September 2, 2025 • 52 mins
Our summer tradition at Here’s the Thing continues, as staff members choose their favorite conversations from the archives for our Summer Staff Pick series. This week, we revisit Alec’s interview with Moby, who reflects on the unexpected success of his 1999 album Play—a record that transformed him from playing gigs in record stores to international stardom. Moby shares the chaotic aftermath of fame, from drug-fueled highs to moments of deep despair, and how he eventually found his way to sobriety. He also speaks with Alec about his unconventional childhood, his memoir Then It Fell Apart, and what he’s learned in the decade since leaving drugs and alcohol behind.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the
Thing from My Heart Radio. It's summer and that means
it's time for our tradition and Here's the Thing, where
the staff share their favorite episodes from our archives in
our Summer Staff Picks series. Our last pick is from
engineer Frank Imperial.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Thanks Alec. When I think back to the late nineties
and early two thousands, it's impossible not to hear Moby's music.
His album play was everywhere in films, commercials, on the radio,
and yet it never felt manufactured. It felt intimate, like
he had cracked open his own world and invited everyone in.
(00:43):
What makes this conversation so compelling is that Mobi doesn't
just talk about the music. He opens up about the
struggles that fueled it, the questions of identity and faith
that have followed him, and his passion for activism from
animal rights to environmental issues. Sense of an artist who
always has tried to connect the personal with the political,
(01:05):
the beats with the bigger picture. Listening back, I was
struck by how candid he is about fame, sobriety, what
it means to try to live authentically in a world
that doesn't always make it that easy. And of course
you hear the humor and self awareness that makes him
such a singular voice. Here's Alex twenty nineteen conversation with Boby.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the thing. Ooh,
lone trouble so ham ooo lone.
Speaker 3 (01:39):
Treboshan don't about and do a job God.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
In nineteen ninety nine, your cool friends put on Moby's
play at parties. In two thousand, it was on the radio.
Popularity snowballed into ubiquity. In two thousand and one, Play
was in and Volkswagen Ads. It became the biggest selling
electronica album of all time. To fans outside the electronic
(02:17):
music world, Moby seemed like an overnight success, but he
was thirty three in nineteen ninety nine and had been
recording since the eighties. Play was actually his fifth studio album.
It never occurred to him it would break even, let
alone break records. The self described loner and nerd succumbed
(02:38):
to the worst sort of rockstar excess. As his fans
filled stadiums and models showed up in his dressing room.
Moby was euphoric but spinning out of control. It's a
story he shares in his new book Then It Fell Apart.
I spoke to Moby last month in the early chapters
(02:58):
of his book. Moby is coming to terms with the
album going platinum. What do you think happened inside the
music in that album that was different and something click did?
Something changed all of a sudden. You're a monolith in
the music business.
Speaker 3 (03:13):
Yeah, And to contextualize it, before that album Play came out,
my career had essentially ended. I'd lost my record deal.
It was a very dark time. My mom had died,
I was I was living on Mott Street and I
recorded Play where in my bedroom on Mott Street?
Speaker 1 (03:31):
Of course you did, and.
Speaker 3 (03:33):
Well, actually I slept in the closet and I had
my bedroom had been turned into an ad hoc recording
studio and I saw it. So I'd made Play. My
last album had failed completely, and I'd lost my record
deal with who. I was signed to Elektra, and then
I was signed in the UK to a label called
Mute and they hadn't dropped me. But to put it
in perspective, they'd never dropped anyone. That was their claim
(03:56):
to fame is they'd never dropped an artist in the case. Yeah,
So I was like I could didn't really take too
much comfort in the fact that I hadn't lost my
deal with Mute when they'd never ever dropped an artist.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
So play who released Play?
Speaker 3 (04:07):
Well, Richard Branson started a label called V two, and
someone working at V two somehow heard one of the
songs on play I still don't know how, and he
offered me a deal. But yeah, I mean before it
was released, I thought, Okay, I'm an alcoholic bald has
been I'm going to release this one last week in
(04:29):
my closet. Well, the building was from the mid nineteenth
century on Mott Street, and it had been a slaughterhouse.
So the space I was living in this is weird
as an animal rights vegan. The floors all sloped to
central drains because when it had been a slaughterhouse, they
would just hose the floors out and all the awful
(04:49):
would just get washed down the drains. So I'm in
that environment thinking I'm going to move back to Connecticut.
I'm going to get a job teaching community college. I'd
probably be a philosophy professor to students who just had
no interest in paying attention to philosophy, and then this
album comes out and rather than failing, it kept doing
better and better. So to your question of, like, musically,
(05:11):
why that happened, I still to this day have because
a lot of the vocals on play were like old
African American vocals from the mid twentieth century, And if
I look at there's just no precedent for a middle
aged musician making a record in his bedroom at the
end of his career, involving vocals from people who've been
dead for a few decades. Like, that's not a recipe
(05:34):
for a hit record. I remember at some point it
sold fifty thousand records because I thought it was going
to sell nothing. I was amazed that my album had
sold fifty thousand records and then six months later it
was selling one hundred thousand copies a week.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
What do you attribute that to? What did people respond
to the only people are listening to your music and
buying your music in a world that is choked with music.
There was so much stuff out there they can listen to,
and they buy ten million copies of your album. Why
do you think you know?
Speaker 3 (06:06):
I was recently doing an interview with Larry King, and
he asked me that question, and he sort of asked
me like, if you could replicate it, would you? And
I was like, oh, I tried, like the following like
the next three twos I kept I was like, how
do I recreate that? And I never really could, Like
that one sort of weird lightning in a bottle moment.
(06:26):
I don't I mean, I don't want to answer promorphize
the universe too much, but I almost feel like the
universe was in a sort of lighthearted educational way saying like, Okay,
we're going to give you everything you ever wanted times
a million, and it's going to come close to killing
you and you're going to hopefully learn something from it.
(06:46):
So there was like, and again, that might sound very narcissistic,
like I've just answer promorphized a thirteen point eight billion
year old universe, but it felt like if at the
end of the day, more than anything else, educational, like
the universe is going to say like, Okay, you live.
Speaker 1 (07:01):
In a crime. To anthropomorphize the university part of the
human condition. Let's go from there.
Speaker 4 (07:05):
Then.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
So the album comes out nineteen ninety nine. It's difficult
for some people to say this is his style. You've
let a lot of different you know, kind of tones
and a lot of different variety to the sound of
your music. And what was music in your childhood? Were
you in a chorus, was a church, was a music school?
It was weird.
Speaker 3 (07:24):
I started playing guitar. I guess when it was are
a nine or ten because one of my mom's boyfriends
had gone to jail and left a guitar behind.
Speaker 1 (07:32):
But your mother is kind of from a privileged background Connecticut.
Speaker 3 (07:36):
Quasi, I mean, like my grandfather worked on Wall Street, right,
But then my mom sort of rejected that the sixties
progressed and she fully embraced the hippie lifestyle.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
But your dad passed away when you were how I
was two? So when you were two? And how long
did you stay in New York? After he passed away.
Speaker 3 (07:54):
My mom moved back to Connecticut to get her undergraduate
at East Cones. Is that he is even still a school.
And then we went to San Francisco in nineteen sixty nine,
where everything sort of fell apart.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
And then three so right after your dad passed away,
she finished school at Fish School.
Speaker 3 (08:10):
We went to San Francisco and she sort of I
guess was very torn, like the counterculture was happening, and
she really desperately wanted to be a part of it,
you know, And.
Speaker 1 (08:22):
So did you have any ideas why? I have a.
Speaker 3 (08:24):
Feeling half of it was rejecting like growing up in
day in Connecticut, being encouraged by her parents to sort
of be very conservative and very traditional. So it was
a rejection of to an extent her family, but also
just wanting to be a part of this new, exciting paradigm,
you know, I mean nineteen sixty nine original paradigm.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
That's why that's been copied since then. Yeah, that was it.
Speaker 3 (08:49):
She's twenty three years old and she wanted to be
this free spirit artist, but she also had a three
year old child, and that's where things, a lot of
tension and trauma really came from.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
What did your dad do for a living?
Speaker 3 (09:03):
He was a chemistry professor at Columbia, but he had
been in the military and he was It's funny people
don't really talk about it that much. I think he
was either an assassin or a sniper, because I've asked
people in my family. I'm like, oh, what did my
dad do in the military, And they're like, well, he
did a lot of things, and never so I think
because he killed himself and he was a.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
He drove a car off the Arizona.
Speaker 3 (09:26):
He drove I don't know where exactly, but he got
very drunk. My mom had threatened to take me away
from him, and so he got drunk and got in
his car and drove one hundred miles an hour into
a bridge somewhere and died.
Speaker 1 (09:38):
Now what would people tell you, if at all? Did
you do any investigation or did you have some curiosity
as to what your dad was like? Did you learn
a little bit about him later on in life? Well,
it's only beyond the CIA credit.
Speaker 3 (09:53):
Only in adulthood did I realize how little I knew
about my father. Like, for example, if I had a
child with a woman and she died, as the child
grew up, I would do everything in my power to
make sure the child knew who his mom had been.
You know, we would talk about it. And after my
dad dies, he was never mentioned. His mother never mentioned
(10:16):
it to me, and all I knew was that he'd
been in the military and I had photos. But again,
it was only after my mother died that the rest
of the people in my family sort of let me
know that my father had been a professor and he
had a good sense of humor, and the.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
Brother had to die before people were allowed to introduce
you to your dad. Kind of yeah.
Speaker 3 (10:38):
And I found and it sort of had this quasi
like almost like a check off play quality, like I
found out after my mother had died. I found out
that my father had killed himself because my whole life
up until that point, I thought he had just died
and no one ever explained how or why. And I
also found out I have a half brother somewhere, which
(10:58):
can I tell you a story about whom I have
half brother? Is not I think you'll appreciate. I was
in DC in two thousand and seven with Alexandra Pelosi,
Nancy's daughter, and we were with Nancy. Nancy was the
Speaker of the house, and this is pre sobriety. So
I got very drunk and ended up talking to a
journalist from Politico and telling this journalist that I have
(11:20):
a half brother, and I jokingly said, maybe it's Carl Rove.
The journalist wrote a little Politico piece saying, our Mobi
and Karl Rove brothers. Two weeks later, I get a
letter on White house stationary, It says, dear Moby, it's
not me. For one thing, I'm seventeen years older than you,
and I have no musical ability. Have you considered James
Carville as your long lost brother because he's bald and
(11:41):
plays the guitar too, your pal Carl Rove? And I
was like, so, I know, as far as I know,
Carl Rove is not my half brother.
Speaker 1 (11:48):
You have one. Did you ever meet the half brother?
I have no idea who or where he might be.
You know your story, and we'll get to some of
the details of this in the book. That the self destructiveness,
but an impression I get of you, the way you live,
as you like to isolate, and you talk about this
panic plateau thing or whatever the terminology is, which which
which kind of hampered or impacted relationships you would have
(12:11):
with people as.
Speaker 3 (12:11):
Oh, yeah, I mean, I'm fifty three and I've never
had a serious relationship, and over time trouble you it
used to, but then over time I've sort of made
peace with it. I mean, I guess there's almost in
a way not to overstate it, but like there's a
(12:32):
there's a sort of utility to being incapable of having
real relationships, which is I get to work on other things,
you know, like I get to be to spend the time. Yeah,
I get to spend more time doing activism. I get
to spend more time I don't know, reading, working on music,
working on art. I have a weird little production company
(12:53):
in La so I can work more on that. So
I had always thought that the key to happiness, at
least growing up, was like you find your perfect per
and you build a life with them. And at some
point I realized, oh, that's just not in the cards
for me, and so there's so far, so far. But
at the same time, I don't I don't have any
longing for it. You don't which not that you know of,
(13:15):
not that I mean, maybe I'll meet them, you know.
Speaker 1 (13:18):
Maybe you just it's it's you don't know. Do you
want to venture where it comes from? Does it come
from certain obvious childhood signals? I think so. I assume
so that because you were left alone a lot as
a child.
Speaker 3 (13:33):
I was left alone, and I was also raised you know,
I grew up very very poor in a very wealthy
town in Darien, Connecticut, and my mom dated Hell's Angels.
Speaker 1 (13:41):
There was a lot of when you went back to
Darien and you were how old when I was five?
So you were you were in San Francisco just a
couple of years. Yeah, so your mom's smoking pot and
the taking actresses and taking acid and and everybody like,
you know, kind of cavorting around the hate or whatever
they were doing. You were only there for a couple
of years and.
Speaker 3 (13:58):
Then we moved back to Connecticut.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
How long?
Speaker 3 (14:01):
Well, I lived in Connecticut from the time I was
five until the time I was twenty one.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
You basically grew up there.
Speaker 3 (14:08):
Yeah, I'm just an inbred white trash kid from Connecticut.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
The San Francisco thing was a brief period of cod.
Speaker 3 (14:13):
That was just brief and traumatic, right and well traumatic.
There was sexual abuse my mom, and I don't want
to throw her under the bus posthumously, but she wanted
to hang out with her friends. She was twenty three
years old. So they put me in this very low
rent daycare center and I was sexually abused there.
Speaker 1 (14:31):
What did she do during the day? Did she work?
Speaker 3 (14:33):
Not?
Speaker 1 (14:33):
In San Francisco. There she was supported by her family.
They were all dependent on somebody.
Speaker 3 (14:37):
A lot of kids from Connecticut who in nineteen sixty
four had been playing lacrosse. Nothing wrong with lacrosse. I
just was never very good at it. And they had
short hair, wearing eyes ods, you know, going to Webern
country Club, drinking gin and tonics. Then all of a sudden,
they're living on hate Ashbury with fringe jackets and hair
down to the middle of their back, taking acid. And
(14:59):
I sort of got caught up in the middle of
that as a three year old.
Speaker 1 (15:03):
Yeah, when you got back to Connecticut and you grew
up there, did your mother develop as a parent and
she was getting older, what did she become a better parent?
Was there a continued period of isolation and kind of.
Speaker 3 (15:18):
Not good childcare for you both an equal measure, Like,
we had a good support system of my grandmother had
aunts and uncles, so there was a lot of support.
Speaker 1 (15:29):
But did you spend a lot of time with their mother's.
Speaker 3 (15:31):
Parents, Yeah, but also a lot of time alone because
also we were very poor. We were on food stamps
and welfare and we were in dairy in Connecticut, which
is per capital, one of the wealthiest places in the world,
And so I had this constant sense of shame, you know,
So when I went to school, it was pretending that
(15:52):
I didn't live in the garage apartment, and that we
weren't on food stamps and welfare. You know, if I
had the flu, I would come back and say, oh,
we went to Switzerland, because that sounded like something that
wealthy people would say. So just this the sense of
shame and the sense of inadequacy, and not again not
to overstate it, but like when you grow up with that,
(16:13):
it's hard, even in adulthood, when your circumstances change, it's
hard to move past how you were formed.
Speaker 1 (16:21):
When did you start to get this idea that you
were going to write music?
Speaker 3 (16:27):
I think, well, my mom, who was an aspiring musician pianist.
I mean, I remember my mom had the most odd
eclectic record collection. So she had Crosby, Stiells, Nash and
Young and Divorge Ack and Lightnin' Hopkins and Baba O
Latunji and so I just grew up with this constant
(16:48):
soundtrack of weirdness and it made sense to me. And
she dated musicians. My uncle was a musician. My great
grandmother actually taught classical composition to Arthur Fiedler. She was
Arthur Fiedler's mentor. So I grew up in this weird,
idiosyncratic musical household. So I never thought as I was
(17:12):
growing up that I would have a career as a musician.
I just knew that I loved music and I wanted
to be a part of it. And I had a
lot of free time because I wasn't very good at
sports and.
Speaker 1 (17:23):
Did you do well in school? I did okay.
Speaker 3 (17:26):
So my name Moby is a nickname that I've had
since birth because I'm related to Herman Melville. So what
I learned was when teachers found out that I was
descended from Herman Melville, they just would add fifteen IQ points.
They would assume, like, oh, he's got to be like
aerodyite because he's descended from Herman Melville.
Speaker 1 (17:45):
Same thing.
Speaker 3 (17:45):
I went to college and I was a philosophy major,
and I was not a good student. But I realized
the moment you tell someone you're a philosophy major, they
think you're way smarter than you actually are. So, like,
descended from Herman Melville philosophy major, Like that just added
thirty bonus points to my IQ, totally unwarranted. So I
had growing up, had a lot of free time, had
(18:07):
access to instruments, and was raised in this odd creative family.
So I just started writing music when I was around
ten or eleven, and i'd also my uncle had given
me some hand me down photo equipment, so I started
taking pictures. And here's an odd, little funny story. My
best friend when I was nine years old was Robert
Downey Junior, and so his dad gave us because his
(18:31):
dad was a filmmaker and Darien he lived there. Darien
has a baffling array of odd public figures like and
Coulter and Gus van Zant and Robert Downey Junior and
Chloe sevig Yee and Steve O from Jackass and the
author Rick Moody from this little town of fourteen thousand people.
Speaker 1 (18:51):
Very odd people. Yeah, in the fact that and.
Speaker 3 (18:53):
Culture and Zant went to the same high school. Yes,
So Robert and I made with his this superak camera
his dad when we were eight and nine years old.
We started making little films long since disappeared. But it
was just part of the ethos of just go out
and make things, with no expectation that there would be
(19:13):
a career or that you'd even make anything good. But
I just started writing and taking pictures and making little
movies and writing songs and doing all this.
Speaker 1 (19:22):
They make little movies. How if you were broke super
eight camera you got your hands on a Super eight camera? Yeah,
like in a pawn shot. Yeah, right, like a really cheap, shitty.
Speaker 3 (19:32):
Superand camera, and you could develop film, you know, like
two and a half minutes of Super eight film, and
then you edit it on your kitchen table tape.
Speaker 1 (19:41):
Yeah, we used a dracula and I'm emerging from the coffin.
Speaker 3 (19:45):
And then you develop it and you show it on
a sheet.
Speaker 1 (19:49):
Yeah, you're ready to get a can. What's the first
song you wrote? Do you remember? Do you remember a boy? I?
Speaker 3 (19:56):
Well, so I started playing guitar, and then I I
had a very odd music teacher. He played in a
heavy metal band, but he also loved jazz fusion and
classical music. So one day we would learn name Chris Rosola.
He would teach me a van Halen song, even though
I never really liked Van Halen that much, and then
we would do a Larry Carlton or weather Report jazz
(20:17):
fusion thing, which I also didn't like that much, and
then do a Bach cantata, which I love and I
still to this day love. And then I broke his
heart because when I was thirteen, I discovered punk rock,
and so I sort of cast aside, like music theory
and the sort of idiosyncratic but formal music education. I
had to play clash covers and because he thought I
(20:40):
was going to go on to be this virtuoso guitarist.
And the irony, Yeah, and the irony is by embracing
punk rock and non virtuosic, if that's the word, I
disinvented music. I ended up coming back to the world
of classical music and have since started playing with orchestras. Yeah,
(21:00):
I just I just did a performance with Dudamel in
the LA film.
Speaker 1 (21:04):
Did You Wouldn't Know? What? Did you guys play? We?
Speaker 3 (21:07):
Well, it was two programs. The first program was LA Composers,
and they put a piece of music of mine in there.
It's a song that I'd written for a Michael Mann
movie years ago, which.
Speaker 1 (21:18):
Film for Heat. Yeah, you wrote a song for Heat.
Speaker 3 (21:21):
It's a very end when Al Patino and Robert de
Niro finally had I don't want to spoiler alert, so
they did that as part of the first program, And
the second program was all orchestral versions of my music.
Speaker 1 (21:33):
Oh wow.
Speaker 3 (21:33):
During the rehearsal. There was I don't know one hundred
and eighty of us on stage because we had a
huge choir, full orchestra. And I realized, like, okay, we're
doing my music, and I'm without question the least talented
musician on the stage right now, Like I'm the person who, like,
if I stopped playing, no one will notice. But in
God Moving over the Face of the Waters, there's this
big crescendo, you know, it's like timpany and symbols. And
(21:57):
I got so annoyed because the percussion had come in early,
and I was like, what, like this is the La Fel?
How did they screw up? And I realized there was
a thunderstorm and I was like, so this song is
called God Moving over the Face of the Water. Keep
in mind this is in September. This is sort of
good theological argument for the existence of God, that he
(22:19):
plays percussion during classical music.
Speaker 1 (22:22):
Do you did this recently with the La Fell? What's
the first time you did that? Well, the first time
was actually Michael Mann for Heat. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (22:30):
I had written some classical pieces. He heard them and
this was nineteen ninety.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
Foudy, how did he unpublished?
Speaker 3 (22:38):
I they were no, I'd put them as a B
sides on they were out there and somehow he had
heard them. And we then had one of the weirdest
phone calls. Do you know, Michael, I'm sure. I so
we're friends. I used that word loose leakause I don't
know if in my mind he and I are friends.
But he's a odd, wonderful creative man. But like our
(23:00):
first phone call was, he got my number and he
called me up and he spent forty five minutes telling
me the story of heat and hung up the phone.
Speaker 1 (23:09):
I didn't say one.
Speaker 3 (23:10):
Word apart from hello, so I was like, hello, he said,
mobe this Michael Man forty five minutes soliloquy, telling me
in great detail everything about heat, like the archetypes that
are going on for like the classical element, the moment
he's done, he just hung up, and I was like,
what just I'd never spoken to like an esteemed film
director before, and I was like, is this is how
(23:30):
film directors talk to people? He just call up and
talk for forty five minutes and to hang up the phone.
Speaker 1 (23:34):
That was the first time you had provided score for
a film?
Speaker 3 (23:38):
Well, I went to Sunny Purchase briefly, and I had
some friends in the experimental film program there, and so
my friend Paul made an experimental movie called me I
the Onion in nineteen ninety or ninety one, So technically
that would have been my first foray in the film composing.
Speaker 1 (23:58):
Beyond me I the Onion, Yeah made it. Michael Mann
was the first. Yeah. Did it lead to how many?
How many other films have you contributed music to other
than sourcing your I also I have.
Speaker 3 (24:08):
A weird website called mobigradis dot com and it gives
free music to independent filmmakers, nonprofits, film students. So if
we count that ten thousand films. But those are like
three minute short films where people hired you hired, I
wouldn't know hundreds thousands.
Speaker 1 (24:27):
I mean like, oh, you're not not accessing your music
you published, they hired you to do score four oh films.
Speaker 3 (24:33):
Oh, because there's the licensing music. I'm licensing music, and
that's like, it's the greatest thing in the world because
all you have to do is say yes, you don't
there's no work involved apart from that actually writing music.
Speaker 1 (24:46):
So when I moved to.
Speaker 3 (24:47):
La after I got sober the first time, this most
like ten years ago, I got sober.
Speaker 1 (24:52):
And I got sober twice.
Speaker 3 (24:55):
Yeah, once in nineteen eighty seven, followed by a glorious
thirteen year long relapse. We're going to get to that,
and then again in two thousand and eight. And so
then I moved to LA and I thought, Okay, I'm
middle aged, I'm sober, I'm in Los Angeles. I need
to fully commit myself to film composing. And then I
realized I really don't like film composing, Like it's.
Speaker 1 (25:17):
What about it? Don't you like? Uh? What I like?
Speaker 3 (25:21):
When I work on my own music, it's just me
in the studio. There's no music supervisor, there's no director,
there's no producer. I can kind of I have some
complete self sufficiency. I don't have to respond to other
people's comments, and as an only child who doesn't do
well with people, that's nice. And my friends who were
great film composers, part of their skill set is knowing
(25:42):
how to deal with twenty different executives at the same time.
Speaker 1 (25:45):
And I just it was too skill have Yeah and
a lot of X acts. Yeah, this is God moving
over the face of the waters. The piece Moby wrote
for Heat after a lot of input from executives at
(26:07):
Warner Brothers and director Michael Mann. Stephen Daldry is another
great film director with strong opinions about how everyone should
do their jobs.
Speaker 4 (26:17):
I find it really crazy when actors come in self
prepared because they've done some journey that they getting in
this comment my character and you go, look, it's not
your character. Okay, it's ours, and we're going to make
it up there.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
Interesting, I'm going to remember that it's ours. Well, my
character wouldn't do that.
Speaker 4 (26:31):
Well, let's change the character. Then.
Speaker 1 (26:34):
The rest of my conversation with Stephen Daldry can be
found in our archive a Here's the Thing dot org
more Moby in a minute. This is Alec Baldwin and
(27:02):
you were listening to Here's the Thing. Moby never would
have ended up so low if he hadn't been so
desperate to be lifted up. He craved the affirmation of fame.
Speaker 3 (27:18):
I loved it, you did, and I just wanted more.
Speaker 1 (27:20):
This guy that was this isolated guy that was left alone.
You can't get enough of that.
Speaker 3 (27:25):
Yeah, I mean, all of a sudden, I was being
invited to fancy parties, meeting heads of state, being flown
around the world, on private.
Speaker 1 (27:35):
Play and freeing clothes to wear in public. I mean
I still have them, sure.
Speaker 3 (27:39):
You know, it's like suddenly like people are competing about
who gets to dress you for the Red carpet, and
you know, it's like Versace and Calvin Klein are like, oh,
let us send you free tuxedos. I was like, you know,
before this record, I was buying clothes at Salvation Army
on the corner of Lafayette.
Speaker 1 (27:55):
In Prince A, Republic.
Speaker 3 (27:57):
Yeah, like it was great, And then of course it
wasn't great. You know, like my narcissism got out of
control of my entitlement because I felt at the time,
like two thousand and two thousand and one, two thousand
and two, I felt that all I needed to be
happy was constant love and attention from every person on
the planet, to make ten million dollars a year for
(28:18):
the rest of my life, and to make sure that
I could be as promiscuous as possible, do as many
drugs as possible, and drink as much as possible without consequences.
So like, obviously, in hindsight, I recognize how absurd and
unrealistic it is, but at the time I just wanted,
like every night to be like this indulgent festival of
(28:39):
narcissism and the mobsters.
Speaker 1 (28:42):
Can you tell me some of these stories that were
in the book.
Speaker 3 (28:44):
Yeah, that was a weird one. We took helicopters to
Staten Island and had this weird dinner with the guy
who apparently invented the cabbage patch doll and then went
on to produce Steven Segall movies. And then we left
and I went to a party on Park Avenue, very drunk.
We show up and I met some friends and they
were talking about this game that they played in college
called knob Touch. And what knob touch is You take
(29:06):
your flaccid penis out of your pants and you brush
up against people and you win by the number of
people you can brush up against. And I'd never done this,
and my date, Miss new Hampshire, challenged me to play
knob touch. And there's only one human being on the
planet I have brushed my flaccid penis against. That man
is currently the President of the United States.
Speaker 1 (29:26):
Now, yes, where was this being held?
Speaker 3 (29:29):
Some bar in park like one of those big restaurants
on Park Avenue, And like twenty first it.
Speaker 1 (29:32):
Was like in public and this isn't a private party.
Speaker 3 (29:35):
I mean it was like a one of those New
York style parties where maybe it was like Ralph Lauren
was launching a new paint color or something, you know,
those things that you just go to. Yeah, and you're
not I don't know why.
Speaker 1 (29:47):
I have a couple of drinks. Yeah. So I was
very famous.
Speaker 3 (29:49):
People, and I brushed my flacid piece against that of.
Speaker 1 (29:52):
Your penis against Donald Trump brush.
Speaker 3 (29:54):
He didn't know it was dark, he was. And what's
funny is the publisher of the book said, like, in
this climate, I don't know if you should include that.
I was like, you know what, I think Donald Trump
being able to say that, I me tooed him.
Speaker 1 (30:08):
Yeah. So you're there and you're this big superstar. When
did you begin to think.
Speaker 5 (30:17):
We really should get back into the studio and make
another album.
Speaker 3 (30:20):
So then the tour for Play was supposed to be
three and a half weeks long, and it ended up
being twenty six months long. But the whole time, because
I've always compulsively written music, I have now probably like
eight or nine thousand pieces of unreleased pieces of music.
So even at the bottom of my like alcoholism, drug addiction, narcissism, entitlement,
(30:42):
self destruction. I was at break. I kept writing music.
So the problem break, Yeah, the problem with albums was
to look at like a thousand songs and figure out
how do you get fifteen to put on an album?
Doesn't mean they're good. And when I say eight thousand
pieces of unreleased music, I'm not speaking to the quality
of them, like a lot of it's garbage. But I
just it's this weird almost like you know there's that
(31:05):
word laggeria. I have that of music where I just
keep making it without any concern for whether it's good
or bad. I just keep writing and so.
Speaker 1 (31:15):
It's like a broken pipe.
Speaker 3 (31:16):
Yeah, yeah, just like you turn on the faucet and
just leave it on. So the next album was called eighteen,
and I thought like, okay, this is like Play was big.
I want this to be bigger, and so like I think,
the promo tour for the next album was five months long,
like five months of just like you've done it as well,
like traveling around the world, sitting in hotel rooms, going
(31:37):
to every country, every TV show, everything, And I just
wanted to be more famous, have more money, sleep with
more people, drink more, do more drugs tour more just
for the.
Speaker 1 (31:45):
Guy that was isolated. Are you sitting there saying this
is more like it? Now? Everybody wants to take their
clothes off and jump in bed with me.
Speaker 3 (31:53):
And it seemed like fame was going And this is
when I say it out loud, it just sounds so
obs heard I honestly, and I wouldn't have admitted this,
but deep down, what I believed was that fame was
going to fix everything.
Speaker 1 (32:07):
Like every all.
Speaker 3 (32:09):
The trauma from child really be the senses of all
that fear, you know, the self centered fear.
Speaker 1 (32:16):
But self centered narcissistic fear is the root of all
of our problems. And living in a constant state, living
in a constant state of agitation, worrying about am I
going to get this? This is going to be taken
away from me? Which defines my life. They say in
a twelve step literature, they say that our greatest fear
is to lose something we already have or not get
(32:37):
something that we want.
Speaker 3 (32:38):
I just thought, oh, fame will fix it as long
as I can keep getting invited to great parties and
drinking and doing drugs, and as long as I get
good reviews. But then the universe, with its sense of humor,
took away all the things.
Speaker 1 (32:55):
That I do. You know, why do you have a sense? Why?
Speaker 3 (32:58):
I think because on a sort of artistic level, there
came a time and I'm so ashamed to admit this,
and around two thousand and two, two thousand and three,
I wanted to make great music, but I wanted music
to be a means to an end where I wanted
it to like sustain my career. So before my life
had just been spent it going yeah, and I had never.
Speaker 1 (33:20):
Thought I don't want to go backwards.
Speaker 3 (33:22):
Yeah, I was like and before that, all I wanted
to do was make music that I loved, you know,
that music that somehow was like it was just beautiful, expressive.
Two thousand and two, two thousand.
Speaker 1 (33:32):
And three, years after the release of Play, I.
Speaker 3 (33:34):
Still wanted it to be beautiful, but first and foremost
commercially viable.
Speaker 1 (33:40):
But it was a little less beautiful and it sold
more copies. That was okay with.
Speaker 3 (33:43):
Me, Yes, And I started thinking, oh, okay, well, if
I produce this type of song, it'll get on the radio.
And if I produce this it'll sell more. And like
the paradox, the wonderful In hindsight, the wonderful paradox is
the more of an effort I made to be famous,
the less famous I became here.
Speaker 1 (34:01):
You were very open with the press, You courted the press,
You would speak to anybody, you know. For me, the
problem has always been the you know, the press is
never it's a sad. It does sometimes make me sad.
I get I get over it, and then every now
and then it comes up in blackjacks me again. After nowhere.
It's like it's like in an alley where I get
mugged by it again, which is they're never going to
(34:22):
interpret who you really are to the public.
Speaker 4 (34:24):
Never.
Speaker 1 (34:24):
They don't have that ability. It's so painful, the misunderstanding
that goes hand in hand with it, especially.
Speaker 3 (34:32):
Because I when I don't know if you had this experience,
but when I started getting press attention, I loved it.
And in the beginning they were so nice, and the
reviews were gentle, and then the reviews were great, and
then you have this sweet spot where you have like
fame and you're lauded in the press, and then it
turned and then all of a sudden, the reviews got bad,
(34:52):
the articles got bad, and I felt so betrayed. I
was like, why why can't you guys just be nice?
But then time passes. I'm like, in a like god,
bless them for turning because I've since then like when
when you're rejected, when the press rejects you, then, at
least for me, I had to sort of look like, Okay,
well who am I without that?
Speaker 1 (35:14):
You know?
Speaker 3 (35:15):
And where does my worth and sense of self come from?
And like realizing, oh, if it comes from the opinions
of people I've never met, there's something really unstable and
unhealthy there, you know. I had this epiphany recently. I
was in la middle of February hiking and Griffiths Park
and it was one of those beautiful days, like the
(35:35):
sun is shining, coyotes are running around, hummingbirds are flying by,
and I suddenly thought like, Okay, if my last album
had sold ten million copies, and if every journalist on
the planet loved me and wrote great things about me,
and if I was dating the most beautiful woman on
the planet, how would this moment be better? And I'm
(35:56):
like it wouldn't like, you know, good reviews, good press,
all this stuff doesn't And I don't know, I sound
like a crazy New age hippie, but like it wouldn't affect.
It's like that moment of like the public radio, like
standing in the sun wearing a T shirt, smelling sage
and lavender, watching the hummingbirds fly by. I was like
the universe in that moment was so benign and indifferent
(36:20):
to anything that I cared about, and there was some
there's sort of like a transcendent liberation, almost like Emersonian
style liberation in that moment.
Speaker 1 (36:28):
I'll take that feeling. At this point, I just turned
sixty one, and I'll take that feeling wherever I can
get it now, and at my age, I have to
accept that my creative energies may or may not come
to the foe here, and if they don't, I have
to find something else to do to get off creatively,
which is what I do. I completely segregate my creative
(36:51):
from my commercial in a way that I never thought
it was possible.
Speaker 3 (36:53):
And there's one because you reference the twelve and twelve earlier. Yep,
I don't know if that's a twelve steps is part
of your life?
Speaker 1 (37:01):
Yes? Oh, okay, I'm thirty four years sober. Oh right,
eighty five?
Speaker 3 (37:05):
Yeah, so it's I mean, and again I feel like
such a middle age cliche saying this, but like the
Twelve Steps really, if all the therapeutic things I've been through,
the Twelve Steps really saved me. And one of the
things I learned, as you mentioned, was like the role
of fear and trying to sort of like deconstruct fear
and learn from it. But the other thing that when
(37:26):
I did the Twelve Steps that I really loved was
all of my judgment up until that point was sort
of based on the misperception of omniscience or fake omniscientce.
Like when I had an album that failed, I was
furious because I knew that it should have succeeded, because
if it had succeeded, it would have been better for me.
And then all of a sudden I realized, like again,
(37:47):
in a thirteen point eight billion year old universe, I
don't have omniscients. I don't know causality. If I want
something to work out and it doesn't work out in
a way, I'm like, who am I to judge? In
politics as well, because I got really involved in politics
for a while, it was like the vast majority of
people on the planet, their goal is to keep the
(38:08):
lights on tomorrow, you know, like they're like they want
a job, they want to keep.
Speaker 1 (38:14):
Their understand where they're coming from.
Speaker 3 (38:16):
And I have to be like, okay, that's It's like
with the press as well. If to remind myself, like
most of the people I know were journalists, like they're
barely able to pay the rent. And I don't want
to be patronizing or judgmental, but I have to sort
of say, like, Okay, my job is not to rely
on them form my sense of happiness and well being,
you know, like my sense of.
Speaker 1 (38:36):
Strength or my creative Yeah, output the same.
Speaker 3 (38:39):
Thing, and creatively, if they're too much of a hindrance,
you move on. You sort of say like okay, God
bless you know, like have healthy boundaries. And I just say,
like it almost makes me think of like that like
the Rudyard Kipling poem is that.
Speaker 1 (38:54):
If I remember reading when like eight or nine years old,
and it's.
Speaker 3 (38:58):
Sort of that idea of just keep I just keep going,
not even from strength and fortitude, more just sort of
like like a post apocalyptic cockroach, just keep plowing forward,
like someone steps on you. Okay, you stepped on me.
Have a good day. I'm going to keep going.
Speaker 1 (39:15):
But this is also if I really became the biggest
movie star in the world and made hundreds of millions
of dollars in private plans, who the fuck knows what
I would have done with that. No, I would have
screwed that up.
Speaker 3 (39:24):
I mean, luckily i'd be dead in a way, like
as as sober middle aged guys. I feel like, maybe
this is an indelicate thing to say, but like a
lot of people have done the work for us, Like,
for example, yeah, twenty years ago, I would look at
Michael Jackson and say, like, wow, look at that. The
(39:45):
wealth and the fame and the adulation. Boy, oh boy,
I'm glad.
Speaker 1 (39:50):
I'm glad hanging out with him.
Speaker 3 (39:52):
Yeah, and I'm glad that I was cut off to
an extent from the access to like excessive wealth and
fame that he had and me. Again, it's a hard
thing to talk about because I don't want to malign anyone,
especially if they're dead or struggling. But like we know,
I mean the number of public figures who have had
profound success, profound wealth and it destroys them. I mean,
(40:13):
like people like you and I are the ones who
sort of like hopefully emerge unscathed and chastened, with hopefully
an understanding that we can almost use in the form
of service, you know, to go out and be like, Okay,
I've learned a lesson. That's an odd, rare, unique lesson.
Let me try and do something with it.
Speaker 1 (40:32):
Yea, was there an epiphany? What was the bottom?
Speaker 3 (40:35):
The bottom was do you remember a restaurant in New
York called zen Palette, vegan Chinese restaurant. So this is
a little analogy. New Year's Eve nineteen ninety two, I
went to the zen Palette on Ninth Avenue, Sure, and
I ordered fourties. Yeah, and I ordered purple Japanese egg plant,
and it disagreed with me. And I never ordered purple
Japanese ig plan again because I had one bad experience
(40:58):
with it. Vodka, cocaine everything. I would do it every
day and it would kill almost kill me and make
me sick. And I kept going back. And basically the consequence,
what I mean is like the rational response to vodka
and cocaine if you have a night out and the
next day you want to blow your miserable, is to say, wow,
(41:20):
that was bad. I shan't do that again, as opposed.
Speaker 1 (41:22):
To it's a great definition of addiction. Act.
Speaker 3 (41:24):
Let's give me more every day for the next fifteen
this thing that's making me sick.
Speaker 1 (41:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (41:29):
And as I got older, because you got sober young.
Speaker 1 (41:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (41:35):
I got sober at forty three and basically to ride
the range and the hangovers just got worse and worse,
and it got to the point where I was having
hard time streaming sentences together.
Speaker 1 (41:48):
Yeah. I got sober because I moved to LA and
I was driving a car, and I thought, well, the
consequence is caught up with Yeah, I thought I came
and I still drove around shiitface for two years before
I got I got smart. I want to talk, when
did pure vegetarianism take hold with you?
Speaker 3 (42:02):
When I was growing up, I had that weird paradox
of loving animals and loving Burger King, you know, when
I was in junior high school high school, like, we
had a bunch of rescue animals and I loved them unconditionally,
But I also loved Pepperoni pizza. And I had this
one rescue cat named Tucker who had found it the
dump in Dairia in Connecticut, and I loved Tucker even
(42:24):
more unconditionally than I unconditionally loved the other animals. And
when I was nineteen, I had this like Saw on
the Road to Damascus moment where suddenly I looked at
Tucker and I was like, he has two eyes, a
central nervous system, and a profoundly rich emotional life and
a deep desire to avoid pain and suffering. And in
that moment I sort of extrapolated and realized every animal
(42:45):
with two eyes and a central nervous system has a
rich emotional life and a deep desire to avoid pain
and suffering. So that's when I became a vegetarian, and
then eighty seven became a vegan, and my only vegan
relapse was in ninety two I had yogurt once. So
now I've got thirty one years.
Speaker 1 (43:02):
What is your diet basically something you cook at home
or you how you eat well.
Speaker 3 (43:07):
Actually I own a vegan restaurant in Los Angeles called
Lil Pine and where it's in Silver Lake, And what
makes it unique is that one hundred percent of the
profits go to animal rights organizations. Because at this point
in my life, I don't I mean, I still am
selfish and probably pretty narcissistic, but all of my work
one hundred percent of the money I make professionally goes
(43:29):
to the charities I work with, because I'd rather live.
You were sort of addressing this, like live a simple life,
like live very much within my means and make art
and music for the love of art.
Speaker 1 (43:40):
Amazing. I had a couple of them.
Speaker 3 (43:43):
And like I had this crazy sixty acre compound up
in Putnam County, and when I moved to La I
moved to a castle. But arms I wasn't happy in
these places. And I was just asked myself, like why
am I having this sort of like Gatsbesque excess, the
citizen cane style, like overcompensation if the end result is
(44:05):
like I've tied up my resources in real estate and
I'm miserable and no one's benefiting. So like now I
live in a much simpler house, got a little simple
apartment in Park Slope, and I can just work for
the causes that I care about. Freedom, yeah, and freedom
and that freedom to like make art, music, books, et cetera.
And if there's money, just give the money to different
(44:28):
very causes.
Speaker 1 (44:28):
That's amazing to do that, but that's rare. That's rare.
Speaker 3 (44:32):
One of the benefits of my weird attachment issues. Is like,
I'm not married, I don't have kids, so like I
have this odd autonomy, so I'm able to be relying
on you, and so there's it is like that there's
a luxury to that, like almost like a monastic independence
(44:53):
more after.
Speaker 1 (44:54):
The break this is I can't think of any better
way to ask this, and I'm sure there's a better
way to ask this, but I want to ask, like,
who cares for you? Where is love in your life?
If you're so autonomous and you don't have the fans
and the public and the press, which is a form
of love, it's like an energy that simulates love. It
isn't really love. But in your life, where is the
(45:16):
love and the care in your life? Who's caring for you? Okay,
well a few friends, so close friends are there for you.
Speaker 3 (45:24):
I have a few family members. But there's the answer
that I'm uncomfortable giving because it's one of the hardest
things to say in our world. Is so when we
do the twelve steps. When I got to the third
step and the third steps has made a decision to
turn our life and our will over to the care
of God as we understood God, and I really wrestled
(45:45):
with this because I was like, I was like, the
care of God is I understood God? Like I don't
understand God. And that was my epiphany. I was like, oh,
the God of my understanding is a God that I
do not understand. And I was like, but I evidence again,
not to answer promorphize, but I see evidence of divinity
(46:05):
in kindness, in forgiveness, in the gentleness of puppies.
Speaker 1 (46:11):
In the redacted parts of the molor reports in our
immune systems, like I see in my eyes.
Speaker 3 (46:18):
This is all evidence of the divine, and so in
nature and all these things. And so my honest answer,
that's an uncomfortable, secular twenty first century answer, is divine
love is.
Speaker 6 (46:31):
What I search your oxygen. That's but also and it's
a component of it other people in yours. And if
I die and someone says, oh, guess what, there's no God.
We live in this empty existential cipher void, like you're
just a bunch of like weird molecules that have come
together arbitrarily. That's okay too, But I do somehow, in
my dim I don't know naive way see evidence of
(46:55):
the divine. And so it's always trying to move towards that. Again,
not religious, denominational, no gender. It's just simply this idea
of the divinity of like forgiveness and puppies and immune
systems and the unredacted MOLA reports and etc. So that's
a huge That's where I get a lot of comfort from.
Speaker 1 (47:16):
What's music in your life? Now? You continue to write?
Speaker 3 (47:19):
Yeah, I mean I work on music mainly for the
love of music. I refuse to tour. I hate touring
unless it's going to do orchestral things. I had this
wonderful realization. I guess it was about eleven years ago,
the first time I met David Lynch, and we've since
become pretty good friends. LA has that going for it.
I live around the corner from David Lynch. But when
(47:39):
I first met him, he was being interviewed at BAFTA
in London and he said something so reductive and simple,
and it really struck me is he said, very simply,
he said creativity is beautiful, And all of a sudden
I was like, oh my god, he's right, Like, why
am I compromising my creativity in the interest of like
commercial game, for saking that and for worldliness? I was like,
(48:02):
as we know, like music is that ineffable beauty, like
it can communicate love and transcendent and beauty. That should
be my goal, not that I'll ever reach it, not
that I'll ever make beautiful, ineffable, wonderful music, but like
if every day I wake up with that as the
goal and not in the interest of worldliness and other people.
Speaker 1 (48:23):
I mean, you've written a book, You at points in
your life have conquered the music business. Have you ever
wanted to try other media? Have you ever wanted to
make films?
Speaker 3 (48:32):
Yeah, I'm actually I have a weird production company. I
feel like I use the word weird too much, but
I have a production company in LA. We're working on
some documentaries. You've got some scripted features, an animated feature
that we're trying to develop, but.
Speaker 1 (48:43):
Have your hand in that too. Do you like making films?
Speaker 3 (48:46):
I love it as long as I have to your
point the recourse of autonomy, meaning like some of the
projects we're working on, like sure, it would be great
if we have financing, if we get people attached to it,
but we also have projects that we can do one
hundred percent ourselves. And because as we know, like how
much time have our friends spent waiting you know, waiting
(49:10):
for the financing, waiting for this to be greenlit approval,
and with the production company again. My goal is to
never make personally, never make money from it. So if
money is generated, it goes to my foundation, or it
goes to causes I work with.
Speaker 1 (49:23):
And if you say upfront, I'm going to be involved
in projects in the film business and I never want
to make money with them, You're not going to have
a lot of meetings in LA You're not going to
get to make money from it.
Speaker 3 (49:35):
Like like the guy who runs my production company and
my head of development and some of our partners, I
want them to be fabulously wealthy. I would rather be
like live in a shitty apartment in Hollywood or I
don't know, in bedsty and work for causes that I
care about.
Speaker 1 (49:53):
I just don't.
Speaker 3 (49:54):
I don't want to personally benefit from it.
Speaker 1 (49:56):
I would like to do a documentary film, and I'd
like to put you together on a project. I'd like
to couple you on a film project with someone equally
maniacally creative and independent as you. I'd like to do
a film where we get you in a in a
studio and you're gonna do like a little project with Coppola.
Two people who don't want to collaborate with other people really,
and you force them to do. They agree to collaborate
(50:19):
for this one time and see what the result would be.
I watched that. Yeah, I want to produce that. And
by the way, you don't have to make any money.
My kids are expensive. I'm keeping all the money. I
think we're done.
Speaker 5 (50:31):
Then we have a deal than you.
Speaker 1 (50:51):
Moby composer, musician, recovering addict and proud ex celebrity. Didn't
you think he's cool with that? Okay? Moby's new book
is called Then It Fell Apart. It's very funny and
(51:12):
very sad. I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the thing is brought
to you by iHeart Radio.
This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the
Thing from My Heart Radio. It's summer and that means
it's time for our tradition and Here's the Thing, where
the staff share their favorite episodes from our archives in
our Summer Staff Picks series. Our last pick is from
engineer Frank Imperial.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Thanks Alec. When I think back to the late nineties
and early two thousands, it's impossible not to hear Moby's music.
His album play was everywhere in films, commercials, on the radio,
and yet it never felt manufactured. It felt intimate, like
he had cracked open his own world and invited everyone in.
(00:43):
What makes this conversation so compelling is that Mobi doesn't
just talk about the music. He opens up about the
struggles that fueled it, the questions of identity and faith
that have followed him, and his passion for activism from
animal rights to environmental issues. Sense of an artist who
always has tried to connect the personal with the political,
(01:05):
the beats with the bigger picture. Listening back, I was
struck by how candid he is about fame, sobriety, what
it means to try to live authentically in a world
that doesn't always make it that easy. And of course
you hear the humor and self awareness that makes him
such a singular voice. Here's Alex twenty nineteen conversation with Boby.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the thing. Ooh,
lone trouble so ham ooo lone.
Speaker 3 (01:39):
Treboshan don't about and do a job God.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
In nineteen ninety nine, your cool friends put on Moby's
play at parties. In two thousand, it was on the radio.
Popularity snowballed into ubiquity. In two thousand and one, Play
was in and Volkswagen Ads. It became the biggest selling
electronica album of all time. To fans outside the electronic
(02:17):
music world, Moby seemed like an overnight success, but he
was thirty three in nineteen ninety nine and had been
recording since the eighties. Play was actually his fifth studio album.
It never occurred to him it would break even, let
alone break records. The self described loner and nerd succumbed
(02:38):
to the worst sort of rockstar excess. As his fans
filled stadiums and models showed up in his dressing room.
Moby was euphoric but spinning out of control. It's a
story he shares in his new book Then It Fell Apart.
I spoke to Moby last month in the early chapters
(02:58):
of his book. Moby is coming to terms with the
album going platinum. What do you think happened inside the
music in that album that was different and something click did?
Something changed all of a sudden. You're a monolith in
the music business.
Speaker 3 (03:13):
Yeah, And to contextualize it, before that album Play came out,
my career had essentially ended. I'd lost my record deal.
It was a very dark time. My mom had died,
I was I was living on Mott Street and I
recorded Play where in my bedroom on Mott Street?
Speaker 1 (03:31):
Of course you did, and.
Speaker 3 (03:33):
Well, actually I slept in the closet and I had
my bedroom had been turned into an ad hoc recording
studio and I saw it. So I'd made Play. My
last album had failed completely, and I'd lost my record
deal with who. I was signed to Elektra, and then
I was signed in the UK to a label called
Mute and they hadn't dropped me. But to put it
in perspective, they'd never dropped anyone. That was their claim
(03:56):
to fame is they'd never dropped an artist in the case. Yeah,
So I was like I could didn't really take too
much comfort in the fact that I hadn't lost my
deal with Mute when they'd never ever dropped an artist.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
So play who released Play?
Speaker 3 (04:07):
Well, Richard Branson started a label called V two, and
someone working at V two somehow heard one of the
songs on play I still don't know how, and he
offered me a deal. But yeah, I mean before it
was released, I thought, Okay, I'm an alcoholic bald has
been I'm going to release this one last week in
(04:29):
my closet. Well, the building was from the mid nineteenth
century on Mott Street, and it had been a slaughterhouse.
So the space I was living in this is weird
as an animal rights vegan. The floors all sloped to
central drains because when it had been a slaughterhouse, they
would just hose the floors out and all the awful
(04:49):
would just get washed down the drains. So I'm in
that environment thinking I'm going to move back to Connecticut.
I'm going to get a job teaching community college. I'd
probably be a philosophy professor to students who just had
no interest in paying attention to philosophy, and then this
album comes out and rather than failing, it kept doing
better and better. So to your question of, like, musically,
(05:11):
why that happened, I still to this day have because
a lot of the vocals on play were like old
African American vocals from the mid twentieth century, And if
I look at there's just no precedent for a middle
aged musician making a record in his bedroom at the
end of his career, involving vocals from people who've been
dead for a few decades. Like, that's not a recipe
(05:34):
for a hit record. I remember at some point it
sold fifty thousand records because I thought it was going
to sell nothing. I was amazed that my album had
sold fifty thousand records and then six months later it
was selling one hundred thousand copies a week.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
What do you attribute that to? What did people respond
to the only people are listening to your music and
buying your music in a world that is choked with music.
There was so much stuff out there they can listen to,
and they buy ten million copies of your album. Why
do you think you know?
Speaker 3 (06:06):
I was recently doing an interview with Larry King, and
he asked me that question, and he sort of asked
me like, if you could replicate it, would you? And
I was like, oh, I tried, like the following like
the next three twos I kept I was like, how
do I recreate that? And I never really could, Like
that one sort of weird lightning in a bottle moment.
(06:26):
I don't I mean, I don't want to answer promorphize
the universe too much, but I almost feel like the
universe was in a sort of lighthearted educational way saying like, Okay,
we're going to give you everything you ever wanted times
a million, and it's going to come close to killing
you and you're going to hopefully learn something from it.
(06:46):
So there was like, and again, that might sound very narcissistic,
like I've just answer promorphized a thirteen point eight billion
year old universe, but it felt like if at the
end of the day, more than anything else, educational, like
the universe is going to say like, Okay, you live.
Speaker 1 (07:01):
In a crime. To anthropomorphize the university part of the
human condition. Let's go from there.
Speaker 4 (07:05):
Then.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
So the album comes out nineteen ninety nine. It's difficult
for some people to say this is his style. You've
let a lot of different you know, kind of tones
and a lot of different variety to the sound of
your music. And what was music in your childhood? Were
you in a chorus, was a church, was a music school?
It was weird.
Speaker 3 (07:24):
I started playing guitar. I guess when it was are
a nine or ten because one of my mom's boyfriends
had gone to jail and left a guitar behind.
Speaker 1 (07:32):
But your mother is kind of from a privileged background Connecticut.
Speaker 3 (07:36):
Quasi, I mean, like my grandfather worked on Wall Street, right,
But then my mom sort of rejected that the sixties
progressed and she fully embraced the hippie lifestyle.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
But your dad passed away when you were how I
was two? So when you were two? And how long
did you stay in New York? After he passed away.
Speaker 3 (07:54):
My mom moved back to Connecticut to get her undergraduate
at East Cones. Is that he is even still a school.
And then we went to San Francisco in nineteen sixty nine,
where everything sort of fell apart.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
And then three so right after your dad passed away,
she finished school at Fish School.
Speaker 3 (08:10):
We went to San Francisco and she sort of I
guess was very torn, like the counterculture was happening, and
she really desperately wanted to be a part of it,
you know, And.
Speaker 1 (08:22):
So did you have any ideas why? I have a.
Speaker 3 (08:24):
Feeling half of it was rejecting like growing up in
day in Connecticut, being encouraged by her parents to sort
of be very conservative and very traditional. So it was
a rejection of to an extent her family, but also
just wanting to be a part of this new, exciting paradigm,
you know, I mean nineteen sixty nine original paradigm.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
That's why that's been copied since then. Yeah, that was it.
Speaker 3 (08:49):
She's twenty three years old and she wanted to be
this free spirit artist, but she also had a three
year old child, and that's where things, a lot of
tension and trauma really came from.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
What did your dad do for a living?
Speaker 3 (09:03):
He was a chemistry professor at Columbia, but he had
been in the military and he was It's funny people
don't really talk about it that much. I think he
was either an assassin or a sniper, because I've asked
people in my family. I'm like, oh, what did my
dad do in the military, And they're like, well, he
did a lot of things, and never so I think
because he killed himself and he was a.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
He drove a car off the Arizona.
Speaker 3 (09:26):
He drove I don't know where exactly, but he got
very drunk. My mom had threatened to take me away
from him, and so he got drunk and got in
his car and drove one hundred miles an hour into
a bridge somewhere and died.
Speaker 1 (09:38):
Now what would people tell you, if at all? Did
you do any investigation or did you have some curiosity
as to what your dad was like? Did you learn
a little bit about him later on in life? Well,
it's only beyond the CIA credit.
Speaker 3 (09:53):
Only in adulthood did I realize how little I knew
about my father. Like, for example, if I had a
child with a woman and she died, as the child
grew up, I would do everything in my power to
make sure the child knew who his mom had been.
You know, we would talk about it. And after my
dad dies, he was never mentioned. His mother never mentioned
(10:16):
it to me, and all I knew was that he'd
been in the military and I had photos. But again,
it was only after my mother died that the rest
of the people in my family sort of let me
know that my father had been a professor and he
had a good sense of humor, and the.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
Brother had to die before people were allowed to introduce
you to your dad. Kind of yeah.
Speaker 3 (10:38):
And I found and it sort of had this quasi
like almost like a check off play quality, like I
found out after my mother had died. I found out
that my father had killed himself because my whole life
up until that point, I thought he had just died
and no one ever explained how or why. And I
also found out I have a half brother somewhere, which
(10:58):
can I tell you a story about whom I have
half brother? Is not I think you'll appreciate. I was
in DC in two thousand and seven with Alexandra Pelosi,
Nancy's daughter, and we were with Nancy. Nancy was the
Speaker of the house, and this is pre sobriety. So
I got very drunk and ended up talking to a
journalist from Politico and telling this journalist that I have
(11:20):
a half brother, and I jokingly said, maybe it's Carl Rove.
The journalist wrote a little Politico piece saying, our Mobi
and Karl Rove brothers. Two weeks later, I get a
letter on White house stationary, It says, dear Moby, it's
not me. For one thing, I'm seventeen years older than you,
and I have no musical ability. Have you considered James
Carville as your long lost brother because he's bald and
(11:41):
plays the guitar too, your pal Carl Rove? And I
was like, so, I know, as far as I know,
Carl Rove is not my half brother.
Speaker 1 (11:48):
You have one. Did you ever meet the half brother?
I have no idea who or where he might be.
You know your story, and we'll get to some of
the details of this in the book. That the self destructiveness,
but an impression I get of you, the way you live,
as you like to isolate, and you talk about this
panic plateau thing or whatever the terminology is, which which
which kind of hampered or impacted relationships you would have
(12:11):
with people as.
Speaker 3 (12:11):
Oh, yeah, I mean, I'm fifty three and I've never
had a serious relationship, and over time trouble you it
used to, but then over time I've sort of made
peace with it. I mean, I guess there's almost in
a way not to overstate it, but like there's a
(12:32):
there's a sort of utility to being incapable of having
real relationships, which is I get to work on other things,
you know, like I get to be to spend the time. Yeah,
I get to spend more time doing activism. I get
to spend more time I don't know, reading, working on music,
working on art. I have a weird little production company
(12:53):
in La so I can work more on that. So
I had always thought that the key to happiness, at
least growing up, was like you find your perfect per
and you build a life with them. And at some
point I realized, oh, that's just not in the cards
for me, and so there's so far, so far. But
at the same time, I don't I don't have any
longing for it. You don't which not that you know of,
(13:15):
not that I mean, maybe I'll meet them, you know.
Speaker 1 (13:18):
Maybe you just it's it's you don't know. Do you
want to venture where it comes from? Does it come
from certain obvious childhood signals? I think so. I assume
so that because you were left alone a lot as
a child.
Speaker 3 (13:33):
I was left alone, and I was also raised you know,
I grew up very very poor in a very wealthy
town in Darien, Connecticut, and my mom dated Hell's Angels.
Speaker 1 (13:41):
There was a lot of when you went back to
Darien and you were how old when I was five?
So you were you were in San Francisco just a
couple of years. Yeah, so your mom's smoking pot and
the taking actresses and taking acid and and everybody like,
you know, kind of cavorting around the hate or whatever
they were doing. You were only there for a couple
of years and.
Speaker 3 (13:58):
Then we moved back to Connecticut.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
How long?
Speaker 3 (14:01):
Well, I lived in Connecticut from the time I was
five until the time I was twenty one.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
You basically grew up there.
Speaker 3 (14:08):
Yeah, I'm just an inbred white trash kid from Connecticut.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
The San Francisco thing was a brief period of cod.
Speaker 3 (14:13):
That was just brief and traumatic, right and well traumatic.
There was sexual abuse my mom, and I don't want
to throw her under the bus posthumously, but she wanted
to hang out with her friends. She was twenty three
years old. So they put me in this very low
rent daycare center and I was sexually abused there.
Speaker 1 (14:31):
What did she do during the day? Did she work?
Speaker 3 (14:33):
Not?
Speaker 1 (14:33):
In San Francisco. There she was supported by her family.
They were all dependent on somebody.
Speaker 3 (14:37):
A lot of kids from Connecticut who in nineteen sixty
four had been playing lacrosse. Nothing wrong with lacrosse. I
just was never very good at it. And they had
short hair, wearing eyes ods, you know, going to Webern
country Club, drinking gin and tonics. Then all of a sudden,
they're living on hate Ashbury with fringe jackets and hair
down to the middle of their back, taking acid. And
(14:59):
I sort of got caught up in the middle of
that as a three year old.
Speaker 1 (15:03):
Yeah, when you got back to Connecticut and you grew
up there, did your mother develop as a parent and
she was getting older, what did she become a better parent?
Was there a continued period of isolation and kind of.
Speaker 3 (15:18):
Not good childcare for you both an equal measure, Like,
we had a good support system of my grandmother had
aunts and uncles, so there was a lot of support.
Speaker 1 (15:29):
But did you spend a lot of time with their mother's.
Speaker 3 (15:31):
Parents, Yeah, but also a lot of time alone because
also we were very poor. We were on food stamps
and welfare and we were in dairy in Connecticut, which
is per capital, one of the wealthiest places in the world,
And so I had this constant sense of shame, you know,
So when I went to school, it was pretending that
(15:52):
I didn't live in the garage apartment, and that we
weren't on food stamps and welfare. You know, if I
had the flu, I would come back and say, oh,
we went to Switzerland, because that sounded like something that
wealthy people would say. So just this the sense of
shame and the sense of inadequacy, and not again not
to overstate it, but like when you grow up with that,
(16:13):
it's hard, even in adulthood, when your circumstances change, it's
hard to move past how you were formed.
Speaker 1 (16:21):
When did you start to get this idea that you
were going to write music?
Speaker 3 (16:27):
I think, well, my mom, who was an aspiring musician pianist.
I mean, I remember my mom had the most odd
eclectic record collection. So she had Crosby, Stiells, Nash and
Young and Divorge Ack and Lightnin' Hopkins and Baba O
Latunji and so I just grew up with this constant
(16:48):
soundtrack of weirdness and it made sense to me. And
she dated musicians. My uncle was a musician. My great
grandmother actually taught classical composition to Arthur Fiedler. She was
Arthur Fiedler's mentor. So I grew up in this weird,
idiosyncratic musical household. So I never thought as I was
(17:12):
growing up that I would have a career as a musician.
I just knew that I loved music and I wanted
to be a part of it. And I had a
lot of free time because I wasn't very good at
sports and.
Speaker 1 (17:23):
Did you do well in school? I did okay.
Speaker 3 (17:26):
So my name Moby is a nickname that I've had
since birth because I'm related to Herman Melville. So what
I learned was when teachers found out that I was
descended from Herman Melville, they just would add fifteen IQ points.
They would assume, like, oh, he's got to be like
aerodyite because he's descended from Herman Melville.
Speaker 1 (17:45):
Same thing.
Speaker 3 (17:45):
I went to college and I was a philosophy major,
and I was not a good student. But I realized
the moment you tell someone you're a philosophy major, they
think you're way smarter than you actually are. So, like,
descended from Herman Melville philosophy major, Like that just added
thirty bonus points to my IQ, totally unwarranted. So I
had growing up, had a lot of free time, had
(18:07):
access to instruments, and was raised in this odd creative family.
So I just started writing music when I was around
ten or eleven, and i'd also my uncle had given
me some hand me down photo equipment, so I started
taking pictures. And here's an odd, little funny story. My
best friend when I was nine years old was Robert
Downey Junior, and so his dad gave us because his
(18:31):
dad was a filmmaker and Darien he lived there. Darien
has a baffling array of odd public figures like and
Coulter and Gus van Zant and Robert Downey Junior and
Chloe sevig Yee and Steve O from Jackass and the
author Rick Moody from this little town of fourteen thousand people.
Speaker 1 (18:51):
Very odd people. Yeah, in the fact that and.
Speaker 3 (18:53):
Culture and Zant went to the same high school. Yes,
So Robert and I made with his this superak camera
his dad when we were eight and nine years old.
We started making little films long since disappeared. But it
was just part of the ethos of just go out
and make things, with no expectation that there would be
(19:13):
a career or that you'd even make anything good. But
I just started writing and taking pictures and making little
movies and writing songs and doing all this.
Speaker 1 (19:22):
They make little movies. How if you were broke super
eight camera you got your hands on a Super eight camera? Yeah,
like in a pawn shot. Yeah, right, like a really cheap, shitty.
Speaker 3 (19:32):
Superand camera, and you could develop film, you know, like
two and a half minutes of Super eight film, and
then you edit it on your kitchen table tape.
Speaker 1 (19:41):
Yeah, we used a dracula and I'm emerging from the coffin.
Speaker 3 (19:45):
And then you develop it and you show it on
a sheet.
Speaker 1 (19:49):
Yeah, you're ready to get a can. What's the first
song you wrote? Do you remember? Do you remember a boy? I?
Speaker 3 (19:56):
Well, so I started playing guitar, and then I I
had a very odd music teacher. He played in a
heavy metal band, but he also loved jazz fusion and
classical music. So one day we would learn name Chris Rosola.
He would teach me a van Halen song, even though
I never really liked Van Halen that much, and then
we would do a Larry Carlton or weather Report jazz
(20:17):
fusion thing, which I also didn't like that much, and
then do a Bach cantata, which I love and I
still to this day love. And then I broke his
heart because when I was thirteen, I discovered punk rock,
and so I sort of cast aside, like music theory
and the sort of idiosyncratic but formal music education. I
had to play clash covers and because he thought I
(20:40):
was going to go on to be this virtuoso guitarist.
And the irony, Yeah, and the irony is by embracing
punk rock and non virtuosic, if that's the word, I
disinvented music. I ended up coming back to the world
of classical music and have since started playing with orchestras. Yeah,
(21:00):
I just I just did a performance with Dudamel in
the LA film.
Speaker 1 (21:04):
Did You Wouldn't Know? What? Did you guys play? We?
Speaker 3 (21:07):
Well, it was two programs. The first program was LA Composers,
and they put a piece of music of mine in there.
It's a song that I'd written for a Michael Mann
movie years ago, which.
Speaker 1 (21:18):
Film for Heat. Yeah, you wrote a song for Heat.
Speaker 3 (21:21):
It's a very end when Al Patino and Robert de
Niro finally had I don't want to spoiler alert, so
they did that as part of the first program, And
the second program was all orchestral versions of my music.
Speaker 1 (21:33):
Oh wow.
Speaker 3 (21:33):
During the rehearsal. There was I don't know one hundred
and eighty of us on stage because we had a
huge choir, full orchestra. And I realized, like, okay, we're
doing my music, and I'm without question the least talented
musician on the stage right now, Like I'm the person who, like,
if I stopped playing, no one will notice. But in
God Moving over the Face of the Waters, there's this
big crescendo, you know, it's like timpany and symbols. And
(21:57):
I got so annoyed because the percussion had come in early,
and I was like, what, like this is the La Fel?
How did they screw up? And I realized there was
a thunderstorm and I was like, so this song is
called God Moving over the Face of the Water. Keep
in mind this is in September. This is sort of
good theological argument for the existence of God, that he
(22:19):
plays percussion during classical music.
Speaker 1 (22:22):
Do you did this recently with the La Fell? What's
the first time you did that? Well, the first time
was actually Michael Mann for Heat. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (22:30):
I had written some classical pieces. He heard them and
this was nineteen ninety.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
Foudy, how did he unpublished?
Speaker 3 (22:38):
I they were no, I'd put them as a B
sides on they were out there and somehow he had
heard them. And we then had one of the weirdest
phone calls. Do you know, Michael, I'm sure. I so
we're friends. I used that word loose leakause I don't
know if in my mind he and I are friends.
But he's a odd, wonderful creative man. But like our
(23:00):
first phone call was, he got my number and he
called me up and he spent forty five minutes telling
me the story of heat and hung up the phone.
Speaker 1 (23:09):
I didn't say one.
Speaker 3 (23:10):
Word apart from hello, so I was like, hello, he said,
mobe this Michael Man forty five minutes soliloquy, telling me
in great detail everything about heat, like the archetypes that
are going on for like the classical element, the moment
he's done, he just hung up, and I was like,
what just I'd never spoken to like an esteemed film
director before, and I was like, is this is how
(23:30):
film directors talk to people? He just call up and
talk for forty five minutes and to hang up the phone.
Speaker 1 (23:34):
That was the first time you had provided score for
a film?
Speaker 3 (23:38):
Well, I went to Sunny Purchase briefly, and I had
some friends in the experimental film program there, and so
my friend Paul made an experimental movie called me I
the Onion in nineteen ninety or ninety one, So technically
that would have been my first foray in the film composing.
Speaker 1 (23:58):
Beyond me I the Onion, Yeah made it. Michael Mann
was the first. Yeah. Did it lead to how many?
How many other films have you contributed music to other
than sourcing your I also I have.
Speaker 3 (24:08):
A weird website called mobigradis dot com and it gives
free music to independent filmmakers, nonprofits, film students. So if
we count that ten thousand films. But those are like
three minute short films where people hired you hired, I
wouldn't know hundreds thousands.
Speaker 1 (24:27):
I mean like, oh, you're not not accessing your music
you published, they hired you to do score four oh films.
Speaker 3 (24:33):
Oh, because there's the licensing music. I'm licensing music, and
that's like, it's the greatest thing in the world because
all you have to do is say yes, you don't
there's no work involved apart from that actually writing music.
Speaker 1 (24:46):
So when I moved to.
Speaker 3 (24:47):
La after I got sober the first time, this most
like ten years ago, I got sober.
Speaker 1 (24:52):
And I got sober twice.
Speaker 3 (24:55):
Yeah, once in nineteen eighty seven, followed by a glorious
thirteen year long relapse. We're going to get to that,
and then again in two thousand and eight. And so
then I moved to LA and I thought, Okay, I'm
middle aged, I'm sober, I'm in Los Angeles. I need
to fully commit myself to film composing. And then I
realized I really don't like film composing, Like it's.
Speaker 1 (25:17):
What about it? Don't you like? Uh? What I like?
Speaker 3 (25:21):
When I work on my own music, it's just me
in the studio. There's no music supervisor, there's no director,
there's no producer. I can kind of I have some
complete self sufficiency. I don't have to respond to other
people's comments, and as an only child who doesn't do
well with people, that's nice. And my friends who were
great film composers, part of their skill set is knowing
(25:42):
how to deal with twenty different executives at the same time.
Speaker 1 (25:45):
And I just it was too skill have Yeah and
a lot of X acts. Yeah, this is God moving
over the face of the waters. The piece Moby wrote
for Heat after a lot of input from executives at
(26:07):
Warner Brothers and director Michael Mann. Stephen Daldry is another
great film director with strong opinions about how everyone should
do their jobs.
Speaker 4 (26:17):
I find it really crazy when actors come in self
prepared because they've done some journey that they getting in
this comment my character and you go, look, it's not
your character. Okay, it's ours, and we're going to make
it up there.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
Interesting, I'm going to remember that it's ours. Well, my
character wouldn't do that.
Speaker 4 (26:31):
Well, let's change the character. Then.
Speaker 1 (26:34):
The rest of my conversation with Stephen Daldry can be
found in our archive a Here's the Thing dot org
more Moby in a minute. This is Alec Baldwin and
(27:02):
you were listening to Here's the Thing. Moby never would
have ended up so low if he hadn't been so
desperate to be lifted up. He craved the affirmation of fame.
Speaker 3 (27:18):
I loved it, you did, and I just wanted more.
Speaker 1 (27:20):
This guy that was this isolated guy that was left alone.
You can't get enough of that.
Speaker 3 (27:25):
Yeah, I mean, all of a sudden, I was being
invited to fancy parties, meeting heads of state, being flown
around the world, on private.
Speaker 1 (27:35):
Play and freeing clothes to wear in public. I mean
I still have them, sure.
Speaker 3 (27:39):
You know, it's like suddenly like people are competing about
who gets to dress you for the Red carpet, and
you know, it's like Versace and Calvin Klein are like, oh,
let us send you free tuxedos. I was like, you know,
before this record, I was buying clothes at Salvation Army
on the corner of Lafayette.
Speaker 1 (27:55):
In Prince A, Republic.
Speaker 3 (27:57):
Yeah, like it was great, And then of course it
wasn't great. You know, like my narcissism got out of
control of my entitlement because I felt at the time,
like two thousand and two thousand and one, two thousand
and two, I felt that all I needed to be
happy was constant love and attention from every person on
the planet, to make ten million dollars a year for
(28:18):
the rest of my life, and to make sure that
I could be as promiscuous as possible, do as many
drugs as possible, and drink as much as possible without consequences.
So like, obviously, in hindsight, I recognize how absurd and
unrealistic it is, but at the time I just wanted,
like every night to be like this indulgent festival of
(28:39):
narcissism and the mobsters.
Speaker 1 (28:42):
Can you tell me some of these stories that were
in the book.
Speaker 3 (28:44):
Yeah, that was a weird one. We took helicopters to
Staten Island and had this weird dinner with the guy
who apparently invented the cabbage patch doll and then went
on to produce Steven Segall movies. And then we left
and I went to a party on Park Avenue, very drunk.
We show up and I met some friends and they
were talking about this game that they played in college
called knob Touch. And what knob touch is You take
(29:06):
your flaccid penis out of your pants and you brush
up against people and you win by the number of
people you can brush up against. And I'd never done this,
and my date, Miss new Hampshire, challenged me to play
knob touch. And there's only one human being on the
planet I have brushed my flaccid penis against. That man
is currently the President of the United States.
Speaker 1 (29:26):
Now, yes, where was this being held?
Speaker 3 (29:29):
Some bar in park like one of those big restaurants
on Park Avenue, And like twenty first it.
Speaker 1 (29:32):
Was like in public and this isn't a private party.
Speaker 3 (29:35):
I mean it was like a one of those New
York style parties where maybe it was like Ralph Lauren
was launching a new paint color or something, you know,
those things that you just go to. Yeah, and you're
not I don't know why.
Speaker 1 (29:47):
I have a couple of drinks. Yeah. So I was
very famous.
Speaker 3 (29:49):
People, and I brushed my flacid piece against that of.
Speaker 1 (29:52):
Your penis against Donald Trump brush.
Speaker 3 (29:54):
He didn't know it was dark, he was. And what's
funny is the publisher of the book said, like, in
this climate, I don't know if you should include that.
I was like, you know what, I think Donald Trump
being able to say that, I me tooed him.
Speaker 1 (30:08):
Yeah. So you're there and you're this big superstar. When
did you begin to think.
Speaker 5 (30:17):
We really should get back into the studio and make
another album.
Speaker 3 (30:20):
So then the tour for Play was supposed to be
three and a half weeks long, and it ended up
being twenty six months long. But the whole time, because
I've always compulsively written music, I have now probably like
eight or nine thousand pieces of unreleased pieces of music.
So even at the bottom of my like alcoholism, drug addiction, narcissism, entitlement,
(30:42):
self destruction. I was at break. I kept writing music.
So the problem break, Yeah, the problem with albums was
to look at like a thousand songs and figure out
how do you get fifteen to put on an album?
Doesn't mean they're good. And when I say eight thousand
pieces of unreleased music, I'm not speaking to the quality
of them, like a lot of it's garbage. But I
just it's this weird almost like you know there's that
(31:05):
word laggeria. I have that of music where I just
keep making it without any concern for whether it's good
or bad. I just keep writing and so.
Speaker 1 (31:15):
It's like a broken pipe.
Speaker 3 (31:16):
Yeah, yeah, just like you turn on the faucet and
just leave it on. So the next album was called eighteen,
and I thought like, okay, this is like Play was big.
I want this to be bigger, and so like I think,
the promo tour for the next album was five months long,
like five months of just like you've done it as well,
like traveling around the world, sitting in hotel rooms, going
(31:37):
to every country, every TV show, everything, And I just
wanted to be more famous, have more money, sleep with
more people, drink more, do more drugs tour more just
for the.
Speaker 1 (31:45):
Guy that was isolated. Are you sitting there saying this
is more like it? Now? Everybody wants to take their
clothes off and jump in bed with me.
Speaker 3 (31:53):
And it seemed like fame was going And this is
when I say it out loud, it just sounds so
obs heard I honestly, and I wouldn't have admitted this,
but deep down, what I believed was that fame was
going to fix everything.
Speaker 1 (32:07):
Like every all.
Speaker 3 (32:09):
The trauma from child really be the senses of all
that fear, you know, the self centered fear.
Speaker 1 (32:16):
But self centered narcissistic fear is the root of all
of our problems. And living in a constant state, living
in a constant state of agitation, worrying about am I
going to get this? This is going to be taken
away from me? Which defines my life. They say in
a twelve step literature, they say that our greatest fear
is to lose something we already have or not get
(32:37):
something that we want.
Speaker 3 (32:38):
I just thought, oh, fame will fix it as long
as I can keep getting invited to great parties and
drinking and doing drugs, and as long as I get
good reviews. But then the universe, with its sense of humor,
took away all the things.
Speaker 1 (32:55):
That I do. You know, why do you have a sense? Why?
Speaker 3 (32:58):
I think because on a sort of artistic level, there
came a time and I'm so ashamed to admit this,
and around two thousand and two, two thousand and three,
I wanted to make great music, but I wanted music
to be a means to an end where I wanted
it to like sustain my career. So before my life
had just been spent it going yeah, and I had never.
Speaker 1 (33:20):
Thought I don't want to go backwards.
Speaker 3 (33:22):
Yeah, I was like and before that, all I wanted
to do was make music that I loved, you know,
that music that somehow was like it was just beautiful, expressive.
Two thousand and two, two thousand.
Speaker 1 (33:32):
And three, years after the release of Play, I.
Speaker 3 (33:34):
Still wanted it to be beautiful, but first and foremost
commercially viable.
Speaker 1 (33:40):
But it was a little less beautiful and it sold
more copies. That was okay with.
Speaker 3 (33:43):
Me, Yes, And I started thinking, oh, okay, well, if
I produce this type of song, it'll get on the radio.
And if I produce this it'll sell more. And like
the paradox, the wonderful In hindsight, the wonderful paradox is
the more of an effort I made to be famous,
the less famous I became here.
Speaker 1 (34:01):
You were very open with the press, You courted the press,
You would speak to anybody, you know. For me, the
problem has always been the you know, the press is
never it's a sad. It does sometimes make me sad.
I get I get over it, and then every now
and then it comes up in blackjacks me again. After nowhere.
It's like it's like in an alley where I get
mugged by it again, which is they're never going to
(34:22):
interpret who you really are to the public.
Speaker 4 (34:24):
Never.
Speaker 1 (34:24):
They don't have that ability. It's so painful, the misunderstanding
that goes hand in hand with it, especially.
Speaker 3 (34:32):
Because I when I don't know if you had this experience,
but when I started getting press attention, I loved it.
And in the beginning they were so nice, and the
reviews were gentle, and then the reviews were great, and
then you have this sweet spot where you have like
fame and you're lauded in the press, and then it
turned and then all of a sudden, the reviews got bad,
(34:52):
the articles got bad, and I felt so betrayed. I
was like, why why can't you guys just be nice?
But then time passes. I'm like, in a like god,
bless them for turning because I've since then like when
when you're rejected, when the press rejects you, then, at
least for me, I had to sort of look like, Okay,
well who am I without that?
Speaker 1 (35:14):
You know?
Speaker 3 (35:15):
And where does my worth and sense of self come from?
And like realizing, oh, if it comes from the opinions
of people I've never met, there's something really unstable and
unhealthy there, you know. I had this epiphany recently. I
was in la middle of February hiking and Griffiths Park
and it was one of those beautiful days, like the
(35:35):
sun is shining, coyotes are running around, hummingbirds are flying by,
and I suddenly thought like, Okay, if my last album
had sold ten million copies, and if every journalist on
the planet loved me and wrote great things about me,
and if I was dating the most beautiful woman on
the planet, how would this moment be better? And I'm
(35:56):
like it wouldn't like, you know, good reviews, good press,
all this stuff doesn't And I don't know, I sound
like a crazy New age hippie, but like it wouldn't affect.
It's like that moment of like the public radio, like
standing in the sun wearing a T shirt, smelling sage
and lavender, watching the hummingbirds fly by. I was like
the universe in that moment was so benign and indifferent
(36:20):
to anything that I cared about, and there was some
there's sort of like a transcendent liberation, almost like Emersonian
style liberation in that moment.
Speaker 1 (36:28):
I'll take that feeling. At this point, I just turned
sixty one, and I'll take that feeling wherever I can
get it now, and at my age, I have to
accept that my creative energies may or may not come
to the foe here, and if they don't, I have
to find something else to do to get off creatively,
which is what I do. I completely segregate my creative
(36:51):
from my commercial in a way that I never thought
it was possible.
Speaker 3 (36:53):
And there's one because you reference the twelve and twelve earlier. Yep,
I don't know if that's a twelve steps is part
of your life?
Speaker 1 (37:01):
Yes? Oh, okay, I'm thirty four years sober. Oh right,
eighty five?
Speaker 3 (37:05):
Yeah, so it's I mean, and again I feel like
such a middle age cliche saying this, but like the
Twelve Steps really, if all the therapeutic things I've been through,
the Twelve Steps really saved me. And one of the
things I learned, as you mentioned, was like the role
of fear and trying to sort of like deconstruct fear
and learn from it. But the other thing that when
(37:26):
I did the Twelve Steps that I really loved was
all of my judgment up until that point was sort
of based on the misperception of omniscience or fake omniscientce.
Like when I had an album that failed, I was
furious because I knew that it should have succeeded, because
if it had succeeded, it would have been better for me.
And then all of a sudden I realized, like again,
(37:47):
in a thirteen point eight billion year old universe, I
don't have omniscients. I don't know causality. If I want
something to work out and it doesn't work out in
a way, I'm like, who am I to judge? In
politics as well, because I got really involved in politics
for a while, it was like the vast majority of
people on the planet, their goal is to keep the
(38:08):
lights on tomorrow, you know, like they're like they want
a job, they want to keep.
Speaker 1 (38:14):
Their understand where they're coming from.
Speaker 3 (38:16):
And I have to be like, okay, that's It's like
with the press as well. If to remind myself, like
most of the people I know were journalists, like they're
barely able to pay the rent. And I don't want
to be patronizing or judgmental, but I have to sort
of say, like, Okay, my job is not to rely
on them form my sense of happiness and well being,
you know, like my sense of.
Speaker 1 (38:36):
Strength or my creative Yeah, output the same.
Speaker 3 (38:39):
Thing, and creatively, if they're too much of a hindrance,
you move on. You sort of say like okay, God
bless you know, like have healthy boundaries. And I just say,
like it almost makes me think of like that like
the Rudyard Kipling poem is that.
Speaker 1 (38:54):
If I remember reading when like eight or nine years old,
and it's.
Speaker 3 (38:58):
Sort of that idea of just keep I just keep going,
not even from strength and fortitude, more just sort of
like like a post apocalyptic cockroach, just keep plowing forward,
like someone steps on you. Okay, you stepped on me.
Have a good day. I'm going to keep going.
Speaker 1 (39:15):
But this is also if I really became the biggest
movie star in the world and made hundreds of millions
of dollars in private plans, who the fuck knows what
I would have done with that. No, I would have
screwed that up.
Speaker 3 (39:24):
I mean, luckily i'd be dead in a way, like
as as sober middle aged guys. I feel like, maybe
this is an indelicate thing to say, but like a
lot of people have done the work for us, Like,
for example, yeah, twenty years ago, I would look at
Michael Jackson and say, like, wow, look at that. The
(39:45):
wealth and the fame and the adulation. Boy, oh boy,
I'm glad.
Speaker 1 (39:50):
I'm glad hanging out with him.
Speaker 3 (39:52):
Yeah, and I'm glad that I was cut off to
an extent from the access to like excessive wealth and
fame that he had and me. Again, it's a hard
thing to talk about because I don't want to malign anyone,
especially if they're dead or struggling. But like we know,
I mean the number of public figures who have had
profound success, profound wealth and it destroys them. I mean,
(40:13):
like people like you and I are the ones who
sort of like hopefully emerge unscathed and chastened, with hopefully
an understanding that we can almost use in the form
of service, you know, to go out and be like, Okay,
I've learned a lesson. That's an odd, rare, unique lesson.
Let me try and do something with it.
Speaker 1 (40:32):
Yea, was there an epiphany? What was the bottom?
Speaker 3 (40:35):
The bottom was do you remember a restaurant in New
York called zen Palette, vegan Chinese restaurant. So this is
a little analogy. New Year's Eve nineteen ninety two, I
went to the zen Palette on Ninth Avenue, Sure, and
I ordered fourties. Yeah, and I ordered purple Japanese egg plant,
and it disagreed with me. And I never ordered purple
Japanese ig plan again because I had one bad experience
(40:58):
with it. Vodka, cocaine everything. I would do it every
day and it would kill almost kill me and make
me sick. And I kept going back. And basically the consequence,
what I mean is like the rational response to vodka
and cocaine if you have a night out and the
next day you want to blow your miserable, is to say, wow,
(41:20):
that was bad. I shan't do that again, as opposed.
Speaker 1 (41:22):
To it's a great definition of addiction. Act.
Speaker 3 (41:24):
Let's give me more every day for the next fifteen
this thing that's making me sick.
Speaker 1 (41:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (41:29):
And as I got older, because you got sober young.
Speaker 1 (41:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (41:35):
I got sober at forty three and basically to ride
the range and the hangovers just got worse and worse,
and it got to the point where I was having
hard time streaming sentences together.
Speaker 1 (41:48):
Yeah. I got sober because I moved to LA and
I was driving a car, and I thought, well, the
consequence is caught up with Yeah, I thought I came
and I still drove around shiitface for two years before
I got I got smart. I want to talk, when
did pure vegetarianism take hold with you?
Speaker 3 (42:02):
When I was growing up, I had that weird paradox
of loving animals and loving Burger King, you know, when
I was in junior high school high school, like, we
had a bunch of rescue animals and I loved them unconditionally,
But I also loved Pepperoni pizza. And I had this
one rescue cat named Tucker who had found it the
dump in Dairia in Connecticut, and I loved Tucker even
(42:24):
more unconditionally than I unconditionally loved the other animals. And
when I was nineteen, I had this like Saw on
the Road to Damascus moment where suddenly I looked at
Tucker and I was like, he has two eyes, a
central nervous system, and a profoundly rich emotional life and
a deep desire to avoid pain and suffering. And in
that moment I sort of extrapolated and realized every animal
(42:45):
with two eyes and a central nervous system has a
rich emotional life and a deep desire to avoid pain
and suffering. So that's when I became a vegetarian, and
then eighty seven became a vegan, and my only vegan
relapse was in ninety two I had yogurt once. So
now I've got thirty one years.
Speaker 1 (43:02):
What is your diet basically something you cook at home
or you how you eat well.
Speaker 3 (43:07):
Actually I own a vegan restaurant in Los Angeles called
Lil Pine and where it's in Silver Lake, And what
makes it unique is that one hundred percent of the
profits go to animal rights organizations. Because at this point
in my life, I don't I mean, I still am
selfish and probably pretty narcissistic, but all of my work
one hundred percent of the money I make professionally goes
(43:29):
to the charities I work with, because I'd rather live.
You were sort of addressing this, like live a simple life,
like live very much within my means and make art
and music for the love of art.
Speaker 1 (43:40):
Amazing. I had a couple of them.
Speaker 3 (43:43):
And like I had this crazy sixty acre compound up
in Putnam County, and when I moved to La I
moved to a castle. But arms I wasn't happy in
these places. And I was just asked myself, like why
am I having this sort of like Gatsbesque excess, the
citizen cane style, like overcompensation if the end result is
(44:05):
like I've tied up my resources in real estate and
I'm miserable and no one's benefiting. So like now I
live in a much simpler house, got a little simple
apartment in Park Slope, and I can just work for
the causes that I care about. Freedom, yeah, and freedom
and that freedom to like make art, music, books, et cetera.
And if there's money, just give the money to different
(44:28):
very causes.
Speaker 1 (44:28):
That's amazing to do that, but that's rare. That's rare.
Speaker 3 (44:32):
One of the benefits of my weird attachment issues. Is like,
I'm not married, I don't have kids, so like I
have this odd autonomy, so I'm able to be relying
on you, and so there's it is like that there's
a luxury to that, like almost like a monastic independence
(44:53):
more after.
Speaker 1 (44:54):
The break this is I can't think of any better
way to ask this, and I'm sure there's a better
way to ask this, but I want to ask, like,
who cares for you? Where is love in your life?
If you're so autonomous and you don't have the fans
and the public and the press, which is a form
of love, it's like an energy that simulates love. It
isn't really love. But in your life, where is the
(45:16):
love and the care in your life? Who's caring for you? Okay,
well a few friends, so close friends are there for you.
Speaker 3 (45:24):
I have a few family members. But there's the answer
that I'm uncomfortable giving because it's one of the hardest
things to say in our world. Is so when we
do the twelve steps. When I got to the third
step and the third steps has made a decision to
turn our life and our will over to the care
of God as we understood God, and I really wrestled
(45:45):
with this because I was like, I was like, the
care of God is I understood God? Like I don't
understand God. And that was my epiphany. I was like, oh,
the God of my understanding is a God that I
do not understand. And I was like, but I evidence again,
not to answer promorphize, but I see evidence of divinity
(46:05):
in kindness, in forgiveness, in the gentleness of puppies.
Speaker 1 (46:11):
In the redacted parts of the molor reports in our
immune systems, like I see in my eyes.
Speaker 3 (46:18):
This is all evidence of the divine, and so in
nature and all these things. And so my honest answer,
that's an uncomfortable, secular twenty first century answer, is divine
love is.
Speaker 6 (46:31):
What I search your oxygen. That's but also and it's
a component of it other people in yours. And if
I die and someone says, oh, guess what, there's no God.
We live in this empty existential cipher void, like you're
just a bunch of like weird molecules that have come
together arbitrarily. That's okay too, But I do somehow, in
my dim I don't know naive way see evidence of
(46:55):
the divine. And so it's always trying to move towards that. Again,
not religious, denominational, no gender. It's just simply this idea
of the divinity of like forgiveness and puppies and immune
systems and the unredacted MOLA reports and etc. So that's
a huge That's where I get a lot of comfort from.
Speaker 1 (47:16):
What's music in your life? Now? You continue to write?
Speaker 3 (47:19):
Yeah, I mean I work on music mainly for the
love of music. I refuse to tour. I hate touring
unless it's going to do orchestral things. I had this
wonderful realization. I guess it was about eleven years ago,
the first time I met David Lynch, and we've since
become pretty good friends. LA has that going for it.
I live around the corner from David Lynch. But when
(47:39):
I first met him, he was being interviewed at BAFTA
in London and he said something so reductive and simple,
and it really struck me is he said, very simply,
he said creativity is beautiful, And all of a sudden
I was like, oh my god, he's right, Like, why
am I compromising my creativity in the interest of like
commercial game, for saking that and for worldliness? I was like,
(48:02):
as we know, like music is that ineffable beauty, like
it can communicate love and transcendent and beauty. That should
be my goal, not that I'll ever reach it, not
that I'll ever make beautiful, ineffable, wonderful music, but like
if every day I wake up with that as the
goal and not in the interest of worldliness and other people.
Speaker 1 (48:23):
I mean, you've written a book, You at points in
your life have conquered the music business. Have you ever
wanted to try other media? Have you ever wanted to
make films?
Speaker 3 (48:32):
Yeah, I'm actually I have a weird production company. I
feel like I use the word weird too much, but
I have a production company in LA. We're working on
some documentaries. You've got some scripted features, an animated feature
that we're trying to develop, but.
Speaker 1 (48:43):
Have your hand in that too. Do you like making films?
Speaker 3 (48:46):
I love it as long as I have to your
point the recourse of autonomy, meaning like some of the
projects we're working on, like sure, it would be great
if we have financing, if we get people attached to it,
but we also have projects that we can do one
hundred percent ourselves. And because as we know, like how
much time have our friends spent waiting you know, waiting
(49:10):
for the financing, waiting for this to be greenlit approval,
and with the production company again. My goal is to
never make personally, never make money from it. So if
money is generated, it goes to my foundation, or it
goes to causes I work with.
Speaker 1 (49:23):
And if you say upfront, I'm going to be involved
in projects in the film business and I never want
to make money with them, You're not going to have
a lot of meetings in LA You're not going to
get to make money from it.
Speaker 3 (49:35):
Like like the guy who runs my production company and
my head of development and some of our partners, I
want them to be fabulously wealthy. I would rather be
like live in a shitty apartment in Hollywood or I
don't know, in bedsty and work for causes that I
care about.
Speaker 1 (49:53):
I just don't.
Speaker 3 (49:54):
I don't want to personally benefit from it.
Speaker 1 (49:56):
I would like to do a documentary film, and I'd
like to put you together on a project. I'd like
to couple you on a film project with someone equally
maniacally creative and independent as you. I'd like to do
a film where we get you in a in a
studio and you're gonna do like a little project with Coppola.
Two people who don't want to collaborate with other people really,
and you force them to do. They agree to collaborate
(50:19):
for this one time and see what the result would be.
I watched that. Yeah, I want to produce that. And
by the way, you don't have to make any money.
My kids are expensive. I'm keeping all the money. I
think we're done.
Speaker 5 (50:31):
Then we have a deal than you.
Speaker 1 (50:51):
Moby composer, musician, recovering addict and proud ex celebrity. Didn't
you think he's cool with that? Okay? Moby's new book
is called Then It Fell Apart. It's very funny and
(51:12):
very sad. I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the thing is brought
to you by iHeart Radio.
Host
Alec Baldwin
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