Kevin Parker sat down with Tape Notes to break down how he wrote, recorded, and produced Tame Impala's 'Deadbeat', and the conversation is unusually specific about method. Here are seven things worth taking from it.
Parker deliberately abandoned the workflow he had spent a career building. “I wanted to do the Stevie Wonder thing,” he said. “You just go in, you play drums to nothing, and then you hit stop and you go back and you play over the top of them and you layer the song like that.”
He had never worked that way before, having always multitracked on a computer or an eight-track with a drum machine running underneath. This time he started with the drums and built forward. “There’s almost no looping.”
The reason was not sonic. It was to force a change. “Just to drag myself out of the way that I’ve been comfortable.”
Recording to tape with no punch-ins exposed something. “I got real bad red light fever,” Parker said. “When the tape is rolling, suddenly you’re not the jet musician that you thought you were.”
The problem is structural. If you fluff the drum part three quarters of the way through, there is no going back. “We can’t go back and punch in the drums because that is all there is. So we’re starting at the start of the song.”
He kept the results anyway, and considers the anxiety part of the sound. “That is also part of what creates a different kind of sounding song, that sort of tension, and the mistakes that are in there. They’re mistakes.” He mentions hearing stick clicks on playback that survived to the record.
The album’s rhythmic signature has a specific recipe. “An 808 going through a guitar amp mixed with an analog drum synth, which is a Vermona DRM1.”
The two machines run synced, played loud in the room and captured in various ways rather than taken direct. Parker used it as the foundation across much of the record “as a way to give it this sonic personality.”
It is a reminder that the TR-808 still earns its place four decades on, mostly through what gets done to it after the trigger.
This is the bluntest thing he says. “Every song that I have that is great is a fluke. Complete fluke.”
He is specific about why. “I maintain that I don’t write melodies. Every time I write a melody, it sucks. Melodies are things that sort of float by.”
Deliberate melodic writing produces a predictable result in his experience. “If someone says write a melody and I do it sort of actively and thoughtfully, it’ll be terrible. It’s going to be generic. I just have to wait for them to come naturally.”
Parker’s productivity advice follows from that. “The times in my life where I’ve been the most creatively fruitful is when I’ve not been bogged down thinking about what I’m doing.”
His fix is volume and speed. “Just do more. Just don’t give yourself time to second guess it, and write more songs, make more songs, start more songs.”
He also thinks prediction is worthless before the fact. “So many times I go, I’m not going to record that melody, it sucks. And then you do it and you realise you were wrong and it was the right melody.” His conclusion: “There’s no songwriter or producer in the world who knows how good something’s going to be before they start it. You just have to suck it and see.”
The order here is the insight. Parker hits record before going to the instrument, not after.
“Rather than go to the piano and work out how I want to play it, I’ll hit record to get all of that, just in case in learning how to play my idea I forget my idea. That happens a lot actually.”
He describes a specific decay problem. “It exists so simply and perfectly in my mind. As soon as I start singing it, it starts affecting the memory of it.” So the memo captures him working out the idea rather than performing it. “Record myself working out what the hell I was thinking.”
Parker usually double tracks everything, and broke that rule selectively on this record. “I purposely didn’t double track them. I usually double track all my vocals, but for the sake of that I wanted to keep it just sort of bare.” The verses are still doubled.
The new technique is the panning. “I started doing something that I learned, which was hard pan left another set of vocals that are hard panned left and right, and they’re quite whispery.”
Combined with two centred doubles, that is four vocals. The whispers are not meant to be audible. “You almost can’t hear the hard panned whispers. It’s just this sort of added textural sibilancy whispery thing.” He calls it “a pop trick” for width and “that sort of ASMR texture in either ear.”
On effects, Soundtoys EchoBoy handles vocal delay. “It has this interesting stereo image that I can’t quite put a finger on. It’s just the way you want your vocal delay.” Valhalla Room and Ableton’s convolution spring reverb sit alongside it, and the spring is “on most tracks.” Straightforward choices that sit close to what most producers actually reach for.
Parker’s summary of the job is about restraint rather than technique. “Knowing where to go and where not to go is the hardest part. Knowing when a song’s finished. I’d say that’s one of the things that separates the great producers from the good.”
He also names the goal for the whole album, which explains most of the decisions above. It was “making it sound like it hadn’t been laboured on,” because he is drawn increasingly to music where the intellectual part is not the point.
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