Kevin Parker
SeTi II--
Demographics
Gender Male
Birth Name Kevin Richard Parker
Birthplace Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Birth Date January 20, 1986
Ethnicity Northwestern European
Overview English, European South African
Nationality Australian
Career Singer, songwriter, musician, multi-instrumentalist, record producer
Color Season Soft Autumn
Notes and Motifs
Best known for his musical project Tame Impala
SeTi II-- Adaptive
Parker: "I'm always working on new music."
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."
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."
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."
Parker: "Making music is so spiritual. I'm not a spiritual person, but music is sacred to me."
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."
Parker: "I always manage to keep myself busy."
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."
Parker: "I was always putting songs on the Internet, but I was never into pushing them on anyone."
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."
Parker: "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."
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."
Parker: "In high school, I was an absolute derelict."
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?'"
Parker: "For me, the value of music is the value you extract from it."
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."
Parker: "I like a messy hotel room. It's a little slice of home."
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."
Parker: "I hate when bands make beige, middle-of-the-road music. I guess you can say 'Lonerism' is the war on beige music."
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."
Parker: "It's a lot harder to reach people's hearts than it is to reach people's brains."
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."
Parker: "I actually think looking to the past for inspiration is pretty redundant."
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."
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."