Kevin Parker Talks Sessions With Kendrick, Kanye, SZA, & More

Kevin Winter/Getty Images for FYF

Kevin Parker Talks Sessions With Kendrick, Kanye, SZA, & More

Kevin Winter/Getty Images for FYF

Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker recently did an interview with Billboard to talk about the many high-profile collaborations and projects he’s been involved in over the last couple years, including his work with Kanye West.

“I was completely starstruck, obviously,” he says of his time in the studio with West. “I was numb with excitement. He was in the element. He was super chilled-out. I guess the first impression I got was how into music he is. He loves to just wax lyrical about music. To him, a lot of the creative process is just talking about it conceptually.”

He talks about working with Travis Scott on “Skeletons,” a track that he co-wrote and co-produced on Astroworld: “I did a lot of sessions with him, actually. What’s cool about people like Travis is that they’re just getting a bunch of people in the room and seeing what happens. For a lot of it, I was just a team player.”

He also mentions that he once did a session with Kendrick Lamar, and that Lamar told Parker that SZA was the one who introduced Rihanna to Tame Impala, which, of course, ended up with her covering “New Person, Same Old Mistakes” on her most recent album, Anti-. He also says that he’s never met Rihanna.

Expanding on his session with Lamar, he says: “Oh, we met up for like an hour. We were kind of playing each other some stuff. It was before DAMN. came out. He was working on DAMN. I don’t think anything came of it, necessarily.

Parker also again talks about the new material he worked on with SZA and Mark Ronson, which he says never got finished and might not ever come out.

He also says that new Tame Impala music is his main focus right now, though if there were one other artist he’d love to work with but hasn’t yet it would be Daft Punk. “Tame Impala is my absolute thing,” he said. “It’s my absolute…whatever you want to call it. That’s me, first and foremost. And to keep the magic of doing collaborations and stuff like that, I don’t want to turn it into a job.”

Read the full interview here.

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