The Anxious Return of Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker

Ronson and Parker finally met in 2011, when Australia’s massive Future Music Festival linked them with the likes of MGMT and Kesha for a tour of the country’s five major markets. Parker and Ronson became fast friends, nerding out nightly about snare sounds and microphone placement. Parker played him a working version of Lonerism. In October 2012, a few weeks after Lonerism was finally out and charting in a dozen countries, Ronson saw the band at Brixton Academy, their first London show since Lawrence wasn’t allowed backstage. There was a big afterparty—“everyone from Kate Moss to Kasabian,” as Ronson tells it. By the end of the night, Ronson and Parker were floating.

“Kevin goes, ‘Man, we should do a project about the funk. No one’s really putting it down for the funk, and funk is kind of like a dirty word now,’” Ronson remembers of their wasted hang. “He’s like, ‘Let’s do some shit.’ I knew what he meant—groove music.”

In 2014, as Tame Impala still toured Lonerism, Parker made the arduous flight from Perth to Memphis to spend four days with Ronson at Royal Studios, where Al Green had made his hits. They ate fried chicken every day and built the core of Ronson’s 2015 album, Uptown Special. Parker didn’t write the album’s famed anthem, “Uptown Funk,” but Ronson believes that their soused conversation in London may have planted the idea. Ronson remembers watching George Clinton on the side of the stage one night, beaming and pounding his foot as he played “Daffodils,” one of the songs he’d made with Parker. He knew they’d fulfilled their mission.

“Kevin has said on a number of occasions that coming to work with us on Uptown Special was his first time ever collaborating, that it helped him understand how to become a producer and work with people,” says Ronson. “That’s like Jimi Hendrix saying, ‘Oh, yeah, that guy gave me my first guitar pick.’ I’ll fucking take it.”

Parker and Lawrence were in bed, about to turn off the lights in Perth, when Rihanna came calling.

Actually, the call was from Jodie Regan, who’d been Tame Impala’s manager before Parker had even adopted that name. She first encountered Parker’s extended circle of “barefoot, long-haired, music-playing” friends after she began booking the Norfolk Basement in Fremantle, Perth’s countercultural cousin, nearly 25 years ago. Though she didn’t yet understand that managing bands was a job, she became the de facto manager for lots of them, even attending a workshop about the business by John Butler, the guitarist and songwriter who had gone from busking in Fremantle markets to big international tours.

On January 14, 2016, Rihanna’s manager Jay Brown—a cofounder, with Jay-Z, of Roc Nation—called Regan in San Diego with a rush request: Rihanna was days away from finishing her eighth album, Anti, with plans to release it in two weeks. She wanted to add one more song: a cover of Tame Impala’s “New Person, Same Old Mistakes,” the finale of Parker’s third album, Currents. To pull it off, Brown said, they’d need the sound files, or stems, for the original song immediately, perhaps even that day—and they couldn’t tell anyone. Regan texted Parker, who got out of bed and got straight to work.