The Tame Impala song that brought Kevin Parker “full circle”
Making it to the end of Currents, it doesn’t seem like Tame Impala could go anywhere else. Across 45 minutes, every step of a relationship has been tapped, from falling in love to falling out of love. But Kevin Parker really puts the button on his white boy funk masterpiece with the album’s final track, ‘New Person, Same Old Mistakes’.
With an entire album to figure out whether people can actually change or not, Parker stares down the opposite conclusion to what was decided on ‘Yes I’m Changing’. Instead of evolving into something new, Parker instead sees himself regressing in real-time back to the person who made all of these mistakes in the first place. It’s a bitter pill to swallow and a downbeat conclusion to Currents, but for Parker, it couldn’t have ended any other way.
“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.”
“That’s the last chapter,” said Kevin Parker. “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.”
For Parker, the song wasn’t meant to be totally autobiographical. In fact, during the initial recording sessions for the track, Parker felt as though the song had too much R&B in its DNA for it to be a Tame Impala song. To Parker, ‘New Person, Same Old Mistakes’ was more akin to something that TLC would put out.
“That’s how a lot of Tame Impala songs start out – as ideas for songs I could potentially give to someone else,” he told UK newspaper 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.”
Eventually, another famous artist would put her own stamp on the song. Pop star Rihanna covered the track, renaming it ‘Same Ol’ Mistakes’, on her 2016 album Anti. “Hearing the Rihanna version, it made me realize that the song finally got the treatment it deserved from the beginning,” Parker claimed. “It went full circle.”
Check out ‘New Person, Same Old Mistakes’ down below.
