Kevin Parker has often been a man of few words and letting Tame Impala‘s music speak for itself, but in isolation he’s become quite the talker. Now, he’s sat down with producer extraordinaire Rick Rubin for an extensive conversation.
The almost hour long conversation comes as the latest episode of Rubin’s Broken Record podcast, which sees Parker candidly speak about the misconception that Tame Impala is a band as opposed to the solo project that it actually is.
“At the start of Tame Impala…we were playing songs that I’d written for us to play live, and they were different to the ones I was recording at home or even had on MySpace,” Parker said.
“It took a while for the two worlds to converge…I didn’t know how to translate what I was doing at home and expressing on my own. Because that music was sensitive and nuanced and genreless. But the music I was making in bands was what we listened to as a group – angsty, heavy kind of stuff.”
In another interesting anecdote, he spoke of how he actually lied to his record label about what sort of act Tame Impala was.
“The record label when they signed us didn’t even know it was me that was playing drums and guitars and bass and multi-tracking,” he said.
“I outright lied to them when we met up. The contract that we signed was for three of us. I didn’t want to say it was just me, for a number of reasons…Looking back, it’s like, why the fuck didn’t you just own it?”
He speaks of his love for music which was encouraged by his late father, reminiscing on when he would ask his father to play a particular song. He said he can’t remember the song exactly, but he thinks it was instrumental and he thinks it was by UK instrumental legends The Shadows.
He also speaks of his love for other bands like Nirvana, Silverchair and Pharrell, specifically for his production on Justin Timberlake’s 2002 hit ‘Senorita’.
Of course, the latest Tame Impala album, The Slow Rush, dropped earlier this year. Parker was scheduled to embark on a nationwide tour this month, but due the coronavirus outbreak it has been postponed to December.
Listen to the full interview below.
