Tame Impala: Not holding back anymore

Kevin Parker of Tame Impala.

Tame Impala's Kevin Parker talks to Lydia Jenkin about his much-anticipated new album.

There's a moment in Tame Impala's Currents In The Making YouTube video where you see Kevin Parker playing the drums on a wide deck, bathed in sunlight, looking out over bushclad hills to the West Australian coast, and into the ocean. It looks pretty idyllic really.

"It's the most amazing place, miles from anywhere, down near Margaret River. I spent about seven weeks there recording the first album, and ever since I've been wanting to go back there, so this time I just went back for a week, to decompress and just get a fresh view - no pun intended.

"And yeah, ha, I tried drumming on the deck, to see what it sounded like really, outside. But also I just thought it would be very decadent to set up a drum kit on this 180 degree balcony with views forever, and record the drums like that. I just thought, 'might as well, while I'm here'," laughs the laid-back Perth frontman/songwriter.

Embracing that "might as well", give-it-a-go kind of attitude seems to have been a key point in Parker's evolution between the second album Lonerism, and Currents. He decided to be less self-censoring this time round, leaving behind the notion of specifically being a psych-rock act, and embracing his inner disco-funk soul-pop tendencies.

"There's always a tendency to channel your musical desires into one box, or not even into one box, but to channel them or encourage them to be one thing. Which you can look at different ways, you can look at that as being focused or as pigeonholing yourself, it's all subjective. But I've always had the desire to do the kind of music that's on Currents, I've always had fetishes, or a taste for things that have really strong pop elements, and disco funk, that kind of stuff. But I've always held that back, and this time I was like, may as well not hold that back anymore."

One of the things that convinced him to roll with the disco vibe was hearing Staying Alive by the Bee Gees a couple of years back while being driven around LA in a friend's sedan while tripping on mushrooms. The groove moved him in a way he hadn't felt before, and he wanted to achieve that same sense of transportation with Currents.

The other thing was accepting change as an inevitability.

"My life since this whole thing started has been changing constantly, but that's not to say that this album is just about this one time in my life when I'm experiencing change that I'm not in control of. I think it's something that happens in everyones life, frequently, or every now and then, you just feel that things in your life are taking a turn, and it's such a powerful feeling. It's something that's daunting and exciting at the same time, there are all these ups and downs that go along with that, that feeling of transition in your life. And I just felt that all these songs were kind of pointing toward that concept."

One thing that hasn't changed is Parker's way of working on the album entirely on his own. He wrote, recorded, engineered, mixed, and produced the album by himself, in his home studio once more, and can't imagine doing it any other way, despite a "refreshing" stint working with Mark Ronson on his recent album, Uptown Special.

"Mark is a good friend of mine, and he's an amazing producer, so it was great to get out and be a people person, interacting with other musicians and producers, doing something I don't usually do. But I think for something to change the way I work, it'd have to be pretty big. You know, even though my state of mind has evolved musically, the way I work has always got the same battle between being really confident and really insecure about what I'm doing. So I guess I'll always have the way I work, as my own little challenge."

Who: Kevin Parker of Tame Impala
What: Third album Currents, out today

- TimeOut