Watch Three Different Kevin Parkers Play Tame Impala’s “Is It True” On Colbert
Tame Impala has long had a kind of Nine Inch Nails thing going on. We all know that the band is really just one guy, but it still presents itself as a band, with multiple members and everything. During quarantine, though, that seems to be going out the window. Tame Impala was the musical guest on last night’s episode of Stephen Colbert’s remotely-recorded Late Show, and judging by that performance, Tame Impala is now a “him” and not a “them.”
For last night’s performance, Colbert introduced Tame Impala as if Tame Impala was just one guy — which it is. Kevin Parker, the Tame Impala, didn’t go the solo-acoustic route that so many of his peers have gone during these quarantine performances. (Parker has done it that way recently, too, but he didn’t do it this time.) Instead, we got three different Kevin Parkers — singer, guitarist, bassist — all edited together to look like they were in the same room. It was a sort of DIY version of the “Hey Ya” video, except that none of the Kevin Parkers was an outsized character. It was three different versions of the same guy, all dressed differently, inconspicuously rocking out, while different-colored lights flashed on them.
The three Kevin Parkers got together to play “Is It True,” one of the songs from Tame Impala’s recent album The Slow Rush. It sounded good, but the real attention-grabbing thing here was the trick of the one-man performance. Check it out below.
The Slow Rush is out now on Modular.