Words by Riley Fitzgerald
Graphic by Press

“When I’m kind of uncomfortable,” Tame Impala‘s Kevin parker shares in a new interview with Esquire, “that’s when I think of melodies.”

“They come to me when I mentally just want to kind of escape,” he continues, “or mentally fill a void.”

This is where the interview takes an interesting turn.

“I hate being stoned in public, right?” Parker contends. “I hate finding myself in that situation, it makes me uncomfortable.”

“So when I was recording this album, I intentionally did that,” he reveals, “Just to see what happened.”

“Rather than not go outside,” Tame Impala‘s mastermind confides, “I went, OK, I’ll go to the shops or try and do some grocery shopping.”

For Parker to use pot as part of the creative process is not unknown.

“I smoke a bit when I’m recording,” Parker shared with GQ Australia in 2015. “If I’m fleshing out a song, smoking weed can make it more potent – like turning up the volume of the ideas in your head. But you’re just as likely to turn up a bad idea, as a good one, so I don’t smoke it if I want to think rationally. There’s also a lot of drinking.”

This said Parker is by no means an advocate.

“I’m not going to recommend that someone does drugs,” he informed Vice in 2016.

While in conversation with Esquire Kevin also revealed that having taken up drums age 11, there is still a degree of association between percussion and his favorite childhood toy Lego in his mind.

“You could probably mark quite clearly where I started learning drums because I stopped playing with Lego,” he muses. “It was quite abrupt.”

Parker likened both Lego and recording music as a similar process of “creating something from nothing.”

The method may be unconventional, but few could argue with the results.

Tame Impala‘s fourth album The Slow Rush arrives on February 14.

You can read the Esquire interview in its entirety here.