Right now it’s mid-April and Parker is at the five-bedroom house he bought in the Hollywood Hills a month after the fire. “It might have been a different story,” he says, “if I didn’t wake up when I did.” At first I kind of just thought it was epic, so I stood there filming for 10 minutes - then I saw the flames start to lap up people’s houses, and the sky started to blacken.” The rental house, and all of Parker’s abandoned gear, were incinerated. He evacuated with just his laptop and his cherished Vintage Hofner bass - “the only thing, really, that I care about losing.” Down on the Pacific Coast Highway, “I could see the whole hillside on fire. to a concerned message from his manager, which prompted him to Google the fire, which sent a “wave of panic” over him. It was November 9th, 2018, and the historic Woolsey fire was raging through L.A.’s northwest end, on its way to killing three people and untold animals destroying roughly 1,500 structures and thousands of acres of natural habitat and causing an estimated $6 billion in property damage. When Parker awoke the next day, however, the city was in flames.
So this time around I’ve been like, ‘Fuck it, let’s dedicate to that being a process: spaced-out nights on my own where I go until the sun comes up.’ ” That night in Malibu, Parker submerged himself in weed smoke and drum drones “to escape the consciousness of what I’m doing, because in my straight, sober mind, I’m thinking about the pressure.” Parker - who writes, performs, mixes and produces almost every sound on every Tame Impala release - is prone to extreme self-doubt and overthinking, whereas the songs he writes in altered states strike him as “my purest.
Meet the Beatle: A Guide to Ringo Starr's Solo Career in 20 Songsħ0 Greatest Music Documentaries of All Time “And it might be placebo, but an hour after I woke up, I had my melody.”
“I just wanted to see what it would do,” he recalls. “Sometimes nothing comes to me, but sometimes I get a melody I’m obsessed with.” He was about halfway through work on the new Tame Impala album (likely out this summer), experimenting with what he calls “crazy, weird” strategies for discovering new sounds: Recently, having failed to devise a melody to match a chord progression, he decided to put the chords on repeat while he slept, letting them seep from the speakers into his dreams. “I can sit there with a beat playing for hours,” he says. “I couldn’t even stand outside to smoke my spliff.” The 33-year-old mastermind behind the blockbuster psych-rock act Tame Impala, Parker had a drumbeat going on an endless loop as he gazed at the Pacific, hit his joint, sipped some gin (or maybe it was wine he alternates between the two as his hangovers dictate) and waited for inspiration. One fateful night last fall in Malibu, Kevin Parker was stoned and tipsy in an ocean-view rental house, writing music and marveling at the ferocious Santa Ana winds. Listen to an audio version of this story here: