I love the Beatles, but I don't listen to them at all regularly. Most of my friends are bigger Beatles fans than I am. I respect them, and I love them - 'Abbey Road' is probably one of my favorite albums, but I don't think I've ever listened to the 'White Album' the whole way through.
Songwriting has become such a big part of what I do that emotions and the melodies that accompany them blur into one.
My personal life, my musical life, my life as an artist - almost everything has pointed all these little arrows that make up which way I go as a person and what I feel comfortable as my identity.
Nothing matches the sheer euphoria of discovering a new melody or a new batch of chords that just come out of nowhere.
I make music that surfers dig, but, like Brian Wilson in the Beach Boys, I'm the dude who never gets on the board.
The worst time for me is in the final few hours of taking a track that you've worked on for two years and bouncing it down to the final stereo mix. The overwhelming emotion for me is complete and utter fear that I've made a mistake. I'm scared. Afterward, I obsess endlessly about it.
If someone says, 'Hey man, I love your album, it really got me through a breakup, but I downloaded it for free,' I'll be like, 'Good! That's good!' Maybe he didn't have the money for the album, but if he still listened to it, and it's an important part of his life, that's all I can ask for. I don't want his twenty bucks.
Surely there's a deeper pursuit to music than getting bros to pump their fists in the air.
Some of my most important musical experiences were from a burnt CD with songs my friend downloaded for me at a terrible digital quality.
I used to hate iPhones. Before I got an iPhone, I used to be like, 'What are you doing, sitting there on your phone. Join the real world, man.' I categorically disliked iPhones. When my friends got an iPhone, I was like, 'Oh, we lost him.'
One of my mottos for 'Currents' was 'Give the song what it deserves.' How would this song flourish? If the song could tell me what it wants, what can I give it? I tried not to dictate it with any sensible or logical decisions.
I wanted to make something that, from the sound of it, could be down at the club. I just realised that I'd never heard Tame Impala played somewhere with a dance floor or where people were dancing.
I've played festivals in Australia. If it's a dance music festival or mainstream festival, there's maybe, like, 10 percent who pay attention to the music.
In high school, I was an absolute derelict.
For me, it's always been draining to be around people for too long because I'm naturally a pretty expressionless person. From an early age, I found being alone incredibly liberating.
To me, rock and roll is like an ethos or a state of mind.
When I try and extract what it is about my music that I do or love or try to create, I'm never aware of it at the time. I just make something.
For me, the value of music is the value you extract from it.
I had this weird fetish for making the guitar sound like it wasn't a guitar to try and trick people into actually thinking it was a keyboard. I don't know why that was such an obsession, why I didn't just get a keyboard. I guess it was because I had no money.
The way I do it is there's never recording 'sessions.' One finishes, the next one starts. It's just continuous.
