Kevin Parker Quotes

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

- Kevin Parker

My personal life, my musical life, my life as an artist - almost everything has pointed all these little arrows that make up which way I go as a person and what I feel comfortable as my identity.

- Kevin Parker

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.

- Kevin Parker

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.

- Kevin Parker

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.

- Kevin Parker

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

- Kevin Parker

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.

- Kevin Parker

'Lonerism' is such an insular, detached album.

- Kevin Parker

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.

- Kevin Parker

With each award we get, we become a little bit more overrated. That's what it feels like.

- Kevin Parker

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.

- Kevin Parker

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.

- Kevin Parker

I don't think you can reach the same highs working in a band as you can on your own.

- Kevin Parker

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.

- Kevin Parker

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

- Kevin Parker

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.

- Kevin Parker

Even if people say you look cool and you did well, it's extremely cringey to watch yourself rocking out. It's like listening to your own voice on an answering machine times a hundred, because you're hearing your voice through a microphone outside of a PA at a hundred decibels.

- Kevin Parker

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.

- Kevin Parker

When I try and extract what it is about my music that I do or love or try to create, I'm never aware of it at the time. I just make something.

- Kevin Parker

For me, the value of music is the value you extract from it.

- Kevin Parker

I always manage to keep myself busy.

- Kevin Parker

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.

- Kevin Parker

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

- Kevin Parker

I grew up in the grunge era. I've always resisted the idea of being part of a machine, wanting just to be an artist in my own right. But at some point, I just realized shutting things out took more energy than just letting it in.

- Kevin Parker

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.

- Kevin Parker

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

- Kevin Parker

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.

- Kevin Parker

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.

- Kevin Parker

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.

- Kevin Parker

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.

- Kevin Parker

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.

- Kevin Parker

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.

- Kevin Parker

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.

- Kevin Parker

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.

- Kevin Parker

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.

- Kevin Parker

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

- Kevin Parker

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.

- Kevin Parker

I'll write songs wherever I am.

- Kevin Parker

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

- Kevin Parker

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.'

- Kevin Parker

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

- Kevin Parker

In the end, I'm lucky enough to travel the world and make albums and not have to worry about not having a job.

- Kevin Parker

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.

- Kevin Parker

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.

- Kevin Parker

I'm always working on new music.

- Kevin Parker

I love the Beatles, but I don't listen to them at all regularly. Most of my friends are bigger Beatles fans than I am. I respect them, and I love them - 'Abbey Road' is probably one of my favorite albums, but I don't think I've ever listened to the 'White Album' the whole way through.

- Kevin Parker

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.

- Kevin Parker

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.

- Kevin Parker

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

- Kevin Parker

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

- Kevin Parker

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.

- Kevin Parker

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.

- Kevin Parker

I've always liked pop music. I love what it does to my brain, and I've shut it out for a long time.

- Kevin Parker

In high school, I was an absolute derelict.

- Kevin Parker

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.

- Kevin Parker

Listening to my dad playing guitar along to 'Sleepwalk' by the Shadows was probably the first time I discovered emotion in music.

- Kevin Parker

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.

- Kevin Parker

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.

- Kevin Parker

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.

- Kevin Parker

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

- Kevin Parker

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

- Kevin Parker

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

- Kevin Parker

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.'

- Kevin Parker

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

- Kevin Parker

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.

- Kevin Parker

I have almost no memory of my parents ever speaking to each other. They split up on bad terms. I assumed that's what family life was like. Just essentially a soap opera.

- Kevin Parker

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.

- Kevin Parker

Tame Impala is kind of psych-pop.

- Kevin Parker

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.

- Kevin Parker

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

- Kevin Parker

There's all this talk of music needing a monetary value, this ownership of music, even that it needs a physical form. But intrinsically... it's music. It should be better than that.

- Kevin Parker

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

- Kevin Parker

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?'

- Kevin Parker

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

- Kevin Parker

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.

- Kevin Parker

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

- Kevin Parker

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

- Kevin Parker

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.

- Kevin Parker

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.

- Kevin Parker

I don't think I've ever listened to 'Sgt. Pepper's' the whole way through.

- Kevin Parker

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.

- Kevin Parker

I didn't even know that small bands played in Las Vegas. I just thought it was, like, Celine Dion and stuff.

- Kevin Parker

I don't really hear the Beatles when I listen to my own music.

- Kevin Parker

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.

- Kevin Parker

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

- Kevin Parker

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

- Kevin Parker

Making music is all about forgetting about everything around you.

- Kevin Parker

It's 2013, and you can make music anywhere. We've got laptops.

- Kevin Parker

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.

- Kevin Parker

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.

- Kevin Parker

My mum was quite poor, and my dad was rich. She didn't dig that, so she left him.

- Kevin Parker

I feel like music will be free sooner or later, and I think I'm all for it.

- Kevin Parker

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.

- Kevin Parker

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

- Kevin Parker