Kevin Parker Quotes

Kevin Parker

Profession : Musician

Birth : January 20, 1986

I wouldn't say making psychedelic music is my focus. That's not the modus operandi for Tame Impala. It's about making music that moves people.

Kevin Parker

Grunge gave me a sense of identity, and I remember really associating with 'Silverchair,' who were these chilled-out Australian teenagers. The fact that they were teenagers was a big deal for me. It was like, 'Oh, man, you don't have to be a 30-year-old to do this.'

Kevin Parker

Nothing matches the sheer euphoria of discovering a new melody or a new batch of chords that just come out of nowhere.

Kevin Parker

Making music is all about forgetting about everything around you.

Kevin Parker

Listening to my dad playing guitar along to 'Sleepwalk' by the Shadows was probably the first time I discovered emotion in music.

Kevin 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.

Kevin 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.

Kevin Parker

One of my mottos for 'Currents' was 'Give the song what it deserves.' How would this song flourish? If the song could tell me what it wants, what can I give it? I tried not to dictate it with any sensible or logical decisions.

Kevin Parker

Tame Impala has two lives. One is the album, which is like a producer, and the other life is like a band: more of a live incarnation where we're basically a covers band for the albums that I produce.

Kevin Parker

I write songs every day, but I don't necessarily get to record them.

Kevin Parker

My personal life, my musical life, my life as an artist - almost everything has pointed all these little arrows that make up which way I go as a person and what I feel comfortable as my identity.

Kevin Parker

For me, the value of music is the value you extract from it.

Kevin Parker

My brother Steve, who was a few years older than me, had 'Bad' on tape, and I remember listening to 'Smooth Criminal' and just thinking it was the coolest thing ever. I must have been five or six at the time, and I remember walking around school by myself thinking I was Michael Jackson. I wasn't dancing, exactly - more like walking musically.

Kevin 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.

Kevin Parker

It's a lot harder to reach people's hearts than it is to reach people's brains.

Kevin Parker

If someone says, 'Hey man, I love your album, it really got me through a breakup, but I downloaded it for free,' I'll be like, 'Good! That's good!' Maybe he didn't have the money for the album, but if he still listened to it, and it's an important part of his life, that's all I can ask for. I don't want his twenty bucks.

Kevin Parker

Songwriting has become such a big part of what I do that emotions and the melodies that accompany them blur into one.

Kevin 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.

Kevin 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.

Kevin Parker

Bands can become absolutely huge and actually be pretty terrible musicians, and bands can be the most amazing songwriters and musicians in the world and never play for more than 10 people. With that in mind, getting successful doesn't mean anything.

Kevin Parker