Moby Reprised

Moby may be one of the most highly recognizable dance-music artists of all time, but he’s also a talented multi-hyphenate whose unconventional 30-year career includes massive success as a producer and DJ, and notoriety as an animal rights activist. Moby’s latest project, Reprise, is a greatest hits album that revisits the highlights of his extensive catalogue. Recorded with the Budapest Art Orchestra and various vocalists like Jim James, Moby’s most well known electronic songs are reimagined on Reprise into sparse, soul-stirring compositions.

On today’s episode we’ll hear Rick Rubin and Moby reminisce about their early punk rock days in New York City, and the first time Moby ever heard house music while dancing in a club basement next to Prince. Moby also talks about what it was like to be buddies with David Bowie, getting sober, and why he decided to sell the big fancy castle he lived in all by himself.

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You can also check out past episodes here: https://brokenrecordpodcast.com

Check out a playlist of Moby's early influences from the NYC club scene  HERE.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Moby maybe one of the most highly recognizable dance
music artists of all time, but he's also a talented
multi hyphen it whose unconventional thirty year career includes massive
success as a producer and DJ and notoriety as an

(00:36):
animal rights activist. Moby's latest project, Raprise, is the greatest
Hits album that revisits the highlights of his extensive catalog.
The songs are rerecorded with the Budapest Art Orchestra and
various vocalists like Jim James. Moby's most well known electronic
songs are reimagined on Raprise into sparse, soul stirring compositions.

(01:01):
On today's episode, we'll hear Rick Rubin and Moby reminisce
about their early punk rock days in New York City
and the first time Moby ever heard house music while
dancing in a club basement next to Prince. Moby also
talks about what it was like to be buddies with
David Bowie, getting sober, and why he decided to sell
the big fancy castle he lived in all by himself.

(01:25):
This is broken record liner notes for the digital age.
I'm justin Richmonds. Here's a Rick rubin with Moby. I
can tell from the window behind you that you're not
in the house that I last visited you in. No
I had this. I think of it like a Jay

(01:47):
Gatsby epiphany. I was in this huge, crazy castle by myself,
and I at one point asked myself, like, why do
I live by myself in a giant castle? So I
sold the big crazy castle and moved to this much simpler,
prettier house in Los Felis, right by the observatory. Cool.

(02:09):
Tell me a little bit about the experience of recognizing
that moment. What was the moment like and did it
happen at once? I mean, that's the thing with epiphanies.
And I don't know if this has been your experience,
but a lot of the epiphanies I've had have taken
a long time to sort of come to fruition, and
when I finally have them, they're so self evident, so's

(02:31):
it builds for a long time, and then once you
notice it, it's like, how did it take so long
for me to see the elephant in the room? Essentially, yeah,
kind of like you drop a brick on your foot
three hundred times, and after the three hundredth time you
think to yourself, maybe I should stop dropping a brick
on my foot. So this time I was sitting at
my kitchen table in the Crazy Castle, and I was,

(02:53):
I don't know, checking Facebook or looking at CNN on
my laptop, and I thought to myself, why do I
need this giant castle to sit at my kitchen table
and do emails? Because I don't have a family. I'm
just one person. I was like, so why do I
need a bunch of empty rooms that occasionally I go

(03:15):
in and vacuum. So it's just a very a very
self evident rational epiphany that said, I really liked that house,
that that crazy castle was a really cool crazy castle. Yeah,
it amazes me a little bit that somehow I was
ever able to live in a crazy cool castle. Yeah. Absolutely,

(03:38):
I'm glad you did. Actually feel like I feel like
if anyone gets to live in a crazy cool castle,
it might as well be you. And then I had
a really an odd experience with the crazy cool Castle.
After I lived in the crazy cool Castle is the
man I sold it to had a brunch and invited

(03:58):
me to the brunch. And this has some very funny
name dropping in it, and So I went to this
brunch and Robert Downey Junior was at the brunch. So
Robert Downey Jr. And I had been best friends when
we were nine years old? Is that true? And I
hadn't seen him since nineteen seventy four. And so by
my selling the Giant Crazy Castle and then getting getting

(04:23):
invited back to this brunch, I somehow got reunited with
my childhood best friend from nineteen seventy four. For some reason,
I thought you grew up on the East Coast. I
did in Connecticut. Oh? Is he from Connecticut? For two years?
He lived in Darien, Connecticut, and then his family moved
to Essex, and I guess they might have moved back here.

(04:45):
But we lost touch in nineteen seventy four, nineteen seventy five, amazing.
Do you have any idea what year it was that
we first ran into each other? Oh, I remember it exactly.
When was that? It would have been June of nineteen
eighty three in Stamford, Connecticut at the Anthrax. Believable, And

(05:10):
I remember it clearly because it was like a sort
of daytime show at the Anthrax. They had graffiti artists
outside and there was this strange show and Hoes were
the headliners, and my band was one of the earlier bands.
And I remember Brian and Sean, who ran the Anthrax,
came to me and asked if you could borrow my amp.

(05:32):
I remember that, I remember, I remember borrowing your amp.
That's the moment that I remember. But I didn't remember
the name of the club, and I wouldn't have been
able to figure out when it was, just because I'm
not good with dates. But that's amazing that you remember that.
I feel like we both came from we're birth from
the same scene, and we've both had interesting journeys from

(05:54):
that start, maybe not the most obvious journeys. I've always
felt a kinship, like we're very much cut from the
same cloth. Well, I mean, if you think about it,
from the Anthrax was a completely illeite go punk rock
club in Stamford, Connecticut. And Stamford, Connecticut has now become
this global center of finance, but back then it was

(06:17):
sort of like just a burned out rough neighborhood and
it was a storefront and they had a little stage
in the basement. So people might be thinking that this
was some sort of big, slightly more glamorous, legitimate place like. No,
it was an anarcho syndicant punk rock club and it
was a tiny little basement as I recall, Oh, it

(06:39):
was minuscule. Yeah, And then I remember you went to
NYU with my friends Lindsay Anderson and John Farnsworth. Yes,
And here's a really funny memory I have. It would
have been I guess nineteen eighty four at some point, Lindsay,
because I had just started djaying, and Lindsay came to

(07:02):
me and asked if I knew anyone who could help
her friend Rick get a djaying job. Really, yeah, she
said that. She said her friend Rick was looking for
DJ gigs and did I know anyone who was looking
for DJs? Wow? Amazing, Like maybe that was autumn of eight,
I don't know, at some point in nineteen eighty four,

(07:23):
and then I think the next time I ran into
was at Angelica's kitchen buying vegan food. Yeah, And there
were a few there were a few other sightings over
the years. Yeah. I remember when I really got into
the initial surge of rave music, when it was going
on and feeling like the energy of the raves that

(07:44):
I was going to these like illegal weekend raves with
tons of people out in the desert, feeling like the
energy was the first new energy that I was excited
by since hip hop music. And after going to many
of these things and realizing that from my perspective, which
is very much music rooted in a personality, whether it

(08:07):
be the personality of a band or the personality of
person that was for the most part of faceless movement.
And then I saw you perform in that, bringing a
punk rock state of theatrical performance into the rave dance world,

(08:29):
and it was so exciting for me and it made sense.
And I've also found over the years that the people
who made the most interesting dance music were the people
who started by making other kinds of music and then
found their way into dance music, as opposed to people
who started in dance music, which historically there are less
cases where I find that that music interesting. Yeah, I
mean it was strange coming from a sort of punk

(08:51):
rock new wave background. And then similar to you, in
the early eighties, I got really excited by hip hop,
you know, listening to mixtapes from BLS and then I
started djaying and I was playing all this eclectic music,
you know, from hip hop to Johnny Cash to Nitzereb
to just you know, all over the place, and house

(09:13):
music started and it excited me in a way that
dance music never had, you know, I mean dance music,
to be honest with you, I viewed it very suspiciously
up until the mid eighties, you know, and then all
of a sudden I realized, oh, part of my suspicion

(09:33):
about it, part of my apprehension around dance music was
actually cultural that it represented like cultural morais and approaches
to music that were just very for a white kid
from the suburbs. They were just really foreign to me.
But then I realized just because they were foreign, it
didn't mean that I had to have the suspicion around them.

(09:56):
And I don't know if this is you found this
to be the case, but I think that dance Atterria
played a big role in turning me from like a
suburban white kid who just wanted to listen to Black
Flag and joy Division into someone who was open to
so many different musical idioms, you know, because I would

(10:18):
go to dance Ateria to see the Bad Brains or
to see Mission of Burma, or even like the place
like the Peppermint Lounge, and then the DJ beforehand would
be playing hip hop and the DJ afterwards would be
playing gay disco, and I was like, well, I revere
this scene so clearly I need to learn from what

(10:39):
they're doing. You know. The incubator of Lower Manhattan in
the early eighties into the mid eighties really was I
don't know. I feel like in a way that that
that saved me from just being a cliched white kid
from the suburbs who only wanted to listen to guitar
rock from Athens, Georgia. So you're going to danceteria, you're

(11:00):
exposed to dance music in a way that's relatable to you.
Can you remember, like your gateway drug, what was the
first dance oriented artists that you felt like this is
for me. That's a wonderful question, because there was the
sort of dance adjacent stuff that I liked, but I

(11:21):
hadn't even registered that it was dance music, you know.
I remember, like one of the best record buying days
of my entire life was in nineteen eighty two. I
was in a record store in DC and I bought
the Message and Minor Threat out of Step. Good day.
That's a good day. But it hadn't even registered to
me that the message was quote unquote dance music. I

(11:45):
was just like I'd heard it on a Mister Magic
mixtape and I was like, wow, I really liked I
loved the lyrics. I really love this. But the first
dance track do you know what it might have been?
And part of it was because it didn't make any
sense to me until I fell in love with it.
Do you remember the song set it off by Strafe?

(12:06):
Of course incredible And I remember like my friend Diana
brought it to me when I was DJing. She said,
you need to play this and I was like, it's
nine minutes long, no one knows it and it was
so poorly recorded and so poorly mixed. Yeah, but it
was flawless. And I think that was the record where

(12:28):
I was like, Oh, something is happening here that I
need to be aware of because this is you know,
at the time, I was also listening to, you know,
like nice indie rock like Aztec Camera, really pleasant guitar music.
But I heard this and I was like, this is special.
You know, the guitar music I'm listening to is very
well made and it's good, but it's not this, Like

(12:51):
this is this is different and fascinating, amazing. I knew
exactly what you're talking about. There was this moment in
New York where there was a new form of dance
music being created. I don't know what it's referred to,
the subgenre, I don't know what we call it, but
Strafe is a key piece of this eighties New York

(13:12):
club music. It was going on on a parallel trip
of hip hop. I don't know which was influencing which
it was very rooted in the hip hop language, but
it wasn't rap music. But the beats might be interchangeable
between the New York club music and the early hip

(13:33):
hop music. And it was a really exciting time for
dance music. Yeah, and then you would have these hits
that were only hits in geographically tiny parts of the world,
you know, Like you could play set it Off by
Streife and an entire room full of people would scream
at the top of their lungs in Lower Manhattan, and

(13:55):
you'd go ten miles away from Lower Manhattan, no one
has heard this song. Yeah, it was so regional and fascinating.
Early house music was a little bit like that. Like
there were some songs like like break for Love, by Rays.
I don't know if you ever knew that it was
an early seminal house track that was a massive hit
in the house music world in New York City. Outside

(14:15):
of that, no one, No one knew what it was.
What's interesting also about the Strafe song. It was as
big of a club song as there's ever been in
New York and for as big of a hit as
it was, I'm guessing almost no one owned the record
except DJs who would play it at the club. Yeah,

(14:36):
no one had that record. You know, they were not fans,
didn't have that record because that was not the nature
of that culture. You went to the club and you
heard that there because that's where it was, you know,
that's where that was. It wasn't meant to be listened
to in your bedroom. Yeah, it was like or you
heard it on Hot ninety seven on a Friday night, yeah,
or Kiss or BLS. But yeah, you're absolutely right. And

(14:58):
I mean that's one of the things with dance music
in general, because I was growing up, I was used
to music that lived everywhere. You know, like you could
listen to LEDs Eppelin at a party. You could also
listen to led Zeppelin in the morning while you were
making breakfast, whereas a lot of electronic music was so
in a way site specific, like even to this day,

(15:21):
like there's there's club music that I love at a
big event with fifty thousand people that I would never
in a million years want to take into my home. Yeah,
but I'm now I'm really curious about You're right because
that genre it was basically dance music. It was like
post disco, prehouse music. Yes, and it didn't know what

(15:44):
it was. It didn't have any like there was no
conformity to certain bpms or anything. It was just this
free floating, slightly nebulous dance music and it was a
really fascinating time. It was a lot more experimental because
there was freestyle. If you remember freestyle, you know, which
was great, but freestyle was a very specific, regimented BPM

(16:06):
in genre. Yeah, but this would have like this. This
was also the music that Madonna really blossomed out of,
like she was part of that culture and then transcended it.
But that was really the early Madonna fit really into
that New York dance club mode as well as like
AEIOU or Evelyn Champagne King or Lisa Lisa. Yeah, I

(16:31):
haven't thought. I haven't thought of Lisa Lisa and such
a Lisa Lisa and the cult jam because it was
like she had roughly the same acronym as LLL cool J.
But it's funny that you mentioned Aeiou by Ebanosen because
I just recently rediscovered that song and video. If you're bored,
go take a look at it and read the lyrics.

(16:54):
I would posit the strangest song in Western pop music history.
Like the lyrics are so phenomenal and they make absolutely
no sense. It's like a grad student dissertation on semiotic
while a guys talking about trying to pick up a
girl at a cafe. Amazing. I had completely forgotten about

(17:16):
that song. It's just it's but that you're right that
that weird incubator of New York that's so much, so
much music, so much art, so much culture came out
of because it was just everybody was influencing everybody else,
and it was kind of like everyone was open to everything. Yeah,
it was breakdancing music before rap music. That was the

(17:39):
music that would people would break dance with. I want
to say with because you didn't really break dance to
music you break dance with music. Yeah, you know, I
mean think of Blondie, you know, coming out of that
scene as well, going back a little bit more into
the late seventies. But yeah, I'm really grateful that I
grew up within driving distance of New York and I
could be exposed to that or also within radio distance.

(18:02):
It's also interesting that another thing that we share is
that we're both suburban kids who had access to New
York City, which is really different than kids who grew
up in New York City because the kids who grew
up in New York City didn't have that suburban experience
that's more rooted in America. Like our experience is much

(18:26):
closer to what the American experiences than kids who grew
up in New York City. Yeah. And I was born
in New York, but I grew up in Connecticut, and
I would meet people who grew up in the city
and I would just be amazed, like they were a
different species. I was like, you were born like so
far up the cool ladder than I will ever attain to. Yeah,
because it just seemed like the idea that they would

(18:48):
do normal things, especially in the seventies, you know, in
the most dangerous, darkest place in the world. They would
be going to elementary school, they would be having sleepovers,
they would be buying ice cream, And I was like,
you did that in New York? Like, how did people
manage to have childhoods in New York City? You know,

(19:11):
when you're like dodging muggers and addicts and crazy people.
And from a musical perspective, something like being able to
like led Zeppelin was essentially a suburban thing. Like led
Zeppelin wasn't cool enough to listen to if you grew
up in Manhattan. It was just a different taste. It

(19:34):
was too mainstream from Manhattan. Yeah, I mean I do
remember meeting people who like, by the time they were eighteen,
if they'd grown up in the city, they were done.
They were jaded. Yeah, Like they've been going to clubs
since they were thirteen. They had gone to rehab when
they were fifteen. You know, they had started their first
band when they're sixteen and broken up and gotten their

(19:55):
first record deal at seventeen. So by eighteen they were
like ready to move to New Mexico and RETIREE. What
was the first punk show you ever saw? Oh? So
this is I made some good choices early on My
first real concert was Yes at Madison Square Garden in
seventy eight, and I love Yes unapologetically. Maybe less so

(20:17):
with the Trevor Horn era, but like early, like close
to the edge. Yes, I just still think it's flawless.
My first punk rock show and I got really lucky
was Fear at the Mud Club. Wow, that's a great one.
I think I was there. I think I was fifteen,
or maybe it just turned sixteen yea, and yeah it was.

(20:38):
It was phenomenal. And then after that we discovered great
Guilder Sleeves. We discovered A seven because my friends and
I were from the suburbs and we knew nothing, so
we thought A seven was a concert venue. And again
to put it in perspective for anyone listening, A seven
was another. It was a hole in the wall dive.
It was a bar with a little stage, and we
went there to see one of my favorite punk rock bands, Krout. Yeah,

(21:01):
And so we thought, okay, Krout and maybe the Cromags
or Burfie's Law or someone was playing at A seven,
to like, We're gonna go to A seven and see
this show. We got there at nine. Bar wasn't even
open yet, Finally the doors opened nine thirty or ten.
We go in and we ask the bartender do you
know when Kraut are playing? And he said, well, that's

(21:22):
my band. Turns out Dougie, the guitar players also the bartender,
and he says, and we're probably gonna go on around two.
Keep in mind, we're sixteen year old kids from the suburbs.
We didn't even know two am existed, like two am.
No one was ever awake at two am, like, let
alone playing a show. But we stayed up and we waited,

(21:43):
and we saw Krout at A seven with a bunch
of other bands I don't remember. Amazing, yeah, a seven.
I saw the Swans at a seven. That was really good.
We could go down so many rabbit holes about genres,
but that mid to late eighties noise genre in New York.
You know, diamonda Glass and the Swans and the Birthday Party.

(22:06):
And I got to see the Birthday Party play at
the club called the Underground. Do you remember the Underground?
I remember the name, but I never went there. Yeah,
it was it was. There would be no reason for
you to go, it would. They've had very few acts
that we would ever go to see but the Birthday
Party happened to be playing there, so I went and
I was one of maybe twelve people in the room

(22:28):
to see the show, and the plug got pulled on
them after the second song. I love them like Prayers
on Fire. I think it's just one of the most
flawless records. Beautiful. But I actually went back and re
listened to it and it's still great. But I don't
know how they came to be because they're from Australia,
and Australia is a wonderful place. But Australia is like

(22:50):
sunshine and blonde people and happiness, and you just wonder, like,
what in Australia created the birthday party? I'm glad it happened. Yeah.
Have you spent much chime in Australia, Yeah, I have
to say so. I got sober about thirteen years ago,
pre sobriety. Australia was absolutely my favorite place in the world,

(23:12):
Like as far as a place to go out and
just be a carefree, happy, go lucky alcoholic, Australia was
pretty special. When we come back, Mobi talks to Rick
Rubin about getting sober. We're back with more of Rick
Rubin's conversation with Mobby, tell me the story of getting sober.

(23:33):
It's similar to what we were talking about at the beginning.
It's sort of like the self evident epiphany that just
takes you a very long time to realize. So I'd
started drinking and doing drugs when I was ten. My
mom and her boyfriends used to do a lot of drugs,
so I'd steal drugs from them, and then I started
drinking and had bouts of sobriety, but kept drinking and

(23:56):
doing drugs up until thirteen years ago. And honestly, like
the consequences of drinking and doing drugs just kept getting
worse when you're sixteen years old. In fact, you might
think this is funny. The first celebrity I ever met
was Ian mackay at Great Gilder Sleeves. Ian mackay from

(24:17):
Fugazi and Minor Threat, and I was so excited to
meet him. I ran up to him and introduced myself.
I was like, I said, my name's Moby, Mister McKay
just loved your band and shook his hand. I was
blind drunk at the time. And Ian McKay is the
man who invented straight edge. Yes, so I just kept
drinking and doing more drugs and occasionally experimenting with sobriety.

(24:37):
And then, finally, thirteen years ago, after years of waking
up at five in the afternoon on a daily basis
hung over and sick and despondent, I finally realized that
it was time to stop. You know, I realized being
sick and despondent and miserable day after day after day

(25:01):
after day was not a good thing, which, in hindsight,
is the most self evident realization any one could have. Like, normally,
you only have to eat rotten food a few times
to decide you'd no longer want to eat rotten food.
I had to be sick and hung over thousands of times,

(25:21):
thousands upon thousands of times to finally accept that being
hungover and miserable was not a good way to live.
I'm happy you found peace without that that method. Oh yeah,
I mean it's I mean, and obviously getting sobers challenging
because drinking and doing drugs becomes your soul reliable organizing principle.

(25:45):
You know, it delivers misery, but before that, it delivers
controlled happiness. So it's a very hard thing to give up.
The familiar, even if the familiar is destroying you. Yeah,
but I am thrilled for so many reasons to no
longer be a sad, embarrassing, miserable alcoholic drug addict. Would

(26:07):
you say that you drugs and drinking to escape? I
used drugs and drinking because and this is something about
the physiology of an alcoholic or the neurochemistry of an
alcoholic alcohol I love drugs a lot, like I did
any drug that was put in front of me. But
really my drug of choice was alcohol. And it's sort

(26:30):
of interesting. Half my family is white Anglo Saxon Protestant
and the other half of my family is Jewish. And
what's funny is in my family, the white Anglo Saxon
Protestants were all alcoholics, and the Jews in my family
have no issue with drinking whatsoever and don't and for
the life of them, can't understand why the Wasps can't

(26:51):
just drink in moderation. But for me, alcohol did everything.
Was this magical drug where it calmed me down and
it woke me up. Yeah, you know, it excited me,
it relaxed me, It kept me awake when I needed
to be awake, and helped me fall asleep when I
needed to fall asleep. It gave me confidence, but it

(27:14):
also helped me access the surreal parts of my brain,
like there was nothing it couldn't do. But then, ultimately, obviously,
when you rely on anything outside of yourself, it goes wrong.
How has it been coming to meet yourself after all
this time? What's it like? It's very challenging, And I

(27:38):
would say, like anybody meeting themselves in an honest way,
it's hard. And one of the hardest things that I
was actually just thinking about recently, like one of my
pandemic projects for myself, and it's gonna sound fancier than
it is because I haven't actually finished any of the books,
was to go back and reread a lot of the

(27:59):
books that I started reading in university because I was
a philosophy major and I'd never finished any of the
books I was reading. So I got like Wittgenstein, like
the Tractatis and the Brown and Blue books. I was
reading some Schopenhauer and reading Young and about the sort
of the schism between Young and Freud, and obviously Young

(28:20):
and I'm grossly paraphrasing, but he writes a lot about
the idea of a shadow self. And I don't know
about you, but when I was growing up, I thought
that the shadow self was evil. I thought that the
shadow self was like this, you know, the Nietzsche quote
of like don't stare too long into the void because
the void might stare back into you, and like it

(28:42):
seems so menacing for me. What I think I've realized
is my shadow self is actually just embarrassing, Like it's
the part of it. Like it's not some menacing Dexter
style serial killer. It's just it's like an awkward adolescent.
And one of the hardest things, Like if I had
a buried psychopath in me, I could probably make peace

(29:04):
with that easier than I can make peace with the
awkward lescent in me, you know, like the vulnerable human, awkward,
frail part of me. That's the like coming to terms
with that and learning to like that part of yourself.
I found that to be a real challenge because I
always wanted to be cool and not awkward and you know,

(29:29):
confident and recognizing like, okay, no, I'm not those things.
And I can't have an honest assessment of self without
looking at that. And before would drinking and drugs would
just hide that away. You wouldn't have to face it,
you would never have to acknowledge it was there. Is
that great? Oh yeah, it was like the Jim Carrey
movie The Mask, Like all of a sudden you just

(29:52):
became the most ideal version of yourself, at least as
far as how I perceived myself. Other people were like, oh,
who's that sad asshole? Like what, like he's gross? But
in my mind I was like confident and you know, powerful,
even if outside people are looking at me like I

(30:13):
was just some sort of like tragic, aging bald musician,
you know, But in my mind, I was like Johnny
Depp meets Orlando Bloom and the outside, you know, the
outside world saw me as a little bit more like
Wally Sewn in The Princess Bride. How did drugs affect
music making over the course of your life. Well, the

(30:34):
funny thing is, and I still don't know how this
was possible. I never once performed drunk or high wow,
And I never drank or did drugs when I was
working on music. Interesting, like, these were the only parts
of my life that were carved out. Like if I
was on tour, I would drink and do drugs the

(30:56):
moment I stepped off stage. But I think there was
some little part of my brain that said, no, Like
you can destroy everything else. You can destroy relationships, you
can destroy your health, but music is this sort of
slightly sacred space. You cannot corrupt it beautiful. Although there

(31:19):
was one time, and part of it was based on experience.
One time, I remember being out and I thought, like,
you know what, a lot of great artists have made
great drunken records. And so I remember coming home from
a bar four in the morning and I thought, I'm
going to write and record a song drunk, because I've
never done this before. And in the morning I listened

(31:41):
to it and it was just bad. Not interesting, bad,
not exciting bad, just garbage bad, you know. Like so
that that also helped me to never drink or do
drugs when making music. How has your relationship to music
changed from when you started till now? I love that

(32:04):
question because it is actually gone to a place of
this wonderful purity. Meaning in the early days, everything about
the world of music was exciting. Record labels seemed exciting,
music magazines were exciting. Everything even tangentially related to the

(32:27):
world of music was like so phenomenally exciting. And then
when I got involved in the music business, as I'm
sure you can relate to its a lot of people can,
there was that sort of the straddling of you, how
do you maintain and learn from and respond to the
like the dynamic or dialectic between art and commerce. And

(32:51):
then once I had a degree of success, I found
myself loving success, and I found myself ashamedly and sort
of and very sadly making compromises to try and further success.
I wasn't very good at it luck, And then I

(33:11):
had this epiphany, helped by David Lynch. I went to
go see see David Lynch speak at BAFTA in the UK,
and he said something so simple. He was on stage
being interviewed and he said, creativity is beautiful. My direct
quote from David Lynch, and it just struck me, and

(33:32):
all of a sudden, I realized, Oh, he's right. Like
the marketplace is okay, record labels are fine, there's nothing
wrong with them, you know, like marketing, campaign selling. Sure,
that's fine. But music has the potential to be sublime.
And I'm not even talking about my music, I'm talking

(33:53):
about just music in general. If you think about it,
the fact that music on a corporeal physical level has
never existed. You know, all it is, And forgive me
how I'm really stating the obvious. All it is is
air molecules hit us a little bit differently, you know.
And somehow, these air molecules touching us differently, it makes

(34:14):
us cry, makes us get tattoos, it makes us jump
up and down in a field with one hundred thousand people.
It's just air moving a little bit differently. And so
my long rambling answer to your question, I've found myself
returned to this place of like almost purity and spirituality

(34:36):
around music, like the love of music for the sake
of music. And if it has commercial viability, fine, but
that's not the goal or the utility of it. It's
that ability to somehow communicate emotion through moving air molecules.

(34:56):
Like what better way for us to spend our lives
than in service of that. Yes, it's unbelievable that we
get to do it. I feel very blessed and lucky
to get to have that be the the thing I
get to spend my time doing. And it is miraculous
and it's magic, and I think it must always be

(35:18):
approached with humility because it's so much bigger than we are.
You know, really, it really is a tremendous You described
it in a very ephemeral way that said, it's this
huge power that's really beyond us, beyond our understanding, and

(35:39):
the fact that we get to dance around the edges
of it is just a beautiful, so lucky that we
get to do that. Yeah, I would say that. I mean,
even my broader spiritual understanding is sort of what you
just described, is like dancing around things that we will
never understand. Yeah, whether it's nature, whether it's science, whether

(36:03):
it's music, whether it's people at their best, but just
somehow getting glimpses of what, for lack of a better word,
I guess we could call the divine. Yes, you know,
and I don't know when I say divine. I know
that such an I had. I had dinner with um
Sam Harris, and I think I really offended him because
I was talking about the divine, and I realized in hindsight, like, oh,

(36:27):
maybe not such a good idea to talk about the
divine with one of the world's most famous atheists. But
I don't know how else to describe it. Yeah, you
know what what you just described then the unquantifiable that
is somehow a trillion times bigger than we are, but

(36:48):
somehow we're involved in it. Like if there's a better
word than divine, I don't know what it like, it
doesn't matter. It's like it doesn't matter what label you
decide to use. I know exactly what you're talking about,
and so did Sam. He was still kind of I
could tell he and his wife were a little a
little peeved that I would use that works. I also

(37:10):
made the mistake with them of using the word God,
And in hindsight, this was my fault because, like I
think they even said, like, why would you use that word?
And I thought about it, I was like, oh, you're right, Like,
if ever there has a more corrupted word in human history,
it's God. And if I use the word God to
mean these elements, I don't understand everything we just described. Clearly,

(37:36):
that's not what most people in human history have used
the word God to describe. So I'm trying to back
away from that word because it's so triggering understandably for
so many people. I don't know that the word is
triggering so much as the concept is triggering and though
you could label it differently, to someone who would be
triggered by the word, what you're talking about would still

(37:56):
be a foreign, foreign and perhaps offensive concept. And that's okay,
because we all have our own experience of life, and
you know, we're allowed to like some things and other
people don't like them, and that's you know, a lot
of people don't like punk rock. We happen to like
punk rock. You know, I like disco music, not a
lot of you know, many people don't like disco music.

(38:16):
It's okay. So speaking of punk rock, I'm wondering because
there aren't too many people. And if you were not
going to join me in this club, that's fine. Is
one of the things I've done in the Pandemics, I've
gone down this weird rabbit hole of the loudest, noisiest,

(38:37):
dishybrid of punk rock and speed metal, and I love
it so much, and I cannot find anybody else on
the planet who likes it. Even my punk rock friends
don't like it. Like there's this one band ac x
DC spelled exactly the same as a CDC, but it's
there they for them, it stands for Antichrist Demon Corps

(39:01):
and they're these wonderful Latino vegans who live in the valley,
and the music they make is so oh. It's takes
the hardcore we grew up with, take Slayer yeah, and
then make it faster and harder. So much so I
sent it to Daryl from The Bad Brains and he

(39:22):
was like, I will not listen to this ship, Like,
please do not corrupt me with this. And some of
the stuff I've gotten into reminds is starting to remind
me of that where it's like everybody in my life
thinks it's unlistenable and I love it. We have to
pause for a quick break, but we'll be right back
with more from Moby. We're back with the rest of

(39:46):
Rick Rubens conversation with Moby. What have you been listening
too lately? Besides speed punk the most eclectic stuff, I
listened to a lot of classical music, although my interest
in classical music is pretty pedestrian, like I like classical
music when it's very pretty, but also a lot and

(40:08):
I'm also little bit ashamed because none of this is new.
But a lot of old new wave from like seventy
eight until about eighty four, you know, from early Devo
to early Robin Hitchcock Blondie. I've been rediscovering one band

(40:29):
I'd forgotten about completely who I've realized I love and
I also feel like they were performance artists. Was the Cars?
I want to reference something recent. I don't want to
just be another like just an old guy on Spotify
listening to music from childhood. But the truth is I'm
an old guy from on Spotify listening music from my childhood. Usually.

(40:53):
Let's talk about the cars for a minute, because as
you talk about them, I think about the vocal style
of the Cars that was different than music that had
come before it. Do you have any idea what the
lineage of that might have been? Not really, although the
only thing I can think of is that they were

(41:13):
from Boston, and I don't know if they were inspired
by the Modern Lovers and Jonathan Richmond at all. That's interesting,
But there is like you'd listened to, like the directness
of a song like Pablo Picasso maybe influenced Rick Okasick
in the Cars. I don't know. Yeah, I was. I
was thinking maybe, and I never made the connection before

(41:35):
this conversation, but I was thinking maybe Bowie. I mean,
everybody who was smart enough to figure it out was
influenced by Bowie. I feel like some people like Rick Okasick,
who might have been like it wasn't a good enough
singer to be David Bowie, but could still employ that
sort of you know, the theatricality and the phrasing and

(41:56):
maybe because a little bit of you know, Iggy pop,
because there's a similar sort of like Midwestern drawl aspect
to it. And I think Iggy was really often channeling
Lou Read I think, like, I think that's the lineage. Yeah,
I mean, and I know that David Bowie was obsessed

(42:17):
with the Velvet Underground, And in fact, I actually had
dinner with David and Lou once. It was one of
those moments that it still doesn't seem like it should
have existed in the realm of possibility, like walking to
David Bowie's apartment to have dinner with David and Lou incredible. Yeah,

(42:40):
growing up listening to musicians who you know and deifying
them and then time passes. I'm sure you've had this
experience more than anyone. Becoming friends with and working with
your heroes. I feel like at this point you've done
that so many times you must be relatively comfortable with
the process. Yes, and no, it's still I mean, it's

(43:03):
still unbelievable anytime I'm lucky enough to be around anyone
who makes something great. So it's exciting, And honestly, it's
maybe more intimidating when you grew up listening to them,
but it's equally exciting when it's a young artist, even
making their first or second project. But you see that

(43:23):
level of originality and sophistication and next level thinking in
their work. Do you know what I'm saying? Like the
excitement of being around really creative people, it's always thrilling.
Can you I mean, I don't want to put you
on the spot. Can you name names like people who
stand out when you think of that? Well, I can

(43:45):
tell you, like, in terms of people that I've been
around where I feel intimidated, it'd be like, you know,
Neil Young is intimidating to be around, even though there's
nothing about him that's intimidating, but he's on such a
high pedestal in my life that I'm on edge when
I see him. Do you know it's funny? Sorry for interrupting,
but I A few years ago, I was at a

(44:06):
gallery event with Shepherd fairy and Shephard asked me, He said, oh,
Neil Young is here. Do you want to meet him?
And I actually said no, yeah, And I was like,
the reason being is like, I'm sure that he's wonderful.
I'm sure he's a delightful human being, but what if
I catch him at a bad moment and what if
for a brief second he's a dick to me? I

(44:28):
was like, that compromises my ability to love after the
gold Rush and Helpless And I was like, I was like,
I'm not willing to potentially jeopardize those songs for me. Yeah.
And so it's the one time I chose not to
meet one of my heroes in the interest of making
sure that I didn't compromise my ability to unconditionally love

(44:50):
these songs. No, I understood. I mean, some people are
so iconic, for better or worse, that it's hard to
remember that they're real humans. Yeah. I had a similar
weird experience. I played a fundraiser once and Paul McCartney
playing on the bill and he was sound checking, and

(45:13):
he sound checked with Hey Jude, and so it's just
him at the piano playing Hey Jude, no band, nothing,
And I sat ten feet away from that, and I
was like, oh he wrote this, Like there was a
day when in the morning this song didn't exist, and

(45:33):
at some point during the day he wrote this song,
this song which it seems like, I mean, a song
like that so iconic that it seems like no one
ever wrote it. It was just sort of like carved
from granite at some point. Yes, forever it's been it's
been here forever. Yeah, there's there was no world before that.

(45:54):
And so being able to say, like, I can't believe
that there is actually like a flesh and blood person
attached to this. Obviously it's not even my favorite Beatles song,
but it was just this moment of like the cognitive
dissonance of oh, these some of these people are actually humans,
Like they're not gods, they're not cartoon characters. Like I

(46:15):
went on tour with David Bowie, and I remember the
last night of the tour in we were at the
Gorge outside Seattle, and he was backstage and he was
so delightful and goofy, like we'd spent a ton of
time together, but this was the first time I had
seen him at his most unguarded, like he was sweaty,

(46:36):
he'd just had a wonderful show, and he was human,
almost going back to what we were talking about earlier,
like the shadow self, Like this might have been like
his shadow self, because it was childlike and delightful, you know,
like maybe a part of him that he didn't want
people to see that much. And it was so endearing
and so lovely. And I was like, this is David Bowie,

(46:59):
Like this is the greatest musician of all time, and
he's acting like a super lovely, goofy fourteen year old
right now. How did you come to meet him? Originally? Well,
I actually met him for the first time at a
nine inch Nails party, but we didn't really get to
talk much. And then in nineteen ninety nine or two thousand,

(47:21):
he emailed me and he said, Hi, it's David. I
got your email address from someone at my record company.
I'm moving into an apartment on Lafayette Street and I
think we're going to be neighbors. And so we lived
across the street from each other and we became friends.
We would get coffee together, we spent holidays together, we

(47:46):
worked on music together, we toured together. Can I tell
you one of my favorite favorite David Bowie stories please, Okay.
So we had agreed to play a fundraiser for Philip
Glasses to Beth House, and so he came over to
my apartment one morning. He stopped at Cafe Giton to
get coffee, so he came over with coffee and we

(48:08):
sat on my soa and I worked up all my
courage and I said, what if we play an acoustic
version of Heroes at this fundraiser? And I thought he
was going to say no, no, how dare you suggest that?
And instead he said sure, why not? So he sat
on my sofa, just the two of us, and played
this very slow, pretty quiet version of Heroes and it

(48:32):
was like one of the most wonderful moments of my life.
And then, afterwards, tying it back to lou Reid, David
told me that Heroes was originally written as a cover
version of Waiting for the Man. Wow Dun dun dun
dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun un. I'm
waiting for the man. We we would be, you know.

(48:56):
So that was That's my favorite David Bowie story. Fantastic. Actually, no,
I have a second favorite David Bowie story, but it's
much let's hear it, it's more nuanced. Okay, let's let's
hear it. I was at his apartment and he had
a very small studio in his apartment, and he wanted
to play me something and it's like, okay, great, he says.

(49:18):
He said, it's a song I'm working on. I'd love
your opinion. And I, first of all, just to put
that in perspective, like I'm at David Bowie's apartment and
he wants to play me a song to get my opinion.
Like that's not right, that's not the way it's supposed
to be. Like I'm supposed to be maybe like cleaning
the toilets in the apartment adjacent to David Bowie's apartment,
not in his apartment. But he plays me this song

(49:40):
and it's the most beautiful David Bowie song ever. It's
called slip Away and it's on the album Heathen, and
it's I would say, the most personal song he's ever written.
It's actually inspired by his love, like his love with
Iggy Pop, like you know, friendship. Whether it was more
than friendship, I don't really know, but like it's this

(50:02):
beautiful love song and it is so emotional, and I
that moment of just sitting in his studio where he
played the CD the demo of this song for me,
and he was nervous and it was done, and I
was like, David, I said, that might be the most

(50:23):
beautiful song you've ever written. How did he react to
that comment? You know, it's funny because we never talked
about music. If I remember, he responded a little formally
and in a polite way, which is the same way
I respond to people telling me about music. Like he
almost like he took it in, but I could tell
a sort of a wall came up. I think he

(50:46):
felt exposed because it if you think about it, most
of his music is not personal. It's beautiful, it's phenomenal,
but rarely did he write personal songs. You know, they're
very theatrical. I mean even Heroes. Heroes was written about
Tony Visconti, and this song slip Away is so personal,

(51:09):
and I think it I think I saw his defenses
come down because he realized he was being perhaps a
little too vulnerable. Yeah, what was the greatest dance music
experience you've ever had out in the world. Okay, they're
gonna be two of them. One was the first time

(51:30):
I heard house music loud in a club. I think
he would have been eighty eight or eighty nine. I
was at Nels and I was in the basement. I
was dancing next to Prince, the only time I ever
saw Prince in person when he was dancing next to
me in the basement of Nels, and the DJ, who

(51:51):
I think was Frankie I Gleasias, played a Day in
the Life and it sounded like the heavens opening up.
The second was in about two thousand and seven, No,
maybe two thousand and eight. I got asked to DJ
at an Electric Daisy Carnival, and I had been sort

(52:16):
of ignoring what I was like. I'd sort of been
ignoring the dance music quote unquote underground for a while.
So I was asked to DJ at this. What I
thought was just like an outdoor, small, outdoor rave, and
so much so that when my manager asked me about

(52:36):
if I wanted to DJ at this, he said, oh,
there's a rave in Los Angeles, do you want to
DJ at it? And my response was they still have raves,
and so I thought, I don't know, I'm going to
feel there'll be a thousand people it was in the
usc Stadium and there were seventy five thousand people, and

(52:57):
I was so stunning, Like to expect nothing and to
have an underground event with seventy five thousand people in
a sports stadium and the level of joyful enthusiasm, Like
there were just a couple of records that I played
that were so euphoric, and to have seventy five thousand

(53:18):
people responding in kind. I mean, that's happened to many times,
but something about this was just really special amazing. Do
you do any type of a spiritual practice? For most
of my life I was a sort of I would think,
if it's almost like a spiritual dilaton, sometimes out of curiosity,

(53:42):
sometimes out of a desire to not piss off whatever
deity might be out there. But for most of my
life I realized that my spirituality was largely trying to
figure out who I agreed with, like which spiritual tradition

(54:05):
I agreed with, or which spiritual writer did I agree with?
And then I had this another sort of epiphany, and
it was a weirdly emotional epiphany, and I don't even
I might even get emotional again. I was taking Amtrak
from New York down to DC and it was one
of those morning trains where like people are eating breakfast, etc.

(54:28):
And I was looking around and there were all these
unhealthy business people, like drinking coke, eating bacon, and I
had this thought. I was like, Oh, nature, the universe
cares about us so much. It's even trying to heal
these people. Like these people who do nothing but punish themselves,

(54:52):
these people who eat nothing but poison, the universe loves
them like it's in and it's trying to heal them.
And actually, sitting on Amtrak, I started crying with that thought.
And I remember like going through the marshland, the meadowlands
in New Jersey, looking out at the marsh, and I
was like, it was similar to looking at the businessman.

(55:13):
I was like, here's this marsh that we've done nothing
but poor toxic chemicals into and life is still coming
through it. So my spiritual practice is best described as
trying to connect with whatever that source might be, trying
to have an understanding of it, trying to recognize that

(55:37):
it's will, Like I don't want to anthropomorphize it, but
if it has a will, it probably has omniscience and
perspective much greater than I do you know, I'm a
short lived, flawed, weird, bald guy like I don't know anything.
So if there is a universe with a will, it
probably makes sense to seek its will rather than try

(55:58):
and pose my will on it. Yes, beautiful, So that's
my spiel. Tell me a little bit about the new album,
or let me start by saying, I listened to it
this morning as I was on my morning walk, and
it really took my breath away. I think it's really
a beautiful album, and I'm so glad you made it. Well. Thanks.

(56:21):
So it's an orchestral greatest Hits album. I wouldn't else
to describe it, and the selfish part of me wanted
to make it because I'd never made a record in
this way, you know, working with a string quartet, working
with a gospel choir, working with an orchestra, working with
you only live non for the most part, non electronic instruments.

(56:46):
But the other part was just the love. And we
were talking about Neil Young earlier, like the love of
acoustic and orchestral music and how I don't know how
effective not to be too clinical, but how effective orchestral
and acoustic music can be delivering emotion, you know, because
ultimately that's the utility of music, is delivering emotion, and

(57:09):
I wanted to see what that was like to try
and use these elements to create something that hopefully was Yeah,
so that's that was the reason behind it. And Yeah,
and being able to get all these different performers. I mean, obviously,
the person whose voice on the record I'm a Little

(57:29):
I'm most in love with is Chris Christofferson. Yeah, similar
to I've actually compared it to Johnny Cash's version of Hurt,
where when you hear a voice that's the product of experience,
you know, a voice that has lived experience, it makes
you not want to listen to children anymore, you know.

(57:51):
Like like after listening to this song from Chris Christofferson
with Mark Lanigan, who also has a voice of experience,
the idea of going and listening to nineteen year old
pop singers just doesn't seem as compelling. Yeah, you were
on Mute records for a long time. Yes, I still
sort of am. I've been on Mute Records somewhere in

(58:14):
some form for now almost thirty years. This record is
on Deutsche Gramophone because it just they asked and it
seemed like, if you're going to make a large like
a record based around an orchestra, why not make it
with the oldest, most venerated orchestral music label in the world. So,

(58:36):
and I have to say, because when I was nineteen,
I worked in a record store and I would unpack
the boxes and there would be the records that had
the Deutsche Gramophone logo on them, and I was like,
this is so fancy, like this is from Europe, and
they're like these this is wow, this is so much
more legitimate than these other records. And I just recently

(58:57):
got the vinyl of this album and I saw the
Deutsche Gramophone logo on one of my records, and it
just it definitely not what you expect as someone who
used to play in a hardcore punk rock band in
a basement of illegal anarchists clubs in Stanford, Connecticut. It's great,

(59:18):
Thank you for doing this, amazing. Oh, this was so
much fun. I had sort of even forgotten that we
were recording this. Yeah, I feel like we have a
million things to talk about forever. Thanks to Moby for
sharing so many great stories from his career. To hear
his new album, or Prise, and our favorite Moby tracks

(59:40):
had a Broken Record Podcast dot he should have subscribe
to our YouTube channel at YouTube dot com slash broken
Record Podcast. We can find all of our new episodes.
You can follow us on Twitter at broken Record. Broken
Record is produced with helpful Lea Rose, Jason Gambrel, Martin Gonzalez,
Eric Sandler, and Jennifer Sanchez, with engineering help from Nick Chafee.

(01:00:02):
Our executive producer is Mail LaBelle. Broken Record is a
production of Pushkin Industries and if you like the show,
please rememriders, share, rate, and review us on your podcast.
Our theme mus explay Kenny Beats. I'm justin Richmond, h