I've always argued that all Tame Impala melodies are pure pop. It's just that 'Lonerism,' for example, is a completely rumbling, fuzzed out psychedelic rock album. But for me, it was just pop music produced the way that I like to produce it.
My brother Steve, who was a few years older than me, had 'Bad' on tape, and I remember listening to 'Smooth Criminal' and just thinking it was the coolest thing ever. I must have been five or six at the time, and I remember walking around school by myself thinking I was Michael Jackson. I wasn't dancing, exactly - more like walking musically.
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.'
I've spent a lot of my life forcing myself to do the right thing, and nowadays, I've just forgotten about all that. It's far more romantic just to let all your vices and fetishes come out and shine.
Making music is so spiritual. I'm not a spiritual person, but music is sacred to me.
Songwriting has become such a big part of what I do that emotions and the melodies that accompany them blur into one.
Making music is all about forgetting about everything around you.
I've always loved listening to music on my own, but there's another side of me that is just fascinated by... like Goa trance, for example - just a rave on a beach in India, you know? Where there's someone that's spinning the music, and it's just this free-flowing, continuous energy.
With 'Innerspeaker' I was trying to do these hypnotic '60s grooves, but it was so hypnotic and repetitive that they sounded like they were sampled. It was making electronic sampled music but using real instruments to do it.
I make music that surfers dig, but, like Brian Wilson in the Beach Boys, I'm the dude who never gets on the board.
It's a lot harder to reach people's hearts than it is to reach people's brains.
I'm actually in love with all of Scandinavia.
My brain has a weird way of turning pressure into other things. I make a point to myself of shrugging it off - of going the other way and doing something for myself, wanting to do something better. For example, I know that I could have made 'Lonerism 2.0' in a day, but it wouldn't have satisfied me.
One of the first albums I can remember hearing was a Supertramp best of, with mostly 'Breakfast in America' songs on it. It's kind of the same thing as the Flaming Lips, where there are these really melancholy lyrics and melodies, yet it's extremely uplifting. They're like a nonfuturistic version of the Flaming Lips.
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.
Nothing matches the sheer euphoria of discovering a new melody or a new batch of chords that just come out of nowhere.
Surely there's a deeper pursuit to music than getting bros to pump their fists in the air.
Tame Impala has two lives. One is the album, which is like a producer, and the other life is like a band: more of a live incarnation where we're basically a covers band for the albums that I produce.
I have almost no memory of my parents ever speaking to each other. They split up on bad terms. I assumed that's what family life was like. Just essentially a soap opera.
I've always had these morals I've sort of put on myself: that excess is bad. I used to be into Buddhism and stuff. I was vegetarian. I was all about shutting things out.
