in a pop song.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In the end, for me, music is such an internal thing that to let the outside world influence would be against my modus operandi.
For me, working alone is being able to express, which is the artistic part.
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.
Surely there's a deeper pursuit to music than getting bros to pump their fists in the air.
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 don't really hear the Beatles when I listen to my own music.
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 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.
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.
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.
With each award we get, we become a little bit more overrated. That's what it feels like.
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'm always working on new music.
It's 2013, and you can make music anywhere. We've got laptops.
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 always manage to keep myself busy.
I used to download music illegally. Everyone has. No one is innocent. Everyone has done that.
I'm actually in love with all of Scandinavia.
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.'
Listening to my dad playing guitar along to 'Sleepwalk' by the Shadows was probably the first time I discovered emotion in music.
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.
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.
Making music is all about forgetting about everything around you.
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