Quotes from Kevin Parker

I feel like music will be free sooner or later, and I think I'm all for it.

Making music is so spiritual. I'm not a spiritual person, but music is sacred to me.

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.

Some of my most important musical experiences were from a burnt CD with songs my friend downloaded for me at a terrible digital quality.

I'm always working on new music.

Trying new things and experimenting is something I push myself to do. It's one thing to have love for all different kinds of music; it's another thing to bring them together seamlessly and make them coherent.

The way I do it is there's never recording 'sessions.' One finishes, the next one starts. It's just continuous.

Nothing matches the sheer euphoria of discovering a new melody or a new batch of chords that just come out of nowhere.

At different times in life, I've felt like it's time to say goodbye from some form of myself that's been hanging around for a while - you just feel this urge to move on, like a herd of antelope. They're just standing there in a field eating grass. You feel like that as a person sometimes. Where's it's just time to move on.

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.'

The worst time for me is in the final few hours of taking a track that you've worked on for two years and bouncing it down to the final stereo mix. The overwhelming emotion for me is complete and utter fear that I've made a mistake. I'm scared. Afterward, I obsess endlessly about it.

In the end, for me, music is such an internal thing that to let the outside world influence would be against my modus operandi.

I didn't even know that small bands played in Las Vegas. I just thought it was, like, Celine Dion and stuff.

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.

After my grunge phase, I started opening my horizons and listening to more electronic stuff. I got into Radiohead, specifically 'Amnesiac' - my brother gave me that album.

For me, working alone is being able to express, which is the artistic part.

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.

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.

I'd say most of the rest of the world are bigger Beatles fans than me. They'd know more of the songs and more of the lyrics - I don't really know that stuff. I just respect them.