MUSIC INTERVIEW: MOBY

From Insomnia Comes Atmospheric, Experimental, Joyful Musical Destruction

By: Team Buzzine

May 13, 2011

Richard Melville Hall, better known to the world as Moby, was one of the world’s first electronic music superstars. From the international success of his 1990 Twin-Peaks sampling single “Go,” to the 10 million fans that bought his 1999 album Play, a simple line could be drawn from humble beginnings to global success. That line would ignore a fiercely independent streak that has included punk rock albums, classical music recordings, ground-breaking multimedia releases and, in short, an adventurous artist expressing himself freely through his chosen medium and beyond. Moby’s latest album, Destroyed, is preceded by a free EP, accompanied by a hardback book of photography, and offered the perfect excuse for Buzzine to sit down, catch up, and pick the brain of one of our favorite artists about today’s ever-changing world of music.

Stefan Goldby: It seems somewhat appropriate to be in a hotel room talking about your latest release…

Moby: The album is called Destroyed, and it’s a sort of strange electronic music album: strange in that it was made primarily with old, broken-down pieces of equipment, and most of the songs were written while on tour because, for better or for worse, I suffer from insomnia. So I’ll be awake in a hotel room at four in the morning, and most cities at four in the morning are very quiet and very desolate, and if you have insomnia at four in the morning, you’re in a city and you’re looking out your window, and you see these empty streets with the occasional…every ten minutes a car will go down the street. And that’s when most of the music on the record was written. So I would work in a hotel room at four in the morning writing music and then take the music back to New York, where I was living at the time, and try to finish things there.

SG: Does that mean you have specific geographical memories associated with each track?

M: Oddly enough, even though most of the music was written in hotel rooms in different cities…I hate to say this, and I don’t mean this as being dismissive of cities in any way, but they’re all kind of the same. Even cities that have their own very distinctive character…hotel rooms at four in the morning, it really doesn’t matter where you are… a Radisson Hotel in Tokyo at four in the morning is kind of the same as a Radisson Hotel in Rome at four in the morning, or Auckland, or where-have-you. Even if outside the hotel there’s radically different character… in the inside of a hotel room they’re quite anodyne and they’re all sort of the same.

SG: Is it fair to say that this is the one and only upside of insomnia?

M: One of the upsides of insomnia is that you get more done. Clearly the downsides of insomnia are constant exhaustion, general irritability during the waking hours, a pervading fear of bedtime, diminished immune systems… So I guess the upside is you have more time during the day in which to get stuff done, even if you’re always exhausted.

SG: This is a non-traditional album in a lot of ways, beyond the fact that it was actually written on the road: You just released a free three-track EP to preview it…there will be an accompanying hardback photo book… Is there a sense of trying new things for you beyond doing that musically?

M: It’s interesting because the music business clearly has changed quite a lot in the last 20 years or even the last 10 years. For the longest time, there was quite an established and predictable trajectory which attended every album release. You made the album, you handed it over to the record company, they did everything in their power to avail themselves of conventional media opportunities and retail opportunities, and you released it and you hoped for the best. And now, no one knows what they’re doing, which is strange but kind of emancipating in a way. So you make an album and everybody in the world says, “You know what? No one listens to albums anymore.”

So then it almost becomes incumbent on the part of the musician to try to make an album that people want to listen to from start to finish, where it’s not just a collection of random songs, and you put it out into the world, and you literally can do anything. There’s no such thing in 2011, as a better or worse way to release albums. No one can say, “Oh! This is the right way to release an album; this is the wrong way to release an album,” because literally no one knows what they’re doing.

What underpins everything, though, hopefully, is still the joy of making music and the joy of discovering music, and the joy of finding a way to get music into people’s lives, almost like a utilitarian approach to music, which…you can’t make music that’s exclusively utilitarian, but I think some musicians approach making music from this very ivory tower perspective of…because they’re a musician, they believe people should pay attention to them, and my approach is: There are a few billion pieces of music in the world; why would someone listen to one of mine? Just because I’ve made it? That’s not reason enough for someone to listen to it.

So I try to work very hard to make albums that I love; hopefully, in the process, I make something that someone else will like, and then you figure out how to present it to people in a way that might increase the chance that they’ll actually listen to it. So your criteria for success doesn’t become how many records have you sold or how much money has been generated; purely the criteria for success is: Have you made something that can find its way in people’s lives that they can have an emotional reaction to?

SG: You’ve always been way out in front of the crowd in terms of finding new ways to get your music out into the world, whether it’s through TV, movies, or perhaps most famously, through commercials – is that all just following that same philosophy?

M: I feel like there are musicians who know what they’re doing, there are musicians who have career plans, there are musicians who, at an early age, decide that they’re gonna get their major label deal and they’re gonna get on MTV and they’re gonna do everything and they’re gonna have big success… I thought I would spend my entire life making music that no one would listen to.

I thought I’d spend my entire life teaching at community college, maybe working at Kinko’s, and making music that occasionally a long-suffering girlfriend would have to endure. But I never thought that I’d have a record contract; I never thought that anyone would ever pay any attention to me or the music that I make, so within that, you just do your best, and I still, after 20-some-odd years of making records, I still really have no idea what I’m doing…except for that simple love of making music…and the clear inability to do anything else.

SG: At what point during those 20 years did you come to the realization that this had become a career? That this wasn’t just you making music for yourself?

M: It’s interesting… it was actually 22 years ago when I got my first real record deal. It was real to me, even though the label didn’t have a name at the time; they didn’t have an office, nor did they have employees. It was called Instinct Records – they came up with a name a few weeks after I signed to them. At first, the only employee was me. So I had my studio set up in the guy’s living room. I would have to wrap up all the records and take them to UPS. I cleaned his apartment – so I was the musician and the employee.

I remember the first time I played a show that paid me enough money so I could pay my rent for a week, and that was mind-boggling to me. My rent was $185 a month, so basically I played a show that paid me $100, and I thought, “Wow, this is amazing. I can actually buy soymilk, and I don’t have to return cans to the A&P on the corner of 14^th & Union Square, which is what I used to do to buy soymilk, because soymilk was a luxury. So as far as a career, as the music business has fallen apart, there have been endless conversations of how to better monetize creative output, and how to increase market-share, and how to create or avail yourself of new media.

All this talk about how to make money from music, how to have careers, how to better distribute or sell music – to me, none of that really matters. What matters is that precious, ostensibly sublime relationship that the musician can have to music when they’re creating it, or the precious relationship someone can have when they’re listening to music. Everything else is nonsense, so careers… A musician shouldn’t worry about their career; they should worry about trying to make beautiful music.

Someone who works at a record company shouldn’t worry too much about new models of distribution; they should worry about trying to get a song to someone who is going to appreciate it. Because, at the end of the day, that’s all that matters. Anything else is just arbitrary bells and whistles. There have been times in my life where I’ve tried to think professionally and think about my career; I’m not very good at it, and I have no interest in it. The only thing I care about is that precious quality that music has to convey emotion. Nothing else matters.

SG: Looking at it through that pure artistic prism, putting the latest album aside for a second, which of your previous releases are you proudest of as an artist?

M: I thought you were going to say, “Which of your previous releases do you feel were compromised by concern about career or…” [laughs]

SG: I’ll admit that did think about it. You can answer that as well, if you’d like…

M: In making records…there’s art and there’s commerce, and the art is precious, but the commerce is unfortunately necessary at times to get people to hear the art. If I just make a record and completely ignore the marketplace realities, no one will hear my music. If I make a record exclusively to accommodate marketplace realities, I’ll end up with terrible, terrible music. So you try to not let market-place realities to compromise the creative process, but you also have to be aware of the fact that to make people… Like, if I’ve worked hard on a record and I really care about it, selfishly, I’d like people to hear it.

How can I get it out into the world in a way that increases the chances people will hear it? So you go out and you do interviews and you go on tour, and you do all that stuff that sometimes gets people to hear music. So every album I’ve made has been a clumsy attempt to make music that I love and then get it in front of people. There have been a couple of times, I’m ashamed to admit, in my career where I’ve actually let the marketplace criteria affect the making of the record or the making of a song or the production of a single. And in hindsight, those are the moments I’m most ashamed of.

Like when you’re in the studio and you’re working on a single, and the guy from the big major label is there and he’s like, “Well if you just bring the drums up, there’s a better chance it will get on radio,” and you make the mistake of listening to them. In hindsight, those are the biggest mistakes I’ve made – listening to people at major labels and their opinion on the creative process, because they’re purely thinking of it from a short-term marketing perspective.

SG: If one of the measures of success for you is people hearing your music, it’s hard to imagine that that goal could be met better than it was on Play. That is as ubiquitous an album as any in the last 20 years… When you put all of that aside and go back to what you were talking about in terms of trying to keep the artistic vision alive… what are you happiest with, out of all the different musical projects that you’ve done?

M: If I look back at the music I’ve made, the records that I like the most tend to be the weird records that no one else seemed to like very much. I guess Rolling Stone just came to me – we did a ‘10 years after’ look back at the album Play, where they went track by track, which is kind of ironic because they didn’t even review the record when it came out…  So we went track by track and we looked at the songs off of Play. And as we were talking, I realized that the first half of the record I’m kind of indifferent towards – it’s the second half of the record that gets stranger and noisier and more idiosyncratic – that’s the music I like.

Of all the albums I’ve made, the one I’m most proud of is Animal Rights, which is this weird, self-indulgent, noisy, difficult, punk rock experimental record that I made about 15 years ago, and no one liked it. No one bought it. By most people’s criteria, it was an abject failure. And that’s the one I like the most. So I’m, in many ways, the worst judge of my own music, because the music I like that I’ve made is the music that no one else seems to care about.

SG: So that makes it a very loaded question to ask: What do you like most about the new record?

M: What I like about the new album is essentially -- at least from my perspective, and I have no objectivity because I make the records, but – to me, it has a very cohesive atmosphere, and it’s got an odd, broken-down warmth to it that I really like. There are a couple of conventional songs on there, but most of it; from a songwriting perspective; from a production perspective; from an instrumentation perspective, is really unconventional. And what I love is when the unconventional can somehow be presented in a way that people still find room for in their lives.

And popular music, music in general, is great for that, because there is the great leveler of headphones or a computer speaker or a stereo, where it doesn’t matter… You can have Fleetwood Mac’s “Tusk,” which was recorded, I think, in the Rose Bowl Stadium with an orchestra of 250 people, or you can have like John Lee Hooker’s “Boogie Chillin’,” which was recorded with one microphone in the back room of a bar. They come out of the speakers: they’re equal. And I love that egalitarian quality of speakers. So it doesn’t matter how the record was produced.

Again, you can have a Justin Bieber record where every last note in ProTools has been worked on and quantized, or like some old, weird blues record, like the R. Crumb records, where it was like an old old old recording that was made with a bad microphone on someone’s porch. They come out of the two speakers, and at that moment, they’re equal.

In fact, oftentimes the more poorly produced music has a resonance and a quality to it that’s way more compelling than hyper-produced music. In making this record, Destroyed, and even the last album, which was called Wait for Me, I’m just saying: “I don’t know if anyone is willing to listen to my music anymore, I don’t know if I have an audience, I don’t know if anyone is going to buy this or listen to it or what-have-you…” So letting myself listen to things that are a little more atmospheric, more experimental, and having no idea what sort of life they’re gonna have once they leave my studio. Especially with the new album – there’s so much weird, busted, broken-down atmosphere on it that I really like.

SG: Isn’t it almost impossible to traditionally tour this new album? It’s essentially an ambient record: Does that make for a pleasant change of pace?

M: I honestly -- and I hope this doesn’t sound disingenuous because I think it’s true – feel, in many ways, like the luckiest weird musician on the planet, or the weirdest lucky musician on the planet, because I get to do everything: I play in punk rock bands, I play in blues bands, I occasionally do hip hop DJ sets, I go on tour with a full band and we play giant shows, I DJ and I play other people’s records and get to take credit for them, we play acoustic shows, sometimes play chamber music, I get to write classical music for movies, I get to play weird experimental music… I don’t know how I’ve fallen into my strange curriculum vitae… I just get to do everything. It doesn’t mean I do anything well. I don’t think I’m particularly good at anything…

There was a week I was in Los Angeles, and I was finishing the new album, which was very electronic, I was playing a show with my high school punk rock band, and working on some film music and just doing all these different things, and I was just so happy to be able to do so many different styles of music. And none of them are particularly commercial. This is going to sound so clichéd, but it’s that Kris Kristofferson line: “Freedom’ is just another word for nothing left to lose.”

The more time a musician spends protecting their public image, the less fun they have. And the more time a musician spends worrying about a record release and worrying about all that stuff, the less interesting their records are gonna be. So at this point, I’m lucky – I don’t have to worry about anything. If someone calls me up and says, “Come play with our punk rock band,” I go play with their punk rock band. It’s this weird, random approach to making music and having no idea whether something is gonna work or not, but hopefully I am enjoying the process.

By the way, I apologize, I realize somehow I have these long Fidel Castro answers… Fidel Castro would sometimes have these long, rambling answers or these long speeches, so I’ll be doing interviews and I’ll be giving an answer, and I’ll be like, “Wow, I’m not answering the question and no one is paying attention…”

SG: I am paying attention, but it’s really our editor’s problem, not mine. [Laughs] As you said, you’re in a very fortunate position where you really can do what you want. Is there some great goal still out there for you, as an artist?

M: As an artist or musician, I simply just want to keep doing what I do… [Pause] Sometimes there are questions that are way better than the answer... [Smiles]

And the question of what’s left or what I haven’t done – I just feel lucky that I get to do what I do, and I’d really like to start producing other people – old people. Anyone under the age of 70, I have no interest in, as far as producing. So I’d like to make a record with Buddy Guy, which is hard because he hasn’t returned any of my phone calls. And I really want to make a record with Kris Kristofferson, because he’s one of my heroes…

It’s funny being at SXSW because I’ve realized the more time passes, the less I feel in any way connected to the music business. The priorities of the music business are fine; I just don’t understand them anymore. I hope this doesn’t sound bad, but I walk around and I see the effort that people are making in constructing their image and presenting themselves to the world… like presenting themselves as being cool, or disinterested, or sexy or whatever, and it’s kind of endearing. Because it’s so much effort…and I hope it works out for people.

I hope they have fun shows and meet nice people and have good romance or whatever they’re looking for, but just the amount of effort and concern and worry that goes into the ways in which people present themselves to the world – especially professionally at a place like this – and it’s especially ironic in the world of indie rock, which is supposed to be that pavement aesthetic and ethos of like, “We don’t care…even though we’ve just spent a few hundred hours perfecting our image and trimming our disinterested facial hair,” or whatever. There’s still that idea of, “Oh well, we’re above it all,” and it’s kind of cute knowing that they’re not.

Like when I go to see an indie rock band and they’re on stage, and they look blasé and disaffected, and you know that they spent three days figuring out which Pixies or Stooges T-shirt they were gonna wear. I think it’s endearing. But as far as other things I want to do, I love taking pictures. I’ve been a photographer since I was ten years old. In the age of digital photography, being a photographer I feel like such a dilettante because anybody can be a photographer, but I still love… I grew up with photography; my uncle was a photographer at The New York Times, so he would give me all his hand-me-down photo equipment.

So I’d like to take more pictures. I’d like to, at some point, start doing more scores for experimental films. The idea of writing scores for big-budget movies is not all that interesting…except for something like Trent Reznor and Atticus [Ross] – the music they made for The Social Network, because it was really interesting – it was like a big-budget movie that had, at times, quite an experimental score. I’m glad it won the Academy Award. I just want to keep doing what I’m doing, and maybe, if I keep working hard, it increases the chances that something good might result…

Moby’s latest album, ‘Destroyed,’ is released by Mute Records on Tuesday, May 17th.