Photo by Venla Shalin/Redferns
When Kanye West edited songs off of his album, ye, after its release, everyone had their opinions, but Kevin Parker of Tame Impala doesn’t think it’s such a bad idea.
In a recent interview with HuckMag, Parker expressed respect for Kanye’s decision to treat the album and the songs within it as “fluid.” As an artist with high standards for himself who is rarely satisfied, Parker envied the idea of making song edits after the fact.
The two collaborated on ye’s closing track, “Violent Crimes,” although Parker has admitted he wasn’t sure exactly what songs he’d be credited on the album until it dropped. Kanye West began quietly making changes to at least one of the album’s tracks, “I Thought About Killing You,” five months after the album was released.
“It’s dangerous,” Parker said. “When I first heard that he’d done that, I just went, ‘Oh, no! That’s gonna be me,‘” he told the publication, adding that he wanted to make tons of changes to his recent single, “Patience.”
“I can’t tell you the number of things I wanted to change. I held myself back… well, actually, I didn’t. I asked if we could [make changes]… so that’s deadly,” he continued.
As a successful artist with a major following, the pressure to make music that will appease a fan base is monumental.
“That changes the creative process because I don’t feel like I’m making it just for me any more. I’m making it for everyone,” he said.
However, releasing music in the streaming age has dramatically changed the way people consume it, and Parker questioned why it’s “inherently wrong” for artists to make changes to their own songs after they’ve been released.
“Are there rules that we’re not able to look past because we’re stuck in our ways? What if releasing a song was fluid?” he asked.
“What if there wasn’t this set period of time when an artist works on a piece of art and they pick a day to share it with the world and it can’t be changed after that?”
For fans waiting for new music from the Australian artist, it may be further off than expected. The hope was that a new album would come before his summer shows, but it didn’t work out. For Parker, the pressure to create is both the catalyst and the catharsis.
“There is always something to prove–just for myself, if nothing else,” he said.
Genius previously broke down the relationship between Tame Impala and hip-hop:
Read the full article at HuckMag and catch up on the lyrics for Tame Impala’s most recent single, “Patience,” on Genius.
