Interview With A Loner

When I asked Kevin Parker if he hails from another planet, he paused. And then he laughed.

“Not that I know of, no,” the 20-something Aussie admitted. “I’m assuming that’s a compliment of some description?”

You tell me. By this point, Parker is likely used to glowing praise and reviews. The neo-psyche wunderkind, who records and performs under the guise of Tame Impala, just dropped his sophomore long-player, Lonerism, via Modular. And if gear-heads and “folks who are just really, really stoked on music” alike weren’t already losing their minds over the other-worldy, fuzz-pop beam of auditory blankets that are Tame Impala, they certainly are, now. Lonerism is being heralded as a rich, “alternate take on anticipating technological encroachment”, the stuff of forward-leaning revivalism and late-entry album-of-the-year contention. You can stream it here or here. Go on.

Now, Tame Impala has always been a rock band. Deeply indebted to the strange, lip snarling, yet rosy vibes of late 60s and early 70s era psychedelia and prog, Parker’s baby could – and still can – be viewed as the lovechild of Cream, Pisces, and maybe even Emerson, Lake & Palmer, if that infant homunculus came screaming out of the fog of some far-off galaxy where every 10-strip came toting a booming sack of that Fourth of July special. To crib Dalí, if I can be so bold: Parker’s music does not require drugs (though it doesn’t hurt, if that’s your thing). Parker’s music is drugs – indeed, the warmest of warm drugs.

But I wanted to know what led the project out of the far-out ambling of its first proper full-length, Innerspeaker (2010), to its new direction – a sugar-coated pop “joke”, in Parker’s words, that eventually came around to form a fully-realized capstone to some of Tame Impala’s longest-running motifs. I recently had the chance to catch up with Parker, who’s currently at home in Perth, Australia, with the rest of his band (Tame Impala performs live as a five piece) for a few last days of rehearsals before setting out on a sprawling European jaunt in support of Lonerism. He sounded off on solitude, how to appropriately go about naming individual pieces of gear, and of course patience, or the lack thereof.

MOTHERBOARD: Hello, Kevin.

Hey.

What’s up, man?

Not much.

How are you doing?

Yeah, really good.

I’m really intrigued with Lonerism as a word, a concept. I feel that so much of your recorded work is not only best consumed by one’s self, and only through a quality pair of studio headphones or over a bedroom soundsystem, at that. But it’s almost like throughout all your music there’s been this continual tapping of the profound, sobering comfort that comes with being left alone. There’s “Slide Through My Fingers” off that first EP. There’s “Solitude Is Bliss” from Innerspeaker. Is Lonerism, or lonerism, the full realization of this idea? Are you a loner? Am I a loner? Are we all loners, now, in this day and age?

I don’t even know anymore, actually.

I mean, the word itself has this onomatopoetic ring to it, no? Llloooonneerrriiiiiiisssmmmmmm

Right, right. That’s good. I like it because it just describes the idea of a loner as a kind of thing, a way of life, or whatever. What do you call that when you add “-ism” on the end of a word? What is that process? “Wordism”? Something like that, yeah. I need to research that, actually. [laughs] But I just like it, because it makes me think of being a loner as a sort of destiny.

Read the rest over at Motherboard.