Top 45 Kevin Parker Quotes

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.

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.

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 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.

The more confidence I get with making music, the more I feel like I can just rely on myself to fulfill me.

For me, pop melodies are their own thing that have their own emotion, but they don’t necessarily belong exclusively in a pop song.

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.

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

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.

I hate when bands make beige, middle-of-the-road music. I guess you can say ‘Lonerism’ is the war on beige music.

‘Lonerism’ is such an insular, detached album.

Once I’ve got something that I feel is strong, if I get long enough to think about it, it’ll turn into something. I’ll start thinking about the drums – what the drums are doing, what the bass is doing. Then, if I can remember it by the time I get to a recording device, it’ll turn into a song.

I write songs every day, but I don’t necessarily get to record them.

Making music is all about forgetting about everything around you.

I had this weird fetish for making the guitar sound like it wasn’t a guitar to try and trick people into actually thinking it was a keyboard. I don’t know why that was such an obsession, why I didn’t just get a keyboard. I guess it was because I had no money.

In the end, for me, music is such an internal thing that to let the outside world influence would be against my modus operandi.

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.

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.

Surely there’s a deeper pursuit to music than getting bros to pump their fists in the air.

For me, I’m just too bad at remembering the details of lengths of parts of songs, so if we had backing tracks, it would be a recipe for disaster.

The way I do it is there’s never recording ‘sessions.’ One finishes, the next one starts. It’s just continuous.

I actually think looking to the past for inspiration is pretty redundant.

I like a messy hotel room. It’s a little slice of home.

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.’

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 used to download music illegally. Everyone has. No one is innocent. Everyone has done that.

I just record whenever I can, whenever I’m home, whenever I have access to something that can make music.

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.

I never know when a record is finished until it’s almost finished.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When I was 14 or 15, I was dead-set on becoming a rock star – the same as anybody who picks up a guitar at that age.

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.

Some of my most important musical experiences were from a burnt CD with songs my friend downloaded for me at a terrible digital quality.

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

To me, rock and roll is like an ethos or a state of mind.

It’s a lot harder to reach people’s hearts than it is to reach people’s brains.

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

The more I question myself about why I think pop is taboo, the more I realize it’s not.

I was always putting songs on the Internet, but I was never into pushing them on anyone.

In high school, I was an absolute derelict.

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.

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.’