The Movies in My Head Finally Had a Stage

There are certain artists you discover because somebody tells you to listen to them.

Then there are artists you almost stumble into.

Tame Impala was the second kind for me.

I can still remember the first time I heard Kevin Parker’s music.

I was driving back to Phoenix from Casa Grande after being down there with my grandparents. They owned a storage-unit business, and when I needed money I would go down and do whatever work needed to be done — cleaning out units, landscaping, painting, moving shit, even helping pave the road a couple of times.

Hard labor.

The kind of work where, when you finally get back into the car, music feels even better.

I was somewhere between junior and senior year of high school.

That weird stretch where one group of seniors had just disappeared from your everyday life and suddenly you realized you were next.

Everything felt transitional.

People were leaving.

People were changing.

And I remember opening Snapchat and seeing a story from a girl who was a year older than me.

She had posted the cover of Currents.

That cover immediately got me.

Before I knew anything about Tame Impala, before I understood Kevin Parker, before I knew the genre or the history or anything else, I knew one thing:

That is an album cover.

Not just some image with a title on it.

An actual album cover.

Something distinctive enough that you know you are looking at a complete visual idea before you even hear a note.

Then I heard the song she had posted.

“Yes I’m Changing.”

Perfect title, in retrospect.

Because I was already thinking about change.

Senior year coming.

Older friends graduating.

People disappearing from the hallways.

That realization that high school, which somehow felt endless while you were inside it, actually had an expiration date.

And the second that song started, my brain did what it always does.

It started directing.

I See Music Before I Understand It

I have hyperphantasia.

For me, certain songs don’t stay songs very long.

They become images.

A sequence.

A scene.

Sometimes an entire movie.

And “Yes I’m Changing” immediately became the ending of something in my head.

I imagined this fictional television series I had created.

Four seasons.

Four years.

The same characters growing up together.

And then this was the finale.

Graduation.

People packing things.

Empty bedrooms.

Goodbyes in parking lots.

Friends splitting off in different directions.

Somebody driving away while everybody else stayed behind.

All the shit that feels enormous when you are seventeen because, at that age, it is enormous.

I didn’t know much about Tame Impala yet.

I didn’t even dive into the entire album.

I just knew the song had done something to me.

That happened a lot when I was younger.

I didn’t always immediately investigate an artist.

Sometimes one song would just sit somewhere in my brain until life brought the artist back around.

Tame Impala did.

Then Came “The Less I Know the Better”

About two years later, I got my first girlfriend.

One of the things I really liked about her was her music taste.

She was into alternative and indie pop in a way that exposed me to things I probably would not have found on my own at that exact point in my life.

And she introduced me to “The Less I Know the Better.”

That was the song that made me go:

All right. Who the hell is this guy?

Because “The Less I Know the Better” belongs to one of those rare categories of songs where it almost doesn’t matter what kind of music you normally listen to.

Country.

Rap.

Rock.

Pop.

Whatever.

It’s just cool.

There are huge songs that get attached to a year and eventually become exhausting because you heard them every five minutes for six straight months.

That song never became that for me.

It just stayed cool.

The bass line.

The groove.

The psychedelic haze around the whole thing.

It sounds effortless even though there is obviously an enormous amount of thought behind it.

That was when I finally started digging into Tame Impala.

And then I realized Tame Impala wasn’t really a conventional band in the way I had assumed.

It was Kevin Parker’s project.

That made the whole thing even more interesting.

One person building these enormous sonic environments.

That immediately made sense to me.

The Psychedelic Thing

There is a certain lineage of music that my brain responds to almost automatically.

The later Beatles.

“I Am the Walrus.”

That period where pop music started getting stranger.

Tape manipulation.

Unusual textures.

Things bending.

Things sounding slightly wrong in exactly the right way.

Then Pink Floyd takes psychedelia somewhere darker.

The Beatles could absolutely be sad or melancholic, but there was still often this sense of curiosity and color in their experimentation.

Pink Floyd could make psychedelia feel lonely.

Heavy.

Alienated.

Almost threatening.

Tame Impala sits somewhere in that universe for me.

Not as an imitation of either one.

More like somebody who absorbed what psychedelic music could be and figured out how to make it belong to his own generation.

Pop enough to be immediate.

Experimental enough to keep revealing things.

Bright enough to dance to.

Dark enough to disappear into.

That combination is extremely my shit.

There are some artists whose music I admire.

Then there are artists whose music seems almost specifically designed for the way my brain experiences sound.

Tame Impala is one of those artists.

Elephant

Years later, Tame Impala started influencing my photography before I ever photographed Tame Impala.

When I was working with Sun Devil Athletics, I made a soccer post using “Elephant.”

And because the song felt psychedelic, I decided the photographs needed to feel psychedelic too.

That became one of the first times I really started experimenting aggressively with kaleidoscope filters, unusual colors, visual repetition and animation.

I took still photographs and tried to make them move.

Not literally just because movement was cool.

Because the song made me feel movement.

I wanted the visuals to respond to the sound.

I wanted the photographs to feel like “Elephant” felt.

To this day, I still think it is one of the most perfectly matched things I have made between music and imagery.

The song changed the way I edited.

That matters.

Because by the time Tame Impala eventually announced Phoenix, I already knew something:

I could not photograph this show normally.

Phoenix Wasn’t on the First Version

When I first saw Tame Impala touring, Phoenix wasn’t on the run I was looking at.

And I was genuinely disappointed.

There are artists I like where, if I miss a tour, I’ll catch them next time.

Kevin Parker does not feel like that to me.

Tame Impala feels rare.

Not necessarily because he never tours, but because the whole experience feels specific enough that when it is near you, you should probably go see it.

There have been major artists I have had opportunities to see multiple times.

Billie Eilish.

Dua Lipa.

Charli xcx.

People at enormous levels.

But there is something about Tame Impala where I immediately think:

No.

If Kevin Parker is coming here, I need to make sure I experience this.

Then the additional North American dates arrived.

Phoenix was there.

September 14.

Mortgage Matchup Center.

Deadbeat Tour.

All right.

He’s coming here.

And immediately I started thinking about the photographs.

This Was Two Concerts

And I almost forgot the other ridiculous part of this night:

Dominic Fike opened the show.

Calling him an “opener” almost feels disrespectful to what actually happened.

I have seen a lot of opening acts.

Some are incredible.

Some are solid.

Some are there because somebody has to play before the headliner.

And, if I’m being completely fair, some have made me wonder how much longer I have until the person I actually came to see walks onstage.

Dominic Fike was none of those things.

This felt like getting two concerts for the price of one.

There are artists who open tours because they are still introducing themselves to people.

Then there are artists who are already completely capable of carrying their own room, selling their own tickets and commanding their own audience — but for whatever reason, you happen to catch them opening for somebody even bigger.

That was Fike.

I don’t regularly listen to his music.

I probably will now.

Because that dude absolutely killed it.

The guitar.

The energy.

The personality.

The way he talked to the crowd.

He was funny without feeling like he was performing some rehearsed personality between songs.

He seemed loose.

Comfortable.

Cool.

And when he played, the entire building felt like it gained voltage.

There was something about the guitar specifically that hit me.

It wasn’t merely loud.

It felt like it was charging the room.

I could physically feel myself getting more awake as the set went on.

More excited.

More impatient for whatever was going to happen next.

By the time Dominic Fike finished, Tame Impala didn’t have to rescue the energy of the room.

Fike had already handed Kevin Parker a crowd that was completely alive.

And I don’t make this comparison lightly.

The last opening performance I remember hitting me on that level was Kendrick Lamar opening for Kanye West on the Yeezus Tour in 2013.

I was a teenager.

My friend Teague and I went together.

Kendrick was in the good kid, m.A.A.d city era.

Kanye was touring Yeezus.

And years later, Teague and I still get to say one of those ridiculous sentences that somehow sounds better every time the artists involved become more legendary:

Yeah, we saw Kendrick Lamar open for Kanye West.

That performance became the benchmark.

I am not saying Dominic Fike somehow topped Kendrick opening for Kanye.

Come on.

But I am saying this:

He got into the same conversation.

That almost never happens for me.

There are opening acts I enjoy.

There are opening acts that surprise me.

Then there are those extremely rare sets where halfway through you realize:

Oh.

This dude could have been the entire show.

Dominic Fike was that.

And somehow, after he finished, we still had Tame Impala coming.

That is when the scale of the night really hit me.

This wasn’t an opener followed by a headliner.

It felt like one complete concert ended —

and then another one started.

I Need to Surprise Myself

That was the challenge I gave myself before this show.

Not:

Can I get sharp pictures of Kevin Parker?

Of course I can.

That’s baseline.

I wanted to surprise myself.

Because Tame Impala has already influenced the way I think visually.

So photographing Kevin Parker with completely traditional concert photography would have felt like missing the entire point.

I wanted color to behave strangely.

I wanted blur when blur made sense.

I wanted repetition.

Distortion.

Light.

Something psychedelic.

Something that looked less like evidence that I attended a concert and more like the way Tame Impala sounds inside my head.

That is also why I was so hard on myself going into it.

When you respect somebody creatively, you don’t want to make something lazy around their work.

I knew months beforehand that this was one of the shows where I wanted to be on my A-game.

I wanted to take everything I had learned through concerts, sports, experimentation, motion, color, lens filters and editing and actually challenge myself.

Not reproduce somebody else’s Tame Impala photographs.

Make mine.

And I am proud of what I made.

Actually proud.

Which, for me, is saying something.

Kevin Parker

Then Kevin Parker walked out.

And there is something funny about finally seeing somebody whose music you have built this enormous internal mythology around.

Because underneath all of the psychedelic production, enormous lights, visual effects and mythology of Tame Impala, Kevin Parker himself came across remarkably normal.

Cool.

Relaxed.

Present.

There wasn’t this feeling that the audience needed to wait around forever because the artist wanted to make some giant theatrical statement by being late.

When it was time, it happened.

Boom.

Show.

I appreciate that more than artists probably realize.

There is something professional about respecting the audience’s time.

And from there, the show just moved.

“Elephant.”

“Eventually.”

“Let It Happen.”

“New Person, Same Old Mistakes.”

“The Less I Know the Better.”

The songs that had existed in headphones, cars, edits and imaginary movies suddenly had physical scale.

That was probably the strangest part for me.

I had spent years projecting imagery onto Kevin Parker’s music.

Now Kevin Parker had built the imagery himself.

Screens.

Light.

Color.

Movement.

Everything huge.

For once, the movies in my head had competition.

The Movies Finally Had a Stage

That is really what this concert became for me.

A collision between how I have always imagined Tame Impala and what Tame Impala actually looks like when Kevin Parker gets to build the world himself.

There were moments where I would lower the camera for a second just to look.

Not because I was tired of photographing.

Because I needed to process what I was seeing.

That is something I have learned to value more as I photograph more concerts.

You can become so consumed with capturing something that you forget to experience the thing you are capturing.

I didn’t want that to happen here.

This music had been living visually inside my head since I was a teenager.

I wanted photographs.

But I also wanted the memory.

So I kept going back and forth between the two.

Camera up.

Camera down.

Make something.

Feel something.

Make something.

Feel something.

And the more the night went on, the more I realized that this was probably exactly why I had cared so much about photographing Tame Impala in the first place.

It wasn’t simply because Kevin Parker is an artist I respect.

It was because his music had already participated in teaching me how I wanted images to feel.

The Less I Know

The funny thing is, the more technically impressive the show became, the more Kevin Parker himself seemed to cut against the mythology.

At the end, he was talking to the crowd like a normal guy telling you about something he had watched recently.

Just conversational.

Loose.

Nothing overly rehearsed.

Nothing that felt like:

Phoenix, you are the greatest audience in the history of civilization.

Just a guy talking.

And that matters more than people think.

You can feel when somebody is actually in the room with you.

There was a genuineness to him.

Good energy.

No desperate attempt to manufacture some giant emotional moment.

No need to constantly remind everyone that he is Kevin Parker.

The music already did enough.

That is ultimately one of the things I respect about Tame Impala.

There is enormous sophistication in the work without this constant need to remind you how sophisticated it is.

Kevin Parker can make something weird without turning weirdness into a personality trait.

He can make something psychedelic without it becoming parody.

He can make music that is technically impressive and still make you forget about technique entirely once the song starts.

That is difficult.

Yes, I’m Changing

Maybe that is why his music keeps appearing at transitional points in my life.

The first time was driving home from Casa Grande.

Junior year becoming senior year.

Older kids leaving.

The first real feeling that an era of my life was beginning to close.

“Yes I’m Changing.”

Then a relationship brought Tame Impala back into my life.

“The Less I Know the Better.”

Then “Elephant” became part of my evolution as a photographer.

Then years later I am standing inside Mortgage Matchup Center photographing the person responsible for all of it.

Different Anthony.

Same reaction.

My brain starts making movies.

That is what has stayed consistent.

I have changed.

The circumstances have changed.

The cameras have changed.

The places I am allowed to stand have changed.

The things I know how to make have changed.

But that fundamental reaction to music —

that immediate need to turn sound into pictures —

hasn’t.

Deadbeat

Maybe this one does not need some giant tragic conclusion.

Not every concert needs to leave me crying.

Not every artist needs to become some metaphor for my entire existence.

Sometimes somebody is just really good at what they do.

Dominic Fike was really good.

Kevin Parker is really fucking good at what he does.

And Tame Impala is one of those projects where I know I am going to remain interested because I genuinely don’t know where he is going next.

That is the fun.

The first time I heard him, I didn’t know who he was.

I just knew that Currents cover looked cool.

Then “Yes I’m Changing” started playing and suddenly I was watching the finale of a television show that didn’t exist.

Years later, another song made me investigate the artist.

Another one changed the way I edited photographs.

And eventually the person who had been making all of those sounds showed up in Phoenix.

So I pointed a camera at him.

And the challenge became exactly what I hoped it would be:

How do you photograph a sound that already makes you see things?

I’m still figuring that out.

I hope I never completely figure it out.

Because the second I know exactly what a Tame Impala photograph is supposed to look like, I have probably stopped doing the thing I admire Kevin Parker for in the first place.

Experimenting.

Changing.

Trying something strange.

Letting the thing become whatever it wants to become.

Looking at these photographs now, I can see years of influence that started before I ever knew I would photograph this show.

A Snapchat story.

A drive back from Casa Grande.

A strange album cover.

A song about changing.

A first girlfriend.

A bass line.

A soccer edit.

“Elephant.”

Kaleidoscopes.

Color.

Movement.

And finally, Kevin Parker standing in front of my camera.

The movies in my head finally had a stage.

And for one night, I got to photograph them.

— Anthony Cavale · Founder & Editor-in-Chief