Tame Impala has covered Seal’s 1994 song “Kiss From a Rose” for Australian radio station Triple J’s “Like a Version” series, with frontman Kevin Parker explaining that the song was both a childhood favorite and was found the first CD he ever bought — the Batman Forever soundtrack. That usage helped spark his love of the Caped Crusader — and left him intimately familiar with every song on the disc after countless back-to-back listens.
Choosing to cover it was another matter. “We sort of just accepted that none of us sound like Seal. None of us have the insane voice that he does,” Parker told the station. “We were just sort of like, content with, like, it’s us. It’s a bunch of Aussie blokes doing it.” Eventually, the band decided to embrace the challenge and do its best rather than attempt to replicate Seal’s extraordinary vocal performance.
Parker made a persuasive case for the song’s musical sophistication. “There aren’t very many chords in it, but it is quite complex at the same time,” he said, pointing to its many distinct musical parts and unexpected rhythmic changes. “It’s quite proggy in that way.”
Tame Impala also performed its Deadbeat smash hit “Dracula,” and Parker noted that the song has some unexpected common ground with the Seal cover, particularly in its arrangement and the amount of shared singing. “It’s the one we’ve got all the synths going,” he said, adding that the band has become especially familiar with it from playing it at every show.
Parker offered a useful philosophy for choosing cover songs, too: “Find a song that is an incredible song that doesn’t get as much credit, because maybe the production is a bit outdated or maybe people didn’t appreciate it as much at the time.” The opportunity, he suggested, is to “bring something different to it and present it in a new light.” That requires a willingness to let go of perfectionism. “We’re good at not taking ourselves too seriously and not being too precious,” Parker said. “You’ve just got to sort of embrace what it is, which is like doing something in the moment.”
There’s also the matter of whether Seal himself will approve. Parker has met the singer and described him as “an amazing artist and an amazing vocalist” who is “probably sick of hearing covers of that song.” He even recalled wanting to leave a playful comment on a video in which Seal imagined Parker telling him, “Good job, cool song bro,” but never got around to it. “I hope he sees it and goes, ‘Oh cool, cool man. Good job.’”
“Kiss From a Rose” was released on Seal’s self-titled 1994 album but didn’t gain much traction until director Joel Schumacher chose it for inclusion in the following year’s Batman Forever. “I owe my career I guess in large part to Joel Schumacher, who took a chance,” Seal said after Schumacher died in 2020. “Who took a song that was always a good song, but a kind of unconventional one, so it wasn’t immediately palatable. But the difference was that 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.”
Tame Impala is off the road until next spring but is heavily rumored to be one of the headliners for the 2027 edition of the Coachella festival, which will be held at Empire Polo Ground in Indio, Ca., from April 9-11 and 16-18.
