Kevin Parker needs to feel “worthless” before making Tame Impala music
There’s no secret to how Kevin Parker crafts his music. The Tame Impala leader has been remarkably candid about his process, bringing interested eyes into his studios while demystifying the songwriting and recording process that made classic albums like InnerSpeaker and Currents. Parker is often the only man in the room, recording his own instruments before taking a seat behind the mixing desk and seeing what he can make out of it.
That solidarity is what fuels the entire Tame Impala process. After all, Lonerism isn’t just an album title: it’s a state of mind. Parker’s isolation isn’t just by choice either – he genuinely feels as though he needs to be alone in order to make the best music possible.
“Part of the thing about me starting an album is that I have to feel kind of worthless again to want to make music. I started making music when I was a kid as a way of feeling better about myself,” Parker told The New York Times. “The ironic thing is, if I’m feeling on top of the world or feeling confident or like everything’s good, I don’t have the urge to make music.”
That feeling of worthlessness might have found its way into the recording of The Slow Rush. For the album’s stand-out single ‘Borderline’, Parker was slaving away trying to perfect the track when he ran into an insurmountable issue – a deadline.
“Honestly, I believe that I kind of just ran out of time making it,” Parker told Triple J’s Lucy Smith around the song’s release. “I was so in my own head about the song. The way I describe it, the way it sounds now, is the way I was hearing it when I released it the first time. For me, the drums sounded just heaps more hard-hitting. There were just things that I could hear in the song that I didn’t realise no one else could.”
“It’s difficult to put into words, but I know exactly what I want to do,” Parker told Uproxx around the release of The Slow Rush. “I want to continue the progression of being more fearless and bold. I want to make more music. One thing I know for sure is that I won’t take five years next time.”
“I want to be more liberal with myself creatively because I’m so inspired these days by the idea of just being like, ‘Fuck it,’ and not being precious, and not overthinking things in the way that I probably did early on,” Parker admitted. “InnerSpeaker, I overthought it. Lonerism, I laboured over it. I don’t want to labour over music. More and more, that’s becoming a quality of music that I’m allergic to.”
Check out ‘Borderline’ down below.
