TAME IMPALA
“It was really moving. I didn’t expect it to be.” Kevin Parker is reflecting on his recent return to Tame Impala’s 2010 debut LP, InnerSpeaker, for its new 10th-anniversary reissue boxset, and the emotions that come to the fore when you crack the amber on a formative moment in your life.
“I actually found the 16-track recorder that I recorded it on, which I hadn’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. “I’d 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 started listening to all the sessions in the order I’d been working on them in the house 10 years ago and it just reminded me of so much more than just the songs themselves. It’s a snapshot of who I was then. 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.”
Joined for live performances by his mates Dominic Simper and Jay Watson, Parker had been performing and recording as Tame Impala for a couple of years by this point. But he had just a self-titled EP of his bedroom recordings to show for his deal with Aussie label Modular Recordings. That was about to change, as Parker decamped with his gear to a beach house with the aim of emerging with his first real statement as an artist. It was no small amount of pressure for a young man whose previous recording experience had been on a much smaller scale.
“I was approaching it like, ‘How am I going to do this?! Holy shit, I have to make an album!’” he says. “I can’t overstate how much was the feeling. Because up until that point, I
