
So that was a difficult thing, because I didn’t want them to feel like they were just waiting in the wings while I made this album. Also, Jay and Dom are my two best friends, and I felt responsible in a way for it to be fulfilling for them too, not just for myself. “Just because the machine of the music industry had put us in that box, and so that’s what I felt like people were expecting. “I felt there was a pressure on me to make it more of a ‘band’ album,” he admits.

I was daunted by the whole task of having to make an album that was then going to be marketed and sold to the public, and money was meant to be made off it!”įor most artists, the thought of having to craft an entire album on your own, playing pretty much every note and beat on the thing yourself would also be pretty daunting, but for Kevin, the opposite was true, because Tame Impala was being presented as a ‘band’ in the traditional sense at this point, as opposed to a solo endeavour with a fixed live band. I’d been signed to a record label, but I’d just made songs with a pair of headphones. “I can’t overstate how much that was the feeling! Because up until that point I had only made solo recordings of myself in my bedroom. “I was approaching it like, ‘How am I going to do this?! Holy shit I have to make an album!’” Parker recalls. “I was daunted by the whole task of having to make an album that was then going to be marketed and sold to the public” So much has happened since, I’ve kind of forgotten what it felt like to be a wide-eyed kid, unsure of who he is, trying to prove himself through music.” I started listening to all the sessions in the order I’d been working on them in the house ten years ago, and it just reminded me of so much more than just the songs themselves. “I kind of assumed that the hard drive had shat itself, y’know? I didn’t expect it to work! But it just turned on, and all the songs were there. “I actually found the 16-track recorder that I recorded it on, which I haven’t bothered to pull out of its box for 10 years,” Parker tells us on an early morning Zoom call from his home in Australia.


“It was really moving, I didn’t expect it to be.” Kevin Parker is reflecting on returning to his debut album, InnerSpeaker, for its forthcoming 10-year reissue box set, and the emotions that come to the fore when you crack the amber on a formative moment in your life.
