Tame Impala’s Vision Quest
The door to room 1226 at Austin’s Hilton Garden Inn is propped open. Kevin Parker is in bed, and the room is a mess — empty cans of Tecate litter the tables; underwear, skinny jeans and scarves spill from a suitcase. Hangover cures — Advil, Tums — rest on the nightstand. “I like a messy hotel room,” Parker deadpans in his thick Australian accent. “It’s a little slice of home.” His memory of last night is hazy, but he knows he climbed down from a second-floor balcony at the hotel and ended up in a nearby creek, where he sat on a rock and watched the sunrise. Today, he wants to take it easy: “Fucking codeine and South Park.”
But it’s the day before Tame Impala‘s five-week summer tour kicks off at Austin’s Psych Fest, and Parker, 29, has work to do. So he struggles out of bed and helps his sound man lug laptops and keyboards into his room. They sit at a desk and connect a MIDI keyboard to a Mac, then turn on an oscilloscope machine, a device that measures electrical signals. They’re typically used to check whether a TV or a medical scanner is working, but Parker discovered that if you plug an instrument into one, it produces trippy images. He’s been projecting them on a huge screen during Tame Impala shows ever since.
Some bands hire a production team to handle onstage visuals; Parker does it himself — along with just about every element of Tame Impala. He played almost every note on the band’s three albums by himself before bringing the songs — paranoid, self-critical head trips buried in a haze of psychedelic riffs and spaced-out synths — to the rest of the group to execute live.
The results have been impressive: Tame Impala just played main-stage slots at Coachella and Governors Ball and will headline Radio City Music Hall this fall. Paul McCartney’s a fan, and Mark Ronson has called them his “favorite rock & roll band.” “Sonically, they’re making some of the most exciting albums right now,” says Jack Antonoff of Bleachers and fun. “They sound like a really exciting blend of future mixed with the early Seventies — this incredible, bizarre blend.”
Parker’s iron grip on his band’s creative process has a downside. He spent months in a Paris apartment making Tame Impala’s 2012 breakthrough, Lonerism, a process he calls “torture.” “I felt like I was going insane,” he adds. “I wasn’t looking after myself, mentally, nutritionally.” He tried to put less pressure on himself for the band’s new album, Currents. “But I wound up falling down completely the same hole again.”
On much of the new album, Parker struggles with an identity crisis; he recorded the album after a breakup and as he chose to embrace life as a young rock star. “I’ve always had these morals I’ve sort of put on myself: that excess is bad,” he says. “I used to be into Buddhism and stuff. I was vegetarian. I was all about shutting things out.” This applies to his music too — the record trades rock riffs for more electronic and R&B influences. “I grew up in the grunge era,” he says. “I’ve always resisted the idea of being part of a machine, wanting just to be an artist in my own right. But at some point I just realized shutting things out took more energy than just letting it in.”
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