You have a new album that's coming out on October 1st and it's called Innocence and you took a different approach with making this album than your previous works. It's been co-produced by Mark Spike and you have some fantastic collaborations on it. For example, you have Wayne Cohen from the Flaming Web Summit, you have Mark Lannigan from The Screaming Trees and Coons of the Stone Age and you have Skylar Grey on it. Can you describe what this experience was like working on this album?
Well, my musical background is actually classical music and then when I was a teenager I played punk rock, I popped DJ for a while telling music. But my goal is just to try and make music that I really love. So my approach to making records is very conventional, sometimes it's been very uncool, but all this sort of trying to be in service of that ultimate goal is trying to make music that really resonates with me emotionally. So in making this new album, of course making music that I love was a guiding principle, but I really wanted to see what it was like collaborating with other people.
So I brought in an outside producer and my criteria in looking for singers was to try and find people who I thought had really interesting voices and people who had a really sort of... You really searched for the right sound for the album then? Yeah, and I just started asking around, you know, I started asking people who they would recommend. So a few people on the record were recommended from Friends of Mine.
And then someone like Wayne from The Flaming Lips, I've known Wayne since 1995. We both went on tour with the Red Hot Chili Peppers. So for a couple of months we shared a dressing room and we've just been friendly ever since. Now you actually just finished making a music video with Wayne Cohen for this single called The Perfect Life.
Where did you get the inspiration for making this music video with Wayne? Well, in the past, like in the 80s and 90s, I felt like oftentimes music videos took themselves seriously and they... Or too much about some arbitrary story or some big idea of production value. So really the idea for this video was just to do something fun and stupid.
We just sort of... We just sort of... We just sort of... Relatively interesting fun and stupid, like roller skating goes and a drunk king being thrown out of a bar and people having a giant crazy party on a rooftop.
So it was the idea of just being too hard about the video and just trying to make it sort of fun and interesting. Oh, that's fantastic. That's... It's kind of refreshing to hear someone not taking themselves so seriously sometimes.
It's okay to have some fun then. A few years ago, one of your songs was sampled in an episode of The Sopranos. And it really helped set the mood for what the emotions were going on with the characters. Do you see your music easily lending itself to that visual medium at all?
Or do you think it's kind of by chance it happens? Over the years, I've licensed a lot of music to movies and TV shows. And I've worked with a whole bunch of different directors. I mean, everyone from David Lynch to Danny Boyle to Michael Mann to Oliver Stone, Paul Haggis.
Because on one hand, it's really nice when music just exists on its own. And a listener can come up with their own ideas, what the visuals or the aesthetic might be for the song. But it's really, I mean, I'm stating the obvious, but it can be quite powerful. When music is linked to a very specific visual and almost like the emotional content, the visual and the emotional content of the music sort of really, really great hands each other.
It really does. I just remember just being awestrucked of how well it was almost like you made that piece of music specifically for that scene of this program. Recently on your blog, which can be found at your official website, Moby.com, you talk about your recent move to Los Angeles. Do you think your new living environment has influenced how you make music now?
I think it has, but I'm not sure how. I mean, I was raised in New York and I moved to LA a few years ago. The main reasons I moved to LA were I wanted to be warm in the wintertime, which I'm sure you can relate to. I wanted to be in a place really easy access to nature.
And to put it in perspective, New York City has 20,000 acres of parkland, whereas Los Angeles County has 2.5 million acres of parkland. Oh, wow. And also, LA, as other cities become more and more expensive, like Chicago, New York, San Francisco, London, at least in New York, a lot of the artists are being priced out. I feel like LA, because it's so big and weird, there's still plenty of relatively inexpensive real estate for people to live in here.
So, you know, LA is a very strange place, but the good thing is it's warm in the winter and filled with weird-fected and making of this record. I'm sure that it has that much objectivity or perspective as regards to my own work. So, the ways in which making this album in Los Angeles might have affected the work, it might take me a few years to figure it out. Now, you've just announced your massive world tour in support of Innocence, and it's going to be three shows, October 2nd through the 4th at the Fonda Theatre in Los Angeles.
For the lucky few who are going to be able to attend, what do you have in store for them? Will you be dusting off some of the old classics that you haven't played for a while? Or is there going to be any special guests? You know, what can they expect?
Yeah, I mean, the first half of the show will be songs from the new album. Hopefully with a bunch of the guests who appear on the new album, depending on who's available. And then the second half of the show will be a great sit set. Full might will be about, you know, three hours, three and a half hours.
Very strange to only play songs from the new record, because, you know, if I go to see a band, I want to hear my favorite songs, or I want to hear the songs that are familiar to me. That A, that people will like the music from the new record, but also hearing, you know, a two-hour long set of live music that they're... I got to kind of go back and just kind of ask you, why music? What was the first got you into music that made you want to become a musician?
Well, I was raised in a very strange family. I was raised in a family, a weird artist. You know, my mom was a painter, both my answer writers. My uncle, one uncle, one uncle, sculptor, the other uncle's photographer.
I was raised around a lot of very creative people, but when I was growing up, nothing affected me as powerfully as music did. It's an early age, maybe even as early as like eight years old, nine years old. I think I somehow knew I was just going to dedicate my life to making music, because resonated with these songs strongly. And yes, I pretty much spent my entire life into nine or ten years old, working on music and trying to make music that I love.
Wow, it's almost like music was in your DNA from day one, then. Yeah, and clearly I'm not alone, because, I mean, there's seven billion people on the planet, and the vast majority seem to have a strong connection to music. There's something about music that's just, you know, remarkably powerful, and I think in some ways, to an extent, we almost take the power of music for granted, especially now because music is so ubiquitous, and often cost anything. Sort of forget that this institution, which really is just based around moving air molecules around a little bit differently.
Listen to music when we want to sleep, when we want to dance, when we want to have sex, when we go into war, we listen to funerals, we listen to at births and weddings. It can calm us down, it can make us contemplative, it can make us angry. When really, at the end of the day, it's just air moving a little bit differently and hitting our eardrums a little differently than it normally was. Is there one album out there that you think everyone out there needs to go check out?
Like, this was the album that when you heard it, it just blew your mind away? I mean, I can probably think of a hundred records like that. I guess, I would even go more specific. I would say there's a single song.
Okay. And the song is, I Feel Love by Donna Summer. Really? Which, of course, most people have heard, but one of my favorite stories is, apparently, when I Feel Love was first released, Brian, you know, and David Bowie were in Berlin working on the album Heroes.
And Brian, you know, came into the studio with the 12-inch of I Feel Love and he made everyone stop what they were doing and he put on, and it's on I Feel Love. And at the end of it, he amounts to everyone. He said, this is the most revolutionary record ever made. Wow.
And even after all this time, I still feel like, electronic dance music ever made. That's really cool too, because it's not like the usual suspects. It's not like the Rowan Stones or the Beatles or Zeppelin or anything like that. I mean, I love the Rowan Stones and the Beatles and the Zeppelin, but I still feel like there's something like I feel of.
The fact that it really wasn't in any way like the first real electronic dance music, and it's still after all this time, it's just being a really remarkable recording. Now you have embraced the use of new technology pretty early on. You blog on a regular basis, you post some of your photography online, you use Twitter, you do Spotify playlists, you've really embraced this new digital technology. In your opinion, how has this new technology kind of changed the music industry, and do you think these changes have had either a positive or negative effect on the industry?
Well, I mean, especially like the music business has changed. Like the way in which records are made, the way they're listened to has changed, the way they're communicated about has changed. And it's hard for me to have too strong of a pro or con opinion when it comes to any of this, because it's sort of like having opinion about the weather. Like there's just not much, like even if there was something in the current musical climate I didn't like, there's really not much I could do about it.
You know, I know like every now and then musicians will complain about, for a while they were complaining about Napster, and they were complaining about iTunes, and they're complaining about Spotify. I just feel like why complain, why not just be a musician and focus on trying to make good music? You know, because like for example, if there are musicians who don't like the streaming model, well, there's not much you can do about it because that's the future. And I really love the fact now that it's so easy for a lot of musicians to make music and make videos and release their music.
So it enables people to bypass the big record labels, it enables people to bypass the huge monolithic media establishments that exist, and really enables people to have a more sort of direct relationship with the people who listen to their music. I think that's incredibly healthy. I'm a part of an organization called College Radio Day, and the goal of College Radio Day is to raise awareness of college radio stations to individuals that normally wouldn't tune into a college station and kind of get them to tune in and check us out. What impact do you think College Radio has had on the music industry?
The impact that College Radio has had on the music industry, it's hard for me to say because, you know, I grew up outside of New York and now I live in Los Angeles, and when I was growing up in New York, I only listened to College Radio. So it would almost be easier for me to talk about the influence that College Radio has had on me. The influence that College Radio has had on me is just huge. You know, like when I was in high school, there's a college radio station called WNYU, and I would run home from school and I would keep a cassette in my cassette recorder, and when anything I liked came on the radio, I would try and record it.
I mean, I spent hours each week listening to College Radio. To Los Angeles, one of the great things about LA is the College Radio here. And what's really amazing about LA is people actually like everyone listens to College Radio. You know, like KXLU and KCRW, which is K-U-S-E for classical music.
College Radio in LA is, you know, like every single person I know in Los Angeles is playing like community meetings. They go and listen to other college college radio. It affected me when I was growing up, but really continues to affect me. In your opinion, do you think College Radio still matters at large?
Well, here's the funny thing. I think that College Radio is actually stronger and more important than it's ever been. Well, there was a time, let's say, in the 80s, like late 70s into the 80s, where College Radio was very important in getting certain bands broken, like, you know, really helped REM, Husker Do, the Pixies, the Cure, but then in the 90s, it seemed like tons of commercial stations became modern rock rock rock rock rock stations, and with, you know, huge signal strength, and College Radio became a little more marginalized, unfortunately. But then, in the, let's say this, you know, in this century, I feel like commercial radio just gets weaker and weaker, whereas College Radio just gets stronger and stronger.
You know, and that's actually borne out by, like, if you look at ratings numbers, like most College Radio stations, year after year, to keep doing better, whereas the commercial stations keep doing worse. And I feel like a big part of that is that College Radio is generally intelligent, and a lot of commercial radio is generally kind of dumb. You know, College Radio, I feel like College Radio respects its audience, and commercial radio sort of insults its audience. College Radio has personality, whereas, you know, especially when all these big media companies started buying up all the commercial stations, commercial radio became really homogenous and generic, and just had no personality.
So I feel like that's kind of what has driven a lot of people back into College Radio. It's just like, the music is better, the DJs are nicer and more interesting, and generally the programming is a lot smarter. If there's one piece of advice you could give to that College student that is working right now at a College Radio station, what would it be? My one piece of advice, or the one thing I would say to someone working at a College Radio station is quite simply, I promise you, people are listening.
You know, like when I was growing up, I would be listening to College Radio at 3 o'clock in the morning, hells the DJs really felt like no one was paying attention. But like my friends and I, you know, even though there might not have been that many of us, like we were listening religiously. You know, anybody on College Radio is like, by being a DJ on College Radio, like you're continuing in this long, amazing tradition of people who not just brought great music to the world, but like, you know, great community programming, great political programming, great political coverage. So it's like, your radio is just one of, I don't know, I'm over exaggerating.
I think it's really one of the best institutions in the United States. Your albums and your website feature a large number of photography that you've taken yourself and you've stated many times that you love photography. Is there any like favorite subject matter that you like taking pictures of? I mean, the history of photography is very odd because regardless of the format, regardless of whether it's old or new or black and white or color or digital or shot with film or, you know, small format or large format, almost all photography is at its core kind of the same, in that it's a two-dimensional representation of something has already existed.
And I know that again, that sounds very self-evident. It's cool to me that, you know, this essentially flat medium can convey so much emotion and so much information and can be so iconic. So for me, my favorite thing to take pictures of, well, I love documenting things that might seem familiar but have a deep sort of otherworldly strangeness to it. You know, something that you might pass a hundred times a day, but then when you take a minute to really look at it, you realize just how odd and idiosyncratic and strange that thing.
Having said that, I also love cheap vacation pictures and conventional pictures of puppies. I mean, there's, as a medium, it can exist as very sophisticated and challenging, but it also exists as like really fun and lighthearted. Final question I have for you, sir. What advice do you have for that individual that's right now in their garage with their friends forming their first-ever band?
If there's any advice or wisdom that you would pass on to them, what would it be? My advice is wear your plugs. There's no point in devoting your life to music and becoming deaf in the process. Advice, staying with Class A narcotics and really the world of music has been more decimated by Class A narcotics than anything.
My other advice would be learn how to do everything because the way the music business has changed, I really believe that now in order to have a career as a musician, you have to be able to write songs and play instruments and play live and DJ and produce other people and do film scores and do remixing and write music for video games. You sort of need to know how to do everything. If you decided to dedicate your life to music to learn how to do everything, that increases the chances that when you're in your 30s, 40s, 50s, 70s, even, you can still wake up every morning and make your living by making music. I think that's really fantastic advice.
Moby has been an honor speaking with you. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today. Oh, it's my pleasure. Thank you very much.