Quotes from Kevin Parker

To me, rock and roll is like an ethos or a state of mind.

There's all this talk of music needing a monetary value, this ownership of music, even that it needs a physical form. But intrinsically... it's music. It should be better than that.

I've always been of the idea that is doesn't really matter where you are geographically - with 'Lonerism,' we made half the album in Australia, half the album in Paris.

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.

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.

I don't think I've ever listened to 'Sgt. Pepper's' the whole way through.

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.

When I was 14 or 15, I was dead-set on becoming a rock star - the same as anybody who picks up a guitar at that age.

I always manage to keep myself busy.

Surely there's a deeper pursuit to music than getting bros to pump their fists in the air.

I guess I'm not saying that I think music should be free, but I do think that if people can get it for free, there's nothing anyone can do to stop them. It's kind of a waste of energy to try and force them to pay for it if they don't have to.

Listening to my dad playing guitar along to 'Sleepwalk' by the Shadows was probably the first time I discovered emotion in music.

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.

For me, pop melodies are their own thing that have their own emotion, but they don't necessarily belong exclusively in a pop song.

The more I question myself about why I think pop is taboo, the more I realize it's not.

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.

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 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.

That's how a lot of Tame Impala songs start out - as ideas for songs I could potentially give to someone else. I think of them with a different persona in mind; it's just a subconscious way of not being bound by what you think you are as an artist.

Tame Impala is kind of psych-pop.

I wouldn't say making psychedelic music is my focus. That's not the modus operandi for Tame Impala. It's about making music that moves people.

I don't like the idea that I'm a one-trick pony, even if I am! No matter what else I do, I have to make sure that 'Elephant' isn't Tame Impala's biggest song anywhere.

It's largely a misconception that Tame Impala is a band. We play as a band on stage, but it's really not how it is at all on the album. The album is just me.

I've always made music on my own, but I didn't think there was a platform for that, so I thought I had to pretend it was a band.