Magic often reaches us through the mundane. Music weaves into the fabric of our beings when we aren't looking for it, as if to say, "Here's a shade of your soul you were missing before. Aren't you much more colorful now?"

The answer is always yes.

Once Upon a Late Night Dreary…

It was dark and late on a bustling street in Yokosuka, Japan, during the 'Tsuyu' ('plum rain') season. Rain lashed my face in sidelong torrents. I marched past palm trees and pedestrian bridges with the kind of grim determination born only from deep-seated angst. Scattered gatherings laughed outside illuminated bars and Family Marts, while other stone-faced souls strode beneath black umbrellas.

My hair had long since drenched into a mass of tangles. Had I wept, no one would have noticed—raindrops mapped messy trails down my eyes and cheeks, and my natural blush had deepened from the faint chill. Under strips of dampened curls, my earbuds rested, providing the soundtrack to my impetus.

"The Boat I Row" by Tame Impala played: "Endless / Problems relentless / I know I'm oblivious / Bit overzealous / Possibly jealous / I run 'til I'm breathless / Try to suppress it," my wet lips muttered, "But I couldn't bear it, so onward I go."

I pressed into the night. Checked my phone's exercise app. Saw that I was still several thousand steps shy of my 20,000-step daily goal. I kept moving, leaning into the wind.

When I get home, I'll be too tired to think anymore, and this day will be over. One day closer to America.

America, where I'd hear my language spoken everywhere again, where the food is bigger and, in some cases, better, and where my family awaited my return from my two-year naval tour across the globe.

*Yokosuka’s rain-soaked alleys, as seen from my apartment complex, 2023*

"The Boat I Row" ended. I pulled up Lonerism (2012), Tame Impala's acclaimed psychedelic rock album, through the water smearing my phone screen, and hit play. Earlier that week, I'd watched a YouTube video on this album and its significance as a record for introverts and chronically misunderstood people. Fitting, coming from the artist who once declared, "Company's okay, solitude is bliss."

One month before, I'd composed one of my final personal music tracks before a long hiatus (that I recently broke), titled "Lonely Planet." I didn't know it yet, but Lonerism would come to mirror my inner world and parts of myself expressed in my own work, too.

Tides of Pain and Rapture

For the past several months, I'd been doing this—pounding out 20k steps after my twelve-hour shifts at work while listening to two artists/groups my coworkers had inadvertently introduced me to via their Spotify playlists: MGMT and Tame Impala. I'd devoured MGMT's discography and found myself mesmerized by their musical complexity (and simplicity, when it came to pop songs) and esoteric musings about life. "Siberian Breaks" remains one of my all-time favorite pieces of music.

One of the strangest, most beautiful songs

But Tame Impala, the brainchild of Australian multi-instrumentalist and self-admitted introvert Kevin Parker, hit me differently. Kevin's music wasn't especially dazzling lyrically, but it reached further and deeper than MGMT's ironic wordplay and puzzling-but-profound existential commentary.

Where MGMT offered a more cerebral listening experience, Tame Impala radiated emotional truth and heart.

Both projects are intelligent; Kevin's just got to the core of me, past the stuff between my ears and into what's between my ribs.

I would need this as the months counting down to my departure from Japan dragged on. By late 2022, something had changed inside me that made me no longer want to live in the Land of the Rising Sun. You could call it a spiritual transition.

Japan's emerald hills had lost their luster. Yokosuka's harbor sunsets, glorious from my eleventh-story Japanese apartment balcony, had become nightly harbingers of loneliness.

*The Yokosuka sunset view from my apartment, 2023*

*Yokosuka sunset view #2: I could see base, the city, and the harbor, 2023*

*Yokosuka sunset view #3: The Hour of Twilight, 2023*

Other Sailors, including many of my coworkers, would take to the Honch neighborhood below my apartment complex to eat, drink, and be merry. I never joined them. Hanging out with my team outside of work was rare, and, not being one for the drink, I spent many of my evenings and days off alone.

Well… except for God and Tame Impala. (Ain't that quite the combo?)

As Japan's downpour nights and balmy days became a prison of isolation, separating me from the people and things I loved, I turned to Tame Impala for much-needed solace. There was something about that music… something that touched a raw nerve, but instead of inflaming it, it soothed me.

*Yokosuka’s downtown, where I’d frequently walk or grab ice cream at the mall, 2023*

*A tunnel in Yokosuka I’d sometimes walk through at night while processing my emotions, 2023*

I'd stand on my balcony above the world during warm rainstorms and listen to "New Person, Same Old Mistakes" from Currents (2015), breathless at its prismatic turns. Sometimes, I'd walk to it. When darkness fell, I'd sprawl across my couch in a state of utter emotional exhaustion and hit repeat on The Slow Rush's (2020) "Borderline"—the single version Kevin pulled from streaming services—and listen to it over and over while the city lights winked gently outside my window.

My old living room; I’d collapse on that couch or pace the space listening to "Borderline," sometimes slowed down versions, 8D audio versions, or whatever could capture that restless, dark feeling I held inside, 2023

I resonated with that song so strongly that for the past couple of years, I've listened to it nearly every day. It is a part of me now. It has followed me through every major emotional upheaval between then and now: a lover I pined for, romance I lost, longing, ruined connections, and the godless dread in me that fears nothing in my life will ever get better.

"Will I be known and loved? / Is there one that I trust? / Starting to sober up / Has it been long enough?"

No, unfortunately, it hasn't been long enough. But I'm still here, two years later. I sometimes think that is a feat in and of itself.

Who is Tame Impala?

Why Tame Impala? You might wonder.

For some of you, What is Tame Impala? is the better question.

Tame Impala is a psychedelic pop, rock, and now progressive house project run by "just one guy." (No, really!) Kevin Parker gained popularity in part for being a one-man band who writes, records, mixes, and often produces everything himself. He hails from what's widely considered the loneliest city on Earth: Perth, Australia.

Apropos.

The man, the myth, the music-maker, *Agolde*

To Tame fans, Kevin is a once-in-a-generation emotional translator whose music blends the best of retro and modern sensibilities. To those who don't jive with the African antelope, he's a weird, scruffy dude who wears flip-flops with jeans (honestly, I admire the audacity).

The beauty of Kevin is that he's not exactly a hippie, nor a macho man, nor a milksop male who never grew up. He's incredibly down to earth and takes a raw approach to his craft, but he's also obsessive, analytical, mystical, and strangely sophisticated. Kevin Parker may be just one guy, but he's not just one thing, and this ripples out in his music.

I am someone who admires contrasts. I sit well with them. I'm comfortable with them. They captivate me because they subvert expectations and remind us that people are not so one-note. Kevin Parker and his music are both multi-dimensional—worlds within worlds.

The contents of these worlds are fascinating.

A Loner's Loner

Many have come to associate Tame Impala with "TikTok music." It's the natural consequence of a song like "The Less I Know The Better," Tame's hottest hit, surpassing two billion streams. That funky bass line and dreamy melody are an addiction I've not even begun to try and quit, but if you left a song like that thinking Tame Impala was just a pop artist, you'd be missing out.

Try not to groove to this, I dare you.

As is the case with so many creators, the hits don't come close to telling the whole story of who a person is. Far be it from me to dismiss the woozy wonder of "Mind Mischief," or sneer at the psychedelic dance odyssey that is "Let It Happen"—these are some of my favorite songs ever, not just my favorite Tame tracks—but they're snapshots of Kevin Parker in hook-writing mode rather than the complete picture of his depth and capabilities.

The full picture emerges most clearly when a curious person consumes an entire Tame Impala album cover to cover. Unfortunately, today's attention spans don't often support that kind of deep listening, but it's the best way to unearth who Kevin Parker is and why that matters.

There's a reason indie music fans and Redditors the world over have Currents mounted on their living room wall; the album marked a cultural moment in the 2010s and has become one of the most influential collections in modern music.

Hear a man today taking a stab at falsetto over some synthy chords? You could look to Foster the People for that inspiration, but the blame may just as easily lie with Kevin Parker. Catch a song that's a little too pleased with its distorted drums and fuzzed-out, 1960s-style guitars? Hello, Kevin.

The Tame Impala project got big because it's emotionally courageous and generous. Its soundscapes are massive, sprawling, and atmospheric. You feel as though you've tumbled into an alternate dimension where your deepest feelings and truths take sonic form, breathing and moving through synthesizers and electric guitars.

People call the smash-hit Currents a breakup album, and it is, in part. More than that, though, it's about personal transition and letting go (hence "Let It Happen"). The currents are life's ebbs and flows that take you in unexpected directions, forcing you to confront who you are, what you're taking with you as you go, and what you're leaving behind.

*Currents* (2015) inner-sleeve artwork, *Sony*

How does Kevin Parker accomplish these themes? Through rich, layered chord progressions, reverb, mid-to-late-20th-century sonic influences, and a haze of melancholic discovery drenching every note.

Currents is a beautiful, soul-deep ache. It is maturity, sorrow, fraying hope, loneliness, introspection, reflection, romantic pain, romantic pain, romantic pain—did I mention romantic pain?—and a reminder that being a sensitive person is always going to hurt. Still, it is also a textured, fulfilling existence.

Lonerism is no different. It's the rough, rock 'n' roll brother of Currents, which is the smoother, angstier cousin of The Slow Rush. Lonerism is about outcasts getting shunned from life's playground and growing into wounded but perceptive adults—who realize society is out of their depth, not the other way around.

InnerSpeaker (2010), Tame's first studio album, muses about aging puppies, dying fathers, and a woman whose "soul won't surface, and her heart won't ache". The Slow Rush ponders aging and irrelevance. Deadbeat (2025), Tame's latest collection, touches on Kevin Parker's parental tenderness and his enduring self-esteem issues as a "loser."

Lonerism's cover is an artistic framing of introversion: photographed at the Luxembourg Palace in Paris, France, it shows the perspective of someone literally barred from social interaction and kept separate from everyone else

Each Tame Impala album has been a defining moment in its creator's career, but Kevin Parker remains the same guy: pensive, too thoughtful for his own good, maybe, and a deep-thinking, feeling loner in a performative world. In the wise words of Alyssa Charpentier (hey, sometimes I have 'em!), Tame Impala is the Champion of Introverts… a loner's loner who transfigures emotion into art.

Why Tame Impala is My Favorite Artist (Until My Next Long-Term Obsession)

I've always considered the hard rock quartet Shinedown my "soul band." That's not a term I apply lightly to anything; it's the equivalent of calling a lover your soulmate. It is an intimate expression that I have now extended to Tame Impala.

Tame Impala is the "soul artist." The reflection of my inner reality.

He is sincere and gives no apologies. He traces pain and pleasure through nostalgic synthesizers and groove-driven bass lines.

He is an old soul with a new coat of paint.

He ruminates. Spectates. Studies matters of the heart from both inside himself and from a place of distant, aching wisdom.

His pain is not a brand, nor his outcast status a persona. They are simply his reality.

He is a gentle soul who sees the world through a kaleidoscope, in rainbow fractals that expose his brokenness through his eye for wonder.

Not-Wild Impala, *Julian Klincewicz, Columbia Records*

Wonder, I believe, is what's missing from so much of modern music.

Soul-baring has become a lost art in a culture armored by irony.

Tame Impala rises above the noise and gives us music, depth, and an unguarded heart.

For a lifelong weirdo, that often feels like a gift from Above.

Ready to See Where the Currents Take You?

I did the impossible—I selected one favorite track from each of Tame Impala's albums, beginning with his 2008 extended play, or EP, Tame Impala (2008), and put it here so you can dip your toes into Kevin's familiar-but-otherworldly waves of sound. These are personal favorites that hold great meaning for me, and a few of them are also his best work!