Kevin Parker
Kevin Richard Parker is an Australian singer, songwriter, musician, record producer, and DJ, best known for his musical project Tame Impala, for which he writes, performs, records, and produces the music. Parker has released five Tame Impala albums: Innerspeaker, Lonerism, Currents, The Slow Rush and Deadbeat. He has won 13 ARIA Music Awards, two APRA Awards, and a Brit Award, and one Grammy Award from five nominations.
In addition to his work for Tame Impala, Parker was the drummer of Pond from 2009 until 2011. He co-produced the band's studio albums Beard, Wives, Denim, Hobo Rocket, Man It Feels Like Space Again, The Weather, and Tasmania. As a producer, Parker has collaborated with artists such as Mark Ronson, Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Kanye West, Dua Lipa, The Weeknd, Gorillaz, Travis Scott, Don Toliver, Melody's Echo Chamber, Justice, and the Flaming Lips.
Early life and career beginnings
Kevin Richard Parker was born on 20 January 1986 in Sydney, but has spent most of his life in Western Australia. Parker's father Jerry Parker was from Zimbabwe and his mother Rosalind Parker is from South Africa. His father worked as a chief financial officer for the mining firm Gold Fields, which meant the family lived in remote Kalgoorlie during Parker's early childhood. The family later moved to Perth, where Parker spent the rest of his youth. His parents separated when he was three years old, and upon moving to Perth, Parker lived primarily with his mother and later stepfather in Mount Lawley, whereas his father moved to Cottesloe. The splitting of his family led to a chaotic upbringing.Parker grew up with a passion for music from a young age. His father "played a lot of music as a hobby" and was a "big part of musical upbringing". His first experience playing an instrument was accompanying his father on guitar. He said: "I learned guitar by playing rhythm guitar to his Shadows leads. He wanted to play Shadows lead riffs, because he loves Hank B. Marvin, and he got me to play the chords in the background." Parker's father also played music by The Beatles, The Beach Boys and Supertramp in a cover band, which Parker believes was where he "got love of melody", which has been a significant part of Parker's music. Parker also recalls "amusing self by singing along to the vacuum cleaner when mum was cleaning." Parker's father later purchased his first guitar.
At age 11, Parker took up the drums, just like his brother, and later was making "excessively melodic music from about the age of 12 to 15", which was "really weird and repetitive and almost genre-less", by recording his drumming and overdubbing guitar and other instruments in lo-fi experiments. Speaking about this Parker said: "I've always recorded music. When I was 12, I used to set up two tape machines and multi-track myself. First, I'd record a beat on the drums, then, I'd play that tape into another tape recorder while playing keyboard; then I'd take that tape and play bass guitar along with the drums and keyboard. I'd keep adding instruments. I did that for a long time until my dad bought me an 8-track, and then I continued recording music by myself, even if I was in other bands at the same time." This hobby turned into an obsession for Parker who was "just doing music all the time, I never did any homework, I'd just spend every night in the garage recording music." Parker got his first eight-track recorder at age 16.
At age 13, Parker met fellow Tame Impala member Dominic Simper in their music class at John XXIII College, Perth, whom he found a musical connection with. Parker and Simper started off playing covers of Rage Against the Machine, Unwritten Law, Sunk Loto and Korn songs, along with Dan Debuf, who is now a presenter on 2Day FM. In his late-teens, Parker discovered the many 1960s and 1970s psychedelic rock artists that would have a huge influence on his music, saying: "I got into bands like Cream and Jefferson Airplane in a big way, and loved the sound of their recordings. My friends were listening to bands like Brainticket and Demon Fuzz who opened my eyes to different ways of constructing songs. The Beatles way of singing vocal lines often crept into the recordings because they are so unique, whereas the elements we take from those other bands are usually common among a few other bands we listen to." He also said that he listened to The Doors, Colour Haze and Black Sabbath, with his main form of inspiration being The Doors and Jefferson Airplane.
Early career
By the time he was 18, Parker was "playing in the pub scene" and at the time was writing "heavy 70's-style almost prog-rock songs, like Blue Cheer".As a younger teenager, Parker had periods where he felt lost and alone, saying: "I didn't have the most solid family life. I didn't have a solid base to fall back on there, so I was tackling a lot of things on my own. And I was just lost. I remember thinking, 'I've got no-one'. I remember once, when I was 15 or something, I was brushing my teeth, and I just broke down crying. I just felt so alone." Parker also felt that Tame Impala's 2012 album Lonerism "validates" a lot of the feelings he had as a teenager. He said: "It's got this weird hopefulness to it. Maybe that's the charm of it. Maybe that's why it's done so well."
Parker later had a job as a legal clerk, delivering court documents in Perth. While working there, he wrote songs in his head amidst the boredom. He later quit the job.
Parker's father always warned him about getting into the music industry. Parker said: "My dad always warned me not to choose music as a career. He got quite worried and said 'if you do music as your job, as the thing that puts food on the table, then it will instantly ruin its magic, it won't be mysterious and fun any more, it would just be like work'". Parker believed what his father had told him, and went on to university for a while, studying engineering. He said: "I wanted to please my dad in a way. I had no idea what I wanted to do, because I didn't enjoy anything other than music." Parker said, "I hated it, and one day I decided to change to astronomy. I knew that I would be poor and I just wanted to do whatever was fun." During an astronomy lecture, Parker saw a slide that he would later paint for the artwork of the Tame Impala EP. However, Parker did not abandon his original dream. He said: "I was at uni, and a couple of months before we got signed, I had submitted to the reality that I wasn't actually going to be a famous musician and I should just get on with my career. So that was when I started to knuckle down and actually do stuff at uni. But at the same time, I could never passionately give my attention to anything other than music. Like, it was a disease. I would not be able to listen to a word in lectures because I'd just be thinking about my new song."
On his way to his last astronomy exam, Parker was contacted by Modular Recordings who wished to sign Tame Impala to their label. Upon hearing this, Parker turned his car around from the exam and drove home to make music.
While Parker was recording his first album, his father died after a year-long struggle with cancer. Jerry's death had a "massive" effect on Parker, who said, "It was a weird time, extremely confusing, and I didn't really know what to make of it."
Music career
Parker is a part of the large and diverse Perth music scene, where he plays in various different bands in addition to his main project, Tame Impala. Commenting on this, Parker said "it's a really close-knit scene, quiet, separated from the rest of Australia" and "Tame Impala is just one sliver of the giant amount of noise-making that we do as a circle of friends. I don't feel bad doing the recording by myself because I don't expect that input in their bands...to us Tame Impala is just Kevin Parker's project and everyone has a project."The Dee Dee Dums
In 2005, Parker formed a band called The Dee Dee Dums, which would later become the basis of Tame Impala. Originally a two-piece project, with Parker and Luke Epstein, long time Tame Impala member, Dominic Simper, joined the band later on in 2007. The Dee Dee Dums achieved some local acclaim, getting second place at the 2005 AmpFest and winning third place later that year in the state final of The Next Big Thing. In October 2006 Epstein was replaced by drummer Sam Devenport, Epstein going on to play with Sugarpuss. They later went on to win the Western Australia state final of the National Campus Band Competition. Live video of the band in their two piece form, from two different gigs, can be viewed on YouTube.In late 2007, Parker renamed the band to Tame Impala, and recruited Jay Watson on drums; Devenport went on to pursue an acting career.
Before recruiting Jay Watson on drums, Watson used to "go watch all the time and I was this little 17-year-old fan boy rocking up at their gigs... I knew it was an awesome band. They were my favourite band in Perth actually. I think I told Kevin once that they were in my top 20 bands ever."
Watson then joined the band two months before Modular Recordings approached them. "Those two months before no one cared when we played. Dom and Kev had been playing together for years and we had a good two months of gigs to like seven people at our local pub before we got signed. And they were the best two months ever man!"
Former live bassist Nick Allbrook noted a change in Parker's music and his band, "There were a couple of months where there was a seismic shift in thing from the Cream influenced, Dee Dee Dums era, and fairly quickly there was the blissed-out, pretty melody, psychedelic thing. And then there was a name change, and then a new drummer whose style was more elegant than the last drummer."
Tame Impala
Tame Impala is Parker's psychedelic rock project. He writes and records almost all of Tame Impala's music, and plays guitar and sings live.After sending off approximately 20 songs, many of them later leaked to YouTube, that Parker had recorded as far back as 2003 to different record labels, Tame Impala was signed to Modular Recordings. After the release of their 2008 debut EP, Parker revealed his intentions for recording: "Most of the songs on the EP were never meant to be heard by the rest of Perth, let alone the rest of the world. They were just recorded for my own listening sake, and burning a CD of it and putting it in my car and giving it to my friends."
After much touring in 2008 and 2009, Tame Impala's debut album, Innerspeaker was released to widespread critical acclaim in 2010, winning a J Award and a Rolling Stone Award for Album of the Year, and 5 nominations at the ARIAs. Parker's ability to take many elements of 1960s psychedelic rock, and give it a distinctly modern twist, creating a new and original sound was praised. Parker also received a WAMI Award for Best Guitarist and an APRA Award for Breakthrough Songwriter of the Year.
In a display of Parker's work ethic, work on the next Tame Impala album Lonerism had already started before Innerspeaker was even released. Lonerism was released on 5 October 2012 to widespread critical acclaim, winning many Album of the Year awards from the likes of NME, Rolling Stone, and Triple J. Lonerism marks an extension of Parker's music, featuring synths and poppier melodies, and also a more lavish, lush and expansive sound. Commenting on the new-found sound, Parker said that " will be the kind of music that I felt as though I wanted to make during Innerspeaker, but I felt that it was too much of a jump. Back when I was doing Innerspeaker, I felt like I should make an album with only guitars, and use no synths, because I felt like it was a compromise to what we do. But I now know that it's not." At the ARIA Music Awards of 2015 he won two trophies, Engineer of the Year and Producer of the Year, for his work on Tame Impala's Currents ; the group won three further categories at the ceremony: Album of the Year, Best Group and Best Rock Album. On 30 March 2019, the band performed live on Saturday Night Live. On 13 April 2019 Tame Impala, performed as a headlining act of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. On 28 June 2019, the group performed as the Other Stage headliner at the Glastonbury Festival. The fourth album under the Tame Impala project, The Slow Rush, was released on 14 February 2020.