Sending Mark Ronson Tracks For 'Shits And Giggles'

In previous interviews, Kevin Parker has mentioned that he took over 1000 takes to get the vocals for ‘Cause I’m A Man right. Listen to the end product though and everyone would say they were glad he went through with it. Does it ever get to a stage where it’s time to call it and abandon a song altogether? “I can’t [do that], I’m stuck; that’s where the insanity happens!” Parker enthuses. “You want to walk away from it, because it’s actually making you crazy, and then you realise that you’ve only got a couple of weeks to finish the album, or even that day — before I left Perth to go to New York to master the album, I was doing vocal takes that day, the day of the flight. Usually I’ll get up and walk out and go and get drunk and forget about it or something, but there was no escaping it that day, so it was like ‘arrgghhh!’ you know? But that’s the kind of situation I end up in every time and every time I promise myself I’m not going to end up in that situation, I’m not going to end up in a pressured time restraint, I’m just gonna lay down the tracks and not care about it, but I just end up fully invested in it, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

"Every time I promise myself I’m not going to end up in that situation, I’m not going to end up in a pressured time restraint."

Currents, the title of the third album by Tame Impala, marks the first record on which Parker decided to do the mixing for all the tracks himself, having previously worked with Dave Fridmann. “The way [Fridmann] does it, because he uses so much outboard gear, he does a song a day, and once he does that, you can’t go back to it because you use so many dials and stuff that can’t be called back on a computer; he has to go around the room and mark all the settings.” Parker believes that brings out a bit of a perfectionist attitude in him. “That used to make me have a panic attack, because if you’re working on a song in the mix it’s like, ‘I think it’s ready, but... is this perfect, could this be better?’” Deciding to take on the mixing himself “in order for it to be less of a headfuck” made Parker realise he’d probably leave it up to someone else from now on, despite the fantastic end product. “I love the option to go back to things, and the way [Fridmann] did it, at the time I didn’t realise it was a blessing in disguise, because once you’ve locked it in, you locked it in because you’re happy with it at that point; you may as well just lock it in. I think it’s better. What I’m realising now is that it’s better to just lock it in and move on and just accept the way it is than have the option to keep going back to it, because to have the option to keep going back to it will make you always keep going back to it. So yeah, I did it so I could have the time to mix each song as long as I needed, but it just made me draw it out even longer, so I’m not sure I’ll do it next time.”

Amidst working on his own material, Parker was also collaborating with Mark Ronson on what became a hugely popular record in itself, Uptown Special, which sees Parker featuring on two tracks. It was a partnership Parker knew was coming. “It was inevitable, really. We’ve been pretty good pals recently. We hardly ever hang out obviously because he’s always jetsetting around wherever he is, and I’m always in Perth or touring. But he wanted to get me to sing on a couple of songs on his album, songs he’d already written with a guy called Jeff Bhasker but then there was this other song. I just sent him the demo of it randomly one day, I don’t even know why I did, because I’d done it that day and I was emailing him and I was like, ‘Oh, by the way, we’ve done this little thing in the studio,’ not for any intention for him to use it or to give it to him or anything, I was just showing him a mix I’d done for shits and giggles, and he asked me if he could use it on his album, if he could develop the song into making it a proper song. Obviously I was delighted.”

"I was just showing him [Mark Ronson] a mix I’d done for shits and giggles, and he asked me if he could use it on his album."

At some points, Currents certainly has elements of disco-funk, but Parker assures the songs he helped put together for Ronson wouldn’t have been in contention for a place on the album. “The reason it wasn’t a Tame Impala song was because it sounded so different. It wasn’t that I’d consciously decided to do something different; it was just that I’d made this kind of sassy disco-funk song, and it was probably outside the realms of Tame Impala. [They] didn’t have the emotive side of things, it was more strutty.”

Working with Ronson definitely inspired Parker with his own album-making, despite usually being relatively closed off about what normally inspires his work. “It’s inspiring to watch someone else’s album coming together, especially an album that turns out so good. It’s inspiring for me and I imagine anyone to see an album that comes out that is so successful, to see that he does it in the same kind of honest way that me and my friends do it, and he has the same doubts about it, and the same ups and downs that me and everyone I know personally, just around Perth, it makes you inspired because it makes you realise that albums that are massive, they’re not done by people that have this other level of confidence or other level of ability, or whatever; this blessed circumstance where they’re in studios that are intrinsically different to yours. Everyone does it the same way in the end.”

Since Tame Impala released their breakthrough debut album, Innerspeaker, back in May 2010, the band have matured considerably, and incredibly, Currents is going to propel them even further into fame, just when it seemed they couldn’t go any higher. External expectations affect most people, but Parker pays little mind — his own internal pressure is what keeps him motivated. “Pressure from other people is just, you know, people want an album they can enjoy and turn the songs up and put it on while doing whatever they do, but internal pressure is, you know — it’s gotta be this, it’s gotta be a step above, it’s gotta be different to what I did before, it’s got to be better, it’s got to be this. For me, the pressure I put on myself and the expectations I have are far greater than those I feel from other people.”

Is it important, then, to set goals, or take things as they come? “With the kind of world that I’m in, to have any kind of goal is, you know, the music world isn’t the kind of world where things happen as you expect them, so to have goals is kind of like setting up a basket to fly a paper plane into. Paper planes go everywhere; they go all around the room. There’s no point in aiming anywhere with a paper plane. It’s like trying to get a paper plane into the bin, there’s no point. You could aim anywhere and have the same chance of getting it in. I just do what I do because I have to do it, and just see what happens. So far, I’ve been lucky.”