Moby Interview

After the meditative electronica of 2002’s '18' and the singer-songwriter moves of 2005’s 'Hotel', Moby returns to the dance floor with a vengeance on his new album 'Last Night', released on 12th May 2008.


What was the inspiration for the album?

When making a record, I mean, I have a strange musical background, because I’ve played a lot of different types of music, so when I’m making a record, one of the bigger questions is what type of record do I want to make? Do I want to make a punk rock record? Do I want to make a strange electronic record? Do I want to mark a more dance-oriented record? And the last couple of records that I’ve made had, at least from my perspective, a slightly subdued quality to them and I wanted to make something… make an album that was maybe just like a little more playful, a little more reflective of my life as it actually is, especially living here in downtown Manhattan and so that was the inspiration. You know, it was supposed to be an album about having a long, interesting, compelling night out with your friends.

What was the impetus behind the album’s concept - one long night out with your friends?

Well, I mean I’ve got my studio here in my home and almost every day I go in there and I work on music and slowly as I was working on this record, basically there were two records coming out of it - one that was very quiet and very subdued and one that was more dance-oriented – and as the dance-oriented one started taking shape, I realised rather than just make it like a collection of random dance tracks, I did want to give it some sort of narrative arc or some sort of theme, whether or not anyone else will ever pick up on that, I have no idea.

But for me, it just represents going out in New York City, which, for better or worse, I spend a lot of time doing and so I wanted it to have that just somehow capture the feeling of having, you know, a long night out, because going out is so complicated! It can be simple, you know, like I guess in certain parts of the world, you go out, you go to a party, you stay there for two hours, you come home, but in other parts of the world, like in the UK or in New York, it’s an endeavour, you know. It starts at 8 o’clock at night and it finished at 8 o’clock in the morning and a lot happens in between and by the end of the night things are kind of blurry and so that was sort of the impetus behind giving the record this… I hate to use this word, but giving it a concept.

Do you see “Last Night” as a return to your dance roots?

So, in making a more electronic dance record, I could either try and make something very, very progressive or I could actually make something that I really like and in this case I wanted to make a record that involved these sort of like musical idioms that I’ve always really loved. You know, whether it’s more soulful, disco or piano-driven rave anthems or quiet ambient music. These are genres that I’ve worked in a lot in the past, and one of the reasons that I’ve worked in these genres in the past is that I really love them. It’s music that I care about and music that speaks to me, so rather than push myself too much stylistically, I just wanted to make a record that I really like.

“Last Night” also refers very much to early rave stuff. I wonder if you could talk about your history in that scene and how you got started.

I first started going out to nightclubs in New York in 1980. I was 14, 15 at the time and my friends would take Metro-North in from Connecticut or occasionally steal one of their parents’ cars and the clubs we would go to then were like The Fallout Shelter and the Mud Club and CBs and Danceteria and the Peppermint Lounge and it was such an amazing time, because you had this thriving New York nightlife and no-one in the rest of the world paid attention to it. It was a world unto itself and had its own fanzine and had its own superstars, but really outside New York no-one knew about it and so you’d have hit records in Lower Manhattan that would sell thousands of copies in Lower Manhattan and outside Lower Manhattan, no-one knew about it, so it really was this very special time.

Actually I mean the whole 80s were like that, because it seemed like after the 70s there was this disco backlash, where no-one in the rest of the world wanted to know about dance music, but dance music here was thriving and it was racially mixed. You know, you’d go out and it’d be white and it’s be black and it’s be Latino, it’d be Asian and half the people would be straight, half the people would be gay. The DJs would be playing Hip Hop into Freestyle into Dancehall Reggae into House music into weird electronic music. It was just a really open, amazing time and it was just a world that… I feel really, really grateful to have come of age musically during that time.

Then as the 80s progressed, I started DJing myself. Like in the late 80s I started DJing in Manhattan in places lik Mars, which is now a parking lot, Red Zone, which is now 30 story condominiums, the Palladium, which is now NYU dorms, MK, which is now a carpet store, the Place Débuté [???], which is now a pet store and on and on. But these clubs, like in the late 80s, was a really interesting time, because New York was being decimated by AIDS and crack and New York felt like a battle zone. People were dying left and right. Every club where I worked, people were getting shot. Like you’d go to Mars and everyone would be depressed and like, “What’s wrong?” and like, “Last night Joey the doorman got shot.

There was a drug deal went wrong and he got shot,” and maybe it’s like living in Sarajevo during the war, but you almost stop noticing and now, like if there was a shooting in a nightclub in New York, it would be the cover of the New York Post and everyone would talk about it and it would be a huge deal and back then, it just happened every day and sometimes it would become… The only time it impacted a club is when it happened a lot. Like there was this one club on 24th street called the Building and eventually it got shut down, because I think in the course of two weeks there were like six drive-by shootings, you know and like two of the doormen died and some patrons got sent to the hospital and so the police finally stepped in and shut this place down, which was a shame, because it was a really amazing place.

The 80s in New York, I was really privileged to have been around then and also, as I’ve said, it was… Downtown alternative dance culture, no-one paid attention to it and then the rave scene in the UK started to blow up and that really influenced club culture in New York, you know, and then the Limelight and Red Zone and the Palladium started doing more rave-oriented nights and that was really exciting and really fun as well, because what was amazing about these genres, these types of music was they were new and no-one knew about them. I mean now, with the Blogosphere some kid makes a record in Williamsburg and in 5 minutes everybody on the planet knows about it and back then you had entire subcultures that no-one knew about outside of the people in those subcultures, so… I have to say I get kind of wistful and a little bit melancholy when I think about it, because it was really special.

How would you describe the music scene in New York in the 80s?

In the early to mid 80s, the music scene in New York was so eclectic. You know, I mean Danceteria was the perfect club for eclecticism, because you’d go there to see a punk rock band in the basement and then the ground floor, there’d be some indie rock. You know, Mission of Burma would be playing on the ground floor, you’d have the Chromags in the basement, you’d have a Gay House DJ on the 3rd floor, you’d have the New Wave video lounge on the 4th floor and then you’d have someone playing Hip Hop on the top floor and everybody got along and everybody liked and respected everybody else’s music and everyone was inspired by everyone else’s music.

You listen to some of those Clash records from this time and you can tell they were spending so much time in New York listening to Hip Hop, listening to Disco, listening to Salsa, etc and their records really reflected that and that eclecticism, which is second-nature to people who grew up here, seemed so strange to anyone else in the rest of the world, because everyone else in the rest of the world was like, Oh, if you like Hip Hop, that’s all you were allowed to like and if you like House music, that’s all you were allowed to like, whereas New York, I guess it’s just such an eclectic city inherently and so the music culture back then really reflected it.

How does “Last Night” differ from your previous albums?

Well, starting with Play, like Play was a very eclectic electronic record and then the next album, 18, was slightly less eclectic, a little more song-oriented and Hotel was probably like the most traditional record I’ve ever made. I’m singing a lot of the songs, a lot of guitars, a lot of live drums and a lot of piano, so it was a very traditional record and I like Hotel, I just realised my strong suit is not being a singer-songwriter and so after I made Hotel, I was like, “You know, this is a pretty good record, but I’ve done it. I don’t need to do that again,” and in the last couple of years, I just found myself living in Lower Manhattan, going out a lot and very simply I wanted to make a record that reflected that. I spend a lot of time with my friends, just going out drinking and getting into trouble and going out dancing and so the record is very much a product of that, so it’s kind of hopefully a relatively honest record, because I wanted it to sound like what, maybe as narcissistic as this is, I wanted it to sound sort of what my life actually is.

Do you see any progression in terms of your albums?

In a weird way Last Night is, of all the records I’ve made, it’s the one that has the least to do with me and that’s one of the reasons why I enjoyed making it so much is because I mean, even though I was the one writing the songs, I felt more sort of like I was producing other artists than I was actually making my own record. Certainly it reflects my artistic vision and hopefully it’s a cohesive body of work and a cohesive artistic statement, but it’s not as maybe self-involved as some of the other records I’ve made, because the last record I made was very self-involved. It was me playing all the instruments and me singing and me singing songs that were very personal and this album is ideally maybe a little bit less about me and a little bit more about just making a dance record that hopefully people will like.

Can you describe your working process?

Every song starts differently. I have my studio here and like the sample-based tracks all start with the sample and then the song is written around the sample, but a lot of the other songs will start with a guitar or a keyboard part or a synth part. Every song does have its own sort of unique genesis.

This record was mixed by Dan Grech-Maguerat who worked with Radiohead. How did that come about and what did he add to the album?

Well, I was looking for someone to work with on mixing the record and it’s tricky, because it’s an electronic record and most American mixers come from a Rock background. I’m sure that a Rock mixer would do a great job with this, but I wanted someone who had more of an understanding of electronics and Dan has worked on a lot of the Radiohead records and he also worked on the last Scissor Sisters record and that seemed like a perfect resumé or CV for someone to mix this record and he’s also young. I mean, he’s in his mid- to late 20s, so like he approached this with like a lot of like fervour and passion and sometimes when you work with people who’ve around for a long time they’re a little bit more jaded and cynical and it was really nice working with him, because I mean, he’s very talented and he’s very smart, but also he’s not at all cynical.

Was it a deliberate choice to make a less serious album?

Yeah, I had a long didactic period in my life, you know. When I was 15 years old I was a militant punk rocker and then I became a militant dance music person. I was a militant vegan and I was a militant Christian and at some point I sort of stepped back and I realised the only thing that these phases had in common was their militancy and the thing I’ve realised about militancy is it can be fun and it can be seductive, but it’s not very productive, you know and being militantly committed to a cause doesn’t necessarily make you a good advocate for that cause and it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re making the world a better place and also the last 6 years in the United States and the world has been a time of fundamentalism and militancy and the more I see other people engaged in militancy, whether it’s right-wing militancy, left-wing militancy, Islamic militancy, it just makes me want to have nothing to do with fundamentalism and militancy at all. So maybe that’s sort of the impetus behind the record, saying like everybody else in the world is so militantly committed to their causes and all these militants are actually ruining the world. Why not just make a fun dance record for your friends?

With Alice and I Love To Move In Here, did you make a conscious decision to return to your roots in the 80s Hip Hop scene in New York?

I mean, I’m always a little hesitant to talk about my long involvement with the Hip Hop world, because ultimately I’m a caucasian kid from Connecticut, excuse the alliteration, but I mean I bought my first Hip Hop record in 1982, 1981, which was The Message from Sugar Hill and ever since then I’ve always bought a lot of Hip Hop records and I’ve DJ’d a lot in the Hip Hop world. Like when I first started DJing in New York, I mainly played at Hip Hop clubs and I’d always keep a microphone handy with me, because you’d be playing records and then Big Daddy Kane would show up or Run DMC would show up or 3rd Base or Ultramagnetics and if you had your microphone there and you could play instrumentals while they did freestyling and so I had some amazing experiences you know with like fantastic rappers from the late 80s coming in and freestyling and then throughout the 90s, like I really liked Hip Hop, although I didn’t have that much to do with it and I did a track with Chuck D of Public Enemy called Make Love F**k War, which was interesting, because he’s just one of my heroes of all time and so including some Hip Hop tracks on this record, to me it’s just a natural extension of the fact that I’ve been listening to Hip Hop for the last 26 years.

You worked with Grandmaster Caz on the album. How did that come about?

Well, the song I Love To Move In Here, I wanted to have an old school Rap element to it and so I started just thinking about who my sort of like old school Rap heroes were and Grandmaster Caz was one of them. I had a really strange record that he had made with the 45 King, I think in 1990 or 91 and I forget what it was called, but it was a record that when I DJ’d I used to play a lot and so I somehow just started asking around, “Does anyone know how to get in touch with Grandmaster Caz?” and it actually wasn’t all that difficult, because he has a manager and he’s still touring and DJing and making records, so I got in touch with him and he came over to the studio and we made the track together and it was amazing working with him, because I mean, he’s really talented and really humble and just like a wonderful human being.

Another vocalist who worked on this record is Sylvia Gordon from Kudu. How did that collaboration come about?

There’s a bar on Avenue C called Nublu and I DJ there occasionally and it’s one of my favourite places in New York. It’s tiny. I mean, it holds maybe 50 people and more than 50 people and it’s really crowded and I went there one night. It was like 4 o’clock in the morning and Kudu were playing and it was just the most wonderful thing I’d ever heard. The music was very raucous and electronic and very drum driven and she had this beautiful voice on top of that and so I asked her if she’d ever want to work on a song and so she came over and yeah, she’d been awake for a couple of days when she came over to work on the song and I think that it fits the record perfectly. You know, the fact that her voice was very… I mean, she’s got a beautiful voice, but she’d been up for a couple of days, so there’s sort of like a languid exhaustion to her voice, which the fact that it’s the last track on the record, I think it suits it really well.

And you also worked with ex-pat British rappers the 419 Crew and Aynzli. How did that collaboration come about?

Well, the 419 Crew, my friend Ryan, who works at my manager’s office, he heard them in a club one night and he was really blown away by them, because when they perform, they perform in English and Yoruban, at least I’m pretty sure it’s Yoruban, which is the native tongue of Nigeria, and so he got one of their demo tapes and he sent it to me and I thought it was really interesting as well, so we sent them this track, Alice, and they wrote some parts for it and then I heard this rapper Aynzli on MySpace and I thought he had a really amazing delivery and just really smart lyrics and so we sent him a copy of the track as well and originally I thought it was just going to be one or the other of these different rappers and it ended up being both just because they both had such an interesting and different approach.

Can you tell us about the track Disco Lies?

I remember going to San Francisco in the early 90s and hearing some DJs like Marc Farina and it was interesting, because in the early 90s in New York, the dance scene here was very aggressive. It was either older, softer House music or very aggressive Rave music and you went to San Francisco and it was much more disco inspired and a bit softer and it reminded me of being out in night clubs in Manhattan in the early to mid 80s, where you had this genuine underground dance scene that no-one outside of Lower Manhattan had any interest in, and so the song Disco Lies, I wanted it slightly to be reminiscent of Paradise Garage with Larry Levan or Tony Humphreys, who used to play at this club called Zanzibar out in Newark, so with these cold electronic elements, but with a very Impassioned diva vocal on top.

The vocalist on that is Shayna Steele. I mean I’m always looking for vocalists and so I put the word out to all my friends, like, “If you know anyone who has a good voice, please can I hear what they do?” and someone sent me Shayna’s demo tape and I just thought like, “What an amazing voice”. It sounds like she should have been making disco records in 1978, which to me is the highest compliment I can ever pay a singer.

Do you have any plans to tour the album?

Well, when I first started making records, I loved touring and I would tour as much as possible and then it got to the point where I was touring with like an eight piece band and we had three tour buses and three big trucks and I would go on tour for a year at a time and I really came to hate touring, so because this is a more dance-oriented record, the touring for it will be DJing, at least for now. I mean, maybe if… I do have this dream of putting on like a huge Rave at Madison Square Garden, so if for some reason, if the record is successful, maybe I’ll get like a bunch of other dance performers and just have like a giant party for 17000 people at Madison Square Garden.

Short of that, I just like going to small clubs and DJing. Like after years and years of touring and being on the road for a long period of time, just being able to go out with a box of records, it’s so liberating and so much fun, because that way you can also… Every night is different and you also get to have contact with people who are coming to see you, because if you’re playing huge or big venues, like 10000, 15000 people, you never have any contact with anyone in the audience and it gets really depressing, really lonely. You know, like week after week you realise the only human contact you’ve had has been with roadies, which is fine – nothing against roadies – but like it’s kind of a lonely, sad way to live.

As part of your website you have a new program called mobygratis. Could you talk about that?

When I went to college, I went to SUNY Purchase for a while. SUNY Purchase has a big film programme, so I went there as a Philosophy student, which was kind of absurd, seeing as it’s a Performing Arts school, but… so I ended up taking a bunch of film classes and making a lot of friends with… SUNY is one of the only places that was doing an experimental film major and a lot of my friends were doing that and so I’ve sort of stayed in touch with them and other people in the world of independent film and their biggest complaint is that it’s really hard and onerously expensive to license music for movies, so I started this thing called Mobygratis which essentially provides free music to independent filmmakers for whatever they want to do with it and there isn’t really a catch to it.

I think most people when they start… In 2007 if someone starts an online venture, there’s a business plan and there’s marketing and there’s this goal to like sell it to Google at some point and with this, very simply, I just want to give away music to people who are making independent and non-profit films and if the films that they’re making eventually become commercial or generate a profit, then they have to pay for a commercial license for this music, but whatever they pay will go to charity and that’s just… It’s not even me being particularly altruistic, it’s more me trying to stay honest. Like I’ve done enough disingenuous stuff in my life, like I’d like to sort of structure something so that even if I want to be disingenuous, hopefully I can’t be. So that’s free music for independent filmmakers

You have a new club night called Degenerates. How did that come about and what’s the idea behind it?

For most of the last 15 or 16 years, I’ve toured with a band and so performing in public involved going out and playing concerts and I’ve really come to hate touring, so I started DJing a lot. Part of it’s because I’ve been really excited by what’s going on in the world of dance music lately and also I love DJing and I love not touring. So with that in mind, I wanted to start a kind of recurring regular… almost like a residency here in New York and I called it Degenerates because I don’t know, it seems to fit late night life in New York and it means so many different things to so many different people.

Degenerates can be very sybaritic degeneracy or it can be just like 19 year olds having sex behind a dumpster in an alley by Burger King degeneracy. I just wanted to start this night that was like an eclectic dance night and so the first… We’ve only done one so far and it was with myself and Stretch Armstrong, who was my first ever roommate in New York, and he’s very well known as a Hip Hop DJ, but he also plays a lot of Electro and House music and then Juan Maclean and then Alex Frankel from DFA Records also played, so it’s this really fun, eclectic approach to dance music where all the DJs are different but sort of support each other and then the second one we’re doing is going to be with Spank Rock and Tommie Sunshine and again Alex Frankel and his band The Holy Ghost are going to DJ so… The idea is just fun, eclectic dance music that hopefully doesn’t take itself too seriously.

I guess since “Last Night” has a concept of one long night out with your friends, do you have any particularly memorable nights going out clubbing?

I’m 42 now, so my stamina isn’t what it used to be, but what was amazing about the late 80s club scene and the early 90s rave scene is, you’d be up until 7 or 8 in the morning every single night and then you’d sleep until 3 in the afternoon and then you’d do the exact same thing all over again and it just seemed so normal. It seemed perfectly normal to be in Washington Square Park at 7 o’clock in the morning watching the old ladies do Tai Chi and now if I do that once every 3 weeks or once a month, I’m shattered for the next two days.