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.
Tame Impala is more about impact than innovation, sure, but the music still stuns on contact.
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.
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 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.
It's largely a misconception that Tame Impala is a band. We play as a band on stage, but it's really not how it is at all on the album. The album is just me.
Tame Impala has two lives. One is the album, which is like a producer, and the other life is like a band: more of a live incarnation where we're basically a covers band for the albums that I produce.
Tame Impala's music revisits a time when guitar effects and studio tricks were music's newest frontiers; when rock was barely old enough to drive and violently threw conventional ideas out the window.
I'm listening to Tame Impala, Mac DeMarco, Frank Ocean, Childish Gambino. I'm just trying to just get as many different inspirations as I can. I love artists that can adapt and have different styles.
Tame Impala and I love the psychedelia. To me, it sounds like Blind Faith and old bands from back in the freak days. It just hit a nerve to me. I was just really feeling that sound.
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.
You kin tame a bear. You kin tame a wild-cat and you kin tame a panther. ... You kin tame arything, son, excusin' the human tongue.
Motocross might be more dangerous because it's hard to tame the machine sometimes. Wrestling, you're dealing with yourself and your own body, but when you're trying to tame the machine, that sh*t can be kind of hard sometimes.
I think pop music is in such an exciting place right now, and I do kind of credit that to Lorde with 'Royals.' I think that song changed everything in the pop scene. All of the sudden, alternative pop music became pop music.
If you say, 'I listen to pop,' you picture this kind of perfect, colorful, polished song. I want to have that, but when you open it, you see this gritty dark - kind of like dancing your tears away. Disguise the sadness in a pop beat.
If you want to be a good saddler, saddle the worst horse; for if you can tame one, you can tame all.