Tame Impala song Kevin Parker called “the final standoff”
Kevin Parker created one of music’s most unique landscapes throughout the 13 tracks that make up the 2015 album Currents. Pairing disco beats and Bee Gees harmonies with downtempo, chillwave, and indie rock influences, Tame Impala had an album that could cross over to just about any music fan in the world.
Parker himself would credit the album’s universal appeal to the central themes found in the lyrics. Composed by Parker after a painful breakup, Currents has biting critiques and rough edges hidden just below its slick jams. To Parker, Currents wasn’t so much a good-time party as it was a survival story.
“It’s someone finding themselves in this world of chaos,” Parker explained to NME. “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 for however long, and then all of a sudden, they start moving. You feel like that as a person sometimes. Where it’s just time to move on.”
For the album’s final track, ‘New Person, Same Old Mistakes’, Parker ends the album on a surprisingly low note. “That’s the last chapter,” Parker added. “It’s like the final battle – or the final stand-off between optimism and pessimism. You feel like you’ve evolved into a new person, but at the same time, you’ve gone full circle. You feel like this brand-new person, but in the end, nothing’s been changed because you’re making the same mistakes.”
Despite its moody tone, Parker originally envisioned ‘New Person, Same Old Mistakes’ as being performed by 1990s R&B trio TLC. “That’s how a lot of Tame Impala songs start out – as ideas for songs I could potentially give to someone else,” he told The Independent. “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.”
It wasn’t until Parker heard Rihanna’s reworking of the song on her 2016 album ANTI that he finally felt that the song was complete. “Hearing the Rihanna version, it made me realise that the song finally got the treatment it deserved from the beginning,” Parker said. “It went full circle.”
Check out ‘New Person, Same Old Mistakes’ down below.
