Kevin Parker discovered a new sense of purpose during the recording process to Solitude, his second album as Tame Impala. The psychedelic rock musician took to social media this week to celebrate the album’s 10th anniversary and reveal some little-known facts about how the record came to be.
“The solitaire is 10 years old today. Hard to sum up what the album means to me at this point,” Parker wrote. “It was a pretty special time for me to make music. It was kind of the time when I really discovered myself as an artist. The musician had shared Tame Impala’s debut album two years before, but had holed up most of the time alone in his Paris apartment, Solitude emerged thanks to a new sense of freedom.
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“Coming out of the back of Innerspeaker, I had this newfound sense of purpose…calling…whatever you want to call it,” he added. “I had finally given myself permission to let the music completely invade my being… to fully immerse myself in my own world of musical recording. So I had this new sense of creative freedom. The record yielded hits in “Elephant” and “Feels Like We Only Go Backwards”.
Parker added, “I felt free to be ambitious, weird, pop, experimental, whatever, and I didn’t feel judged because I was ultimately doing it for myself and believing in myself. For the most part anyway… of course the day of its release came and it all fell apart and I thought the album sucked and I couldn’t even imagine people would like it. Turned out I was wrong…the album dropped and exceeded all of my expectations and my life changed massively again, and I slowly realized the music was pretty good, again, which made me sad. gave a new goal, and the cycle begins again. ”
The Aussie musician shared some photos taken during his isolated recording process, showing him surrounded by instruments with little desire to be on camera. “There really isn’t much footage or photos of me recording Lonerism,” Parker wrote. “I was not dying to be in front of a camera at the time. My friend and photographer Sav came over several times to take photos and film me messing around in the studio, and that’s basically all there is.
But for all his breakthroughs while doing Solitudehe’d be celebrating the release of an album with a completely different name if he hadn’t taken a moment to change the title to one that matched the creative work he had produced.
“Lonerism was actually called Loner Pop until it was subdued and sent off for production,” Parker revealed. “I was sitting in the courtyard outside my flat in Paris after finishing the album a few days before, which is always a pretty spaced out feeling, kind of like… ‘what do I do now??’. I was glad it was done, but not completely satisfied as I didn’t think I had quite nailed the title.
Solitude seemed like the most obvious choice to him, and he started making phone calls to burn it before it was too late. “I immediately called Glen my A&R and begged him to stop the press and get it changed,” he explained. “The CDs must have gone into production already because all the first pressings say Loner Pop when you put them in a CD player.”
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