For Kevin Parker, Tame Impala’s Triple J cover of Seal’s “Kiss From a Rose” reaches back to a formative soundtrack and forward to a useful lesson in interpretation: a band doesn’t need to imitate a song’s original singer to make it work.
Parker told Triple J that the track was a childhood favorite and appeared on the first CD he ever bought: the Batman Forever soundtrack. Replaying that disc helped fuel his interest in Batman and made him deeply familiar with every song on it.
A cover built around the band’s own voice
Matching Seal’s vocal performance was never a realistic goal. “We sort of just accepted that none of us sound like Seal. None of us have the insane voice that he does,” Parker said. The band settled on making the song its own: “It’s a bunch of Aussie blokes doing it.”
That approach fits Parker’s view of what makes the song interesting. He said it uses relatively few chords, yet its distinct sections and shifting rhythms give it a layered, “quite proggy” quality. The arrangement, in his telling, offers plenty to work with even without trying to reproduce Seal’s vocals.
Tame Impala also played “Dracula,” a hit from Deadbeat. Parker sees a connection between it and the Seal cover in their arrangements and shared vocals. “It’s the one we’ve got all the synths going,” he said of “Dracula,” which the band has played at every show.
Finding a fresh angle on a familiar song
Parker’s cover-song rule is to look for “an incredible song that doesn’t get as much credit.” That might happen because its production feels dated or listeners didn’t fully value it when it first appeared. A new arrangement can bring the song into focus from another angle, he said.
The process also calls for a light touch. Parker said Tame Impala tries not to be too precious about a cover: “You’ve just got to sort of embrace what it is, which is like doing something in the moment.”
There’s a personal audience for the performance, too. Parker has met Seal, whom he called “an amazing artist and an amazing vocalist,” and joked that the singer may be “probably sick of hearing covers of that song.” Parker recalled seeing a video in which Seal imagined him saying, “Good job, cool song bro.” He never left the comment he had in mind, but hopes Seal sees the cover and responds in kind.
“Kiss From a Rose” first appeared on Seal’s self-titled 1994 album. It found a much wider audience after director Joel Schumacher included it in Batman Forever the following year. After Schumacher’s death in 2020, Seal credited him with taking a chance on a song that was strong but unconventional. “Everyone who went to see that movie, when they came out of that theater, the last they heard was, ‘baby!’ And I guess it kind of stuck,” Seal said in a tribute to Schumacher.
Tame Impala is off the road until next spring. The band is also heavily rumored to be among the headliners for Coachella 2027, scheduled for April 9–11 and 16–18 at Empire Polo Ground in Indio, California.
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