Michael Jackson's one of my favorite artists of my whole life. In fact, I think he is my favorite. It's one of the first things I fell in love with before I learned about genres and before I knew what was cool to like.
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.
Obviously, artists need to make money and stuff like that, but if you do something good or if you make good art or make good stuff, the wealth will find you in some way.
Grunge gave me a sense of identity, and I remember really associating with 'Silverchair,' who were these chilled-out Australian teenagers. The fact that they were teenagers was a big deal for me. It was like, 'Oh, man, you don't have to be a 30-year-old to do this.'
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.
I grew up in the grunge era. I've always resisted the idea of being part of a machine, wanting just to be an artist in my own right. But at some point, I just realized shutting things out took more energy than just letting it in.
With 'Innerspeaker' I was trying to do these hypnotic '60s grooves, but it was so hypnotic and repetitive that they sounded like they were sampled. It was making electronic sampled music but using real instruments to do 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.
'Lonerism' is such an insular, detached album.
It's 2013, and you can make music anywhere. We've got laptops.
I hate when bands make beige, middle-of-the-road music. I guess you can say 'Lonerism' is the war on beige music.
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 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.
Even if people say you look cool and you did well, it's extremely cringey to watch yourself rocking out. It's like listening to your own voice on an answering machine times a hundred, because you're hearing your voice through a microphone outside of a PA at a hundred decibels.
I don't think I've ever listened to 'Sgt. Pepper's' the whole way through.
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.
When I became a 'rock musician,' I assumed pop music was easy to write and that interesting rock music, or alternative music, was hard. It was only later I realised that writing a pop song is the hardest thing musically.
For me, pop melodies are their own thing that have their own emotion, but they don't necessarily belong exclusively in a pop song.
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.
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.
