Last week, Tone Deaf reported on the release of a track from Tame Impala’s highly anticipated new album, Currents, titled ‘Nangs’, via a behind-the-scenes video of the album’s making. Naturally, it didn’t take long for fans to figure out what the song was about.
However, in a new interview with The Guardian, Tame Impala frontman Kevin Parker has revealed Currents was in fact entirely inspired by another, uh, “transcendental” experience. One that involved a most unlikely musical influence.
“I was in LA a few years ago and for some reason we’d taken mushrooms, it must have been the end of our tour,” Parker recounted to The Guardian. “I was coked up as well, and a friend was driving us around LA in this old sedan. He was playing the Bee Gees and it had the most profound emotional effect.”
“I’m getting butterflies just thinking about it. I was listening to Staying Alive, a song I’ve heard all my life. At that moment it had this really emotive, melancholy feel to it. The beat felt overwhelmingly strong and, at that moment, it sounded pretty psychedelic.”
“It moved me, and that’s what I always want out of psych music. I want it to transport me.” However, while the frontman admits a coked-out night in LA doing mushrooms and listening to the Bee Gees may been what inspired the sound of Currents, most of it wasn’t recorded under the influence.
While he reckons people getting high to his music is a compliment, illicit substances are not the frontman’s primary muse. “I’d be disappointed if I was sat there with no ideas and thought: ‘Hey, maybe if I get stoned I’ll have some ideas,’” he said.
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“I’d feel quite defeated. At the same time, sometimes if I’m smoking a spliff halfway through a recording session it makes things sound more potent. When I had the idea for some of my best songs I was stone-cold sober. Some of my best songs I thought of stoned and recorded stoned. There’s no correlation.”
The Guardian go on to echo several other sources, including the first round of reviews for the album, in describing Currents as a departure from Tame Impala’s previous albums. The album apparently hews more towards dance music than ’60s psychedelic.
“Parker likes to picture Currents being played at sunrise at a Goan beach rave, or anywhere else where the music itself – and not a live band – is the audience’s focal point. Just as he blazed a trail by making psych cool again when it seemed passé, he’s confident that Tame Impala’s fans will follow him barefoot on to the sand,” they write.
Tame Impala’s third full-length album and follow-up to 2012’s Lonerism, Currents, is out later this month on the 17th and has already yielded several hazy, sprawling singles, including ‘Let It Happen’ and the somewhat controversial ”Cause I’m A Man’.
