Moby
Melville's descendant
By Gary Graff
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Yes, he's a distant relative of Moby Dick author Herman Melville, but Richard Melville Hall, aka Moby, has had a whale of a career in his own right. A college dropout who studied religion and philosophy, he emerged in the late '80s as one of the pioneers of New York's underground electronic dance scene, become a creative force who helped frame the genre with club hits such as "Go," "Move," "Next is the E" and "uhf."
Moby also distinguished himself by displaying his earnest spirituality, and by eschewing alcohol and drugs amidst a scene that reveled in both. By 1995's Everything Is Wrong, however, Moby was stretching himself, adding electric and acoustic guitar to the mix along with punk and heavy metal. The next year's Animal Rights, in fact, abandoned electronica altogether in favor of full-fledged vocal rock. He then conquered the pop charts with 1999's Play, a 10-million selling worldwide smash that wove his eclectic musical influences together and even launched a hit single, "South Side," that featured a duet with No Doubt's Gwen Stefani. (It also set a mark with every one of its songs licensed for some form of advertisement.)
Moby has continued in that wide-reaching vein ever since, though his 2005 release, hotel, came in tandem with hotel:ambient, a disc of laid-back "chill" music that showed his electronic muse is still very much intact.
Q: You are known as a prolific songwriter.
Moby: I am. For (Hotel) I ended up writing around 250 songs and kind of narrowed it down to 14, plus the second disc. I go on tour so long that by the time they end I'm so happy to be home and so happy to be in my studio that I'm not thinking about what specific style of music I want to make or what direction I want to go in. I'm just thrilled and happy to be home and making music again. I can write two or three songs in a day.
Q: That's insane.
Moby: Well, when I say two or three, I don't mean completely finished, fully fleshed-out songs. But if you write two songs a day, that's 730 songs a year. The fact that I only wrote 250 songs means I've been lazy. Really, I just go in there every day and make music. That's what I do, make music. I tend not to think too much about what I'm doing. I tend to get involved in the process of making music and work on it enthusiastically. So there's usually a lot more music lying around than ever actually gets placed on the albums.
Q: So what are your vaults like?
Moby: I've probably got four or five thousand unreleased songs. There might even be more. I've been recording music since 1981. A lot of it is really not very good. A lot of it will never see the light of day. I hope no one hears quite a lot of it, to be honest. What's nice, though, is to sort of catalog everything and go back and listen to it, even just for nostalgic value. It's endearing, because I was a very different person 23 years ago. And you never know what will happen when you go back and rediscover a song.
Q: Have you, in fact, found ideas in the vaults that you turned into new material?
Moby: Sure. For example, on Play, the song "Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad?" was originally written in 1991 as a techno song. It just kind of sat around for eight years as a techno song, and when I was making Play I thought it might be interesting to do it in a more melodic, slowed-down tempo and then match it to a sample from an old field recording or something. So, yes, they sometimes do have lives beyond when I first write them.
Q: Do you write on the road at all?
Moby: I can, but it's tricky. There's something about being at home in my studio. It's just such a nice environment to write in. It's quiet. I've got all my equipment. It's sunny. Being on the road you have tons of free time, but it's not an environment that lends itself to creativity.
Q: Your music over the years has become more sophisticated and well-crafted -- more songwriterly, if you will. Could you have anticipated that when you started out producing mostly techno and dance music?
Moby: I go back and listen to rave records I made 15 years ago, and they sound really endearing to me. It was like a kinder, simpler time, when you could make big, goofy, over the top rave records for people wearing oversized pants and chewing on blow sticks and dancing. It was a silly, fun time, and even though the music I was making back then was a lot more rudimentary, it still has a charm to me. So I can't really establish an objective hierarchy of song craftsmanship, though I think in general the more you do something, then, ostensibly, the more you learn.
Q: What kind of changes have you made in your production approach?
Moby: Most recently I've taken to doubling and tripling a lot of the parts in this sort of Phil Spector approach to production. Like on the (Hotel) song "Beautiful," the choruses have about 40 background vocals, but they're mixed so quietly you don't notice them. I really like duplicating, replicating parts so you get a much bigger sound. Because I'm a music nerd and a production nerd, I really take a degree of pride in being able to take seven separate things and blend them together so the cohesive whole is stronger than the separate components.
Q: Did the great commercial success of Play create more pressure on your subsequent releases.
Moby: Not really. I mean, now, if a record came out and sold 50,000 copies worldwide, I would probably think it failed. But really, my main concern is making something I love that I feel can be important to people. I like making records that have a sense of utility to them. I had so many people come up to me and tell me just how much use they got out of Play. There were lots of people saying they had listened to the record so many times, in their car or making out with their boyfriend or girlfriend, just a variety of different circumstances. So I felt this kind of artistic responsibility to also make something that will be useful and important to people, something they could use as an emotional soundtrack to their lives, as background music, or if they're driving home from work or making dinner with their friends or even if it's late at night and they just want to get lost with a pair of headphones.
Q: Ever regret the decision to license your songs for commercials?
Moby: No. The reason we licensed stuff from Play was that was the only avenue we had available to us to get people to hear the music. After that, there was a lot more conventional support in terms of the songs getting played on radio, MTV support, press support. But if a really interesting licensing opportunity comes along, I would certainly take advantage of it.
Q: You're co-owner of a tea shop in
Moby: Not much, really. Oh, I understand the need for people to take vacations when they do jobs they don't like, or if their work precludes spending time with their loved ones. But I love my work. My work is the most important thing in my life. Why would I want to escape from it? The idea of going to sit on a beach for two weeks is anethma to that.
