Tame Impala talks cartoons, concert nightmares

Patrick Ryan | USA TODAY

Not many artists have had a better summer than Tame Impala.

Three years ago, the Aussie psych band had music blogs abuzz with sophomore album Lonerism and alt-radio hit Elephant (heard in Blackberry ads and TV shows Girls and The Vampire Diaries). But with third outing Currents, released last month, Tame have proven themselves viable rock stars — peaking at No. 4 on Billboard's album charts (their highest ever) and selling 66,800 copies to date, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

Predictably, chilled-out frontman Kevin Parker kept festivities to a minimum. "My favorite way to celebrate anything is to just completely strike out on my own and contemplate, but we must've had a glass of something," says the 29-year-old, calling from a Los Angeles hotel room earlier this month. After a summer of touring and headlining festivals Coachella, Lollapalooza and Outside Lands, the band is currently playing a slew of dates across Europe.

Before they return stateside in October for Austin City Limits and some U.S. gigs, Parker caught up with USA TODAY to chat life on the road:

Q. Touring nonstop since May, how do you keep shows fresh for yourself and the band? Do you ever switch up the set list?

A. For us, it's always enough of a challenge without completely, catastrophically (messing) up, because we're batting above our league a bit — there's a lot going on to make the songs exist the way they do. But one of my favorite things to do is walk around the stage while the crew is setting up during the day and just stand out front and watch. There's something really therapeutic about that for me. Like, 'If I was standing out here, watching what was going on onstage, what would blow my mind? What would make it really satisfying to me?' Imagining what could happen, it's like a hobby for me.

Q. You've talked about how different your live arrangements are compared to the studio versions. Is there one song off Currents in particular that sounds new?

A. So far, we've been pretty proficient about keeping the same vibe, but it's still early days. For the moment, we haven't needed to totally rearrange a song to make it really special live, but it's something we'll know after a couple of months if we feel like some of the songs are not flourishing quite as well as the others. It's like we've got a litter of kittens and they're all growing into cats: If one of them seems to be struggling, we'll give them a different bed to sleep in.

Q. Looking back, what do you recall about your first show as Tame Impala?

A. Jay (Watson) had just joined. Jay plays keyboard now but he joined as a drummer, and it was like any other gig, really. It was a bar down the road from us — it would've been about five people in the audience. I remember I was so excited about the gig because Jay was joining and he was my favorite drummer around the Perth scene. Just in my own selfish way, I didn't even care that nobody was in the audience. Sometimes you really rely on the audience to have a good time playing live, and sometimes you could have zero people or a thousand and you'd feel exactly the same. That was one of those days.

Q. What about the worst gig you've ever played?

A. We've never had a real catastrophic show, miraculously. By far the worst concerts that I know of have always been in dreams. It's funny how concert dreams are such a recurring thing among musicians. It's like how everyone has that dream of their teeth falling out? Except musicians have this dream of just standing onstage and there being all these people out there, and for some reason, the song isn't starting. Or one time — and this was a real dream — I looked down and my guitar was an empty Gatorade bottle, but it had the strap on it and everything. And I was really angry at the guy who gave me my guitar, I was like, 'Dude! It's a Gatorade bottle! What are you doing?'

Q. How do you usually kill time when you're traveling?

A. If I'm really jet-lagged and need to get to sleep, I just try and watch cartoons. As long as it's animated, I don't care — it has to have that distance from real life. I've always been a big fan of Futurama and The Simpsons, and I recently got into this show called Rick and Morty.

Q. In the three years between Lonerism and Currents, what's changed most for you?

A. Nothing and everything, really. I bought a house a year ago, which really changed my perspective about where I saw myself, like a place that I belonged. It's weird. But at the same time, I've never felt so comfortable traveling and being a total nomad. I used to hate traveling — well, not hate it, but it used to drain me really easily. I'd only be able to go out on tour for a short amount of time before I started aching and getting really homesick. But the last year or two, it's just been invigorating. It energizes me and I feel like I could travel forever, do laps of the world.