Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker On Missing Royalties: “I Don’t Give A Shit”

The Tame Impala frontman maintains a zen attitude.

June 15, 2015
Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker On Missing Royalties: “I Don’t Give A Shit” Kevin Parker / Getty Images

Kevin Parker wants everyone to calm down about this whole Tame Impala missing royalty situation. "It gets extremely technical extremely quickly, and that's why I'm not that interested in it," he told The Music. "I've been OK, I'm doing fine, I'm getting by, I can pay for my dinner. In the end, I'm lucky enough to travel the world and make albums, and not have to worry about not having a job. Whilst it is naive that I don't give a shit about that much money that's gone missing, I just find it counter-productive to get worked up over it. They're just gonna battle it out and do their thing, I'm a spectator at this point."

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Parker mostly portrayed himself as totally at the mercy of forces out of his control. "When [the suit] actually hit the surface and everyone knew about it, I was surprised," he noted. "I didn't know they were going to sue anyone, I didn't know there was going to be any suing going on."

His comments suggest he barely knows why hundreds of thousands of dollars went missing: it's just the record business as usual. "I haven't made any album money, I haven't made any money from album sales … that's the way it is. It's one of those things that I accept. To begin with, it's complicated, it's so complicated. Put it this way, I've had it explained to me a number of times, how the money went missing and where it went and why it went missing, but about 30 seconds into the explanation I'm just lost."

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To get some of Tame Impala's zen attitude in your own life, watch their new music video featuring puppets. Read the band's FADER cover story here, and watch their FADER TV interview below.

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Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker On Missing Royalties: “I Don’t Give A Shit”