May 28, 2019 • 50 mins
Moby had already put out four studio albums when Play was released in 1999. He was solidly into his 30s, playing gigs in record stores and thinking about a career-change. But Play, against all expectations, started selling. Then it started selling out. There was champagne, then vodka, then cocaine. He swung between drug-induced euphoria and thoughts of suicide. The stories of stardom he tells Alec are both funny and troubling. But Moby saw his way out of the spiral. Now a decade without drugs or alcohol, he's remarkably open about his darkness, and the weird hippie childhood that laid the groundwork for it. He and Alec sat down last month and swapped stories of sobriety and celebrity. Moby's new memoir is Then It Fell Apart.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing,
O Lot, Travel so hard, Oh love so hid, don't
know that God in You're Cool. Friends put on Mobi's
(00:21):
play at parties in two thousands, it was on the radio.
Popularity snowballed into ubiquity. In two thousand one, Play was
in malls and Volkswagen ads. It became the biggest selling
electronica album of all time. Two fans. Outside the electronic
(00:48):
music world, Moby seemed like an overnight success, but he
was thirty three in 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 to the worst
(01:10):
sort of rock star 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 of
his book. Moby is coming to terms with the album
(01:33):
going platinum. What do you think happened inside the music?
In that album that was different. Did something click? Did
something changed all of a sudden, You're a monolith in
the music business. Yeah, And to contextualize it, before that
album Play came out, my career had essentially ended. I'd
lost my record deal. It's very dark time. My mom
had died, I was I was living on Mott Street, um,
(01:57):
and I recorded Play where in my drum on Mott Street,
And well, actually I slept in the closet, and I
had my my bedroom had been turned into an ad
hoc recording studio, and and I thought, so I had
made Play, my last album had failed completely, and I'd
lost my record deal. I was signed to Elektra, and
(02:19):
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 to fame is they'd never dropped an artist like Yeah,
So I was like, I couldn't really take too much
comfort in the fact that I hadn't lost my deal
with Mute when they had never ever dropped an artists. Well,
Richard Branson started a label called V two, and someone
(02:42):
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 closet. Living in my closet. Well,
(03:04):
the building was from the mid nineteenth century on Mont Street,
and it had been a slaughter house, so the space
I was living in this is weird as an animal
rights vegan. The floor is all sloped to central drains
because when it had been a slaughter house they would
just hose the floors out and all the awful would
just get washed out in the drains. So I'm in
that environment thinking I'm going to move back to Connecticut.
(03:26):
I'm gonna get a job teaching community college, like 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 do your question of, like, musically, why
that happened? I still to this day because a lot
of the vocals on play were like old African American
(03:47):
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 have been dead for a
few decades. Like, that's not a recipe for a hit record.
I remember at some point it's sold fifty thousand records
(04:09):
because I thought it was gonna sell nothing, and I
was amazed that my album has told fifty thou records
and then six months later it was selling a hundred
thousand copies a week. What did people respond to the
only people are listening to your music and buying your
music in a world that has choked with music. It
was there was so much stuff out there they can
(04:31):
listen to, and they buy ten million copies of your album?
Why do you think you know? 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 two I kept. I
was like, how do I recreate that? And I never
(04:52):
really could Like that one sort of weird lightning in
a bottle moment. I don't I mean, I don't want
to anthropomorphize a 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
(05:13):
come close to killing you and you're gonna hopefully learn
something from it. So there was like and again that
that might sound very narcissistic, like I've just anthropomorphized a
thirteen point eight billion year old universe, but it felt like,
at the end of the day, more than anything else, educational,
like the universe is gonna say like, okay, you live
in a time to ANTHROPOMORPHI the universe part of the
(05:35):
human condition. Let's go from there. Then, so the album
comes out, it's difficult for some people to say this
is his style. You've had 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. We went a chorus with a church with
a music school. It was weird. I started playing guitar.
(05:56):
I guess when those are a nine or ten because
one of my mom's boyfriend friends had gone to jail
and left a guitar behind. But your mother is kind
of from a privileged background Connecticut quasi, I mean, like
my grandfather worked on Wall Street. But then my mom
sort of rejected that the sixties progressed and she fully
(06:17):
embraced the hippie lifestyle. But your dad, your dad passed
away when I was too, so when you were too
And how long did you stay in New York? After
he passed away? My mom moved back to Connecticut to
get her undergraduate at East Khan if that is even
still a school, and then we went to San Francisco
in nine where everything sort of fell apart. And that
(06:38):
three so right after your dad passed away, she finished school,
say school, 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 so did you have any ideas why?
I have a feeling half of it was rejecting, like
growing up in Dary in Connecticut, being encouraged by her
(07:01):
parents to sort of be very conservative and very traditional. Um,
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 original paradigm. That's
when it's been copied since. Yeah, that was it. And
she's twenty three years old and she wanted to be
(07:24):
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. What did your dad
do for a living? 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,
but I think he was either an assassin or a sniper.
(07:45):
Um because I've asked me people in my family and like, oh,
what did my dad do in the military, and they're like, well,
he did a lot of things. It's never so I
think because he killed himself and he was 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 a hundred miles an hour into a bridge somewhere. Now,
(08:11):
what would people tell you if it all to do
to do 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. Only in adulthood did
I realize how little I knew about my father. Like,
for example, if I had a child with a woman
(08:33):
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 it to me, and
all I knew was that he had been in the
military and I had photos. And but again it was
(08:55):
only after my mother died that the rest of the
people in my family sort of let me know that
father had been a professor and he had a good
sense of humor. And your mother had to die before
people were allowed to introduce you to your dad. Kind
of yeah, I found And it's sort of had this
quasi like almost like a check off play quality, Like
I found out after my mother had died. I found
(09:17):
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, um,
can I tell you a story about who my half
brother is not? I think he'll appreciate. I was in
d C in two thousand and seven with Alexandra Pelosi,
(09:38):
Nancy's daughter, and we were with Nancy. Nancy was the
Speaker of the House. And this is pret sobriety. So
I got very drunk and ended up talking to a
journalist from Politico and telling this journalist that I have
a half brother, and I jokingly said, maybe it's Carl Rove.
The journalist wrote a little political piece saying our Mobi
(09:59):
and Karl Rove brothers. Two weeks later, I get a
letter on White House stationary and 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
plays the guitar too, your pal Karl Rove? And I
was like, so, I know, as far as I know,
Karl Rove is not my half brother. You have one?
(10:20):
Did you ever meet? I don't 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 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 with people
(10:42):
as Oh, yeah, I mean I'm fifty three and I've
never had a serious relationship. Um 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 there's a sort of utility to being incapable
(11:06):
of having real relationships, which is I get to work
on other things, you know, like I get to be
to spend more use of the time. Yes, 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 in
l A. So I can work more on that. So
(11:27):
I had always thought that the key to happiness, at
least growing up, was like you find your perfect person,
you build a life with them, and at some point
I realize, 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,
which not that you know of not that I mean,
(11:47):
maybe I'll meet the you know, maybe you just it's
it's you don't know. Do you want to vent? Your
word comes from? Does it come from certain obvious childhood signals?
I think I assume so that because you were left
alone a lot as a child, was left alone, and
I was also raised you know, I grew up very
very poor in a very wealthy town in Daryan, Connecticut,
(12:10):
and my mom dated Hell's Angels. There was a lot
of when you went back to Darien and you were
how old when I was five? So were you in
San Francisco just a couple of years? Yeah, so your
mom smoking pot and the taking actresses and taking acid
and 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 then we
moved back to Connecticut. Long well, I lived in Connecticut
(12:34):
from the time I was five until the time I
was twenty one. You basically grew up there. Yeah, I'm
just an inbred, white trash kid from Connecticut. The San
Francisco thing was a brief period of that was just
brief and traumatic and traumatical. 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
(12:55):
with her friends. She was twenty three years old, so
they put me in this very low rent daycare enter
and I was sexually abused there. What did she do
during the day? Did she work? Not? In San Francisco,
she was supported by her family. They were all dependent
on somebody. 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 uh
(13:18):
that short hair wearing I od's, you know, going to
Weburn Country Club, drinking Gin and Tonics, and 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 I sort of got caught up in the middle
of that as a as a three year old. When
you got back to Connecticut and you grew up there,
(13:38):
did your mother, Uh, developed as a parent and she
was getting older, which did she become a better parent?
Was there a continued period of isolation and kind of
uh uh not not good child care for you both
an equal measure, like with a good support system of
my grandmother, aunts and uncles. So there was a lot
of support. But did you spend a lot of time
(14:01):
with your mother's parents. Yeah, um, but also a lot
of time alone because also we were very poor. We
were on food stamps and welfare and we're 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 I didn't live in the garage
(14:25):
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 to again not to overstate it, but like
when you grow up with that, it's hard, even in adulthood,
(14:45):
when your circumstances change, it's hard to move past how
you were formed. When did you start to get this
idea that you were right music? I think, well, my mom,
who was an aspiring musician pianist. I mean, I remember
(15:06):
my mom had the most odd, eclectic record collection, you know.
So she had Crosby Stills, Nash and Young and divor
Jack and Lightning Hopkins and Bob Ala Tunji and so
I just grew up with this constant soundtrack of weirdness
and it made sense to me. And she she dated musicians. Um,
my uncle was a musician. My great grandmother actually taught
(15:31):
classical composition to Arthur Fiedler. She was Arthur Feedler's mentor.
So I grew up in this weird, idiosyncratic musical household.
So I never thought as I was 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
(15:54):
did you do well in school? I did okay. So
my name Moby is an name 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 i Q points.
They would assume, like, oh, he's got to be like
erudite because he's descended from Herman Melville. Same thing. I
(16:16):
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 i Q totally unwarranted. Um. So
I had growing up, had a lot of free time,
(16:38):
had access to instruments, and was raised in this odd
creative family. So I just started writing music when I
was on ten or eleven UM 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 Jr. And so his dad gave
(17:01):
us because his dad was a filmmaker, and Darien he
lived there. Darien has a baffling array of odd public
figures like and Coulter and Gus fan Zant and Robert
Downey Jr. And Chloe seven Ye and Stevo from Jackass
and the author Rick Moody from this little town of
fourteen thousand people, very odd people the fact, and and
(17:24):
Colton and Sans and went to the same high school. Yes,
so Robert and I made with his this super eight
camera his dad when we were not eight 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
(17:44):
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 and make
little movies. How if you were broke, uh super eight camera,
you got your hands on a Super eight camera. Yeah
I'm gonna horn shot so yeah, right, like a really cheap,
shitty super and you could develop film, you know, like
(18:06):
two and a half minutes of Super eight film, and
then you edit it on your kitchen table tape. Yea
a dracula and I'm emerging from the coffin. And then
you develop it and you show it on a sheet
kitchen yeah, you're ready to get a can? What's the
first song you wrote? Do you remember? Do you remember? Boy? Well?
(18:28):
So I started playing guitar, and then 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 Chris Razola. 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 fusion thing, which
(18:49):
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 was going to
(19:11):
go on to be this virtue also guitarist and the
iron Yeah, and the irony is by embracing punk rock
and non virtuosic, if that's the word, I just invented music.
I ended up coming back to the world of classical
music and have since started playing with orchestras. Yeah, I
just I just did a performance with Dudamel in the
(19:35):
l A film. Did you wouldn't know? What did you
guys play? We? Well, they was two programs. The first
program was l A Composers, and they put a piece
of music of mine in. There's a song that I'd
written for a Michael Mann movie years ago for heat Heat,
It's a very end when al Pacino and Robert de
(19:55):
Niro finally, I don't want to spoiler alert, so they
did at as part of the first program, and the
second program was all orchestral versions of my music. During
the rehearsal there was I don't know a 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
(20:17):
stage right now, Like I'm the person who like if
I stopped playing, no one will notice. When God moving
over the face of the waters, there's this big crescendo,
you know, it's like timpani and symbols, and I got
so annoyed because the percussion had come in early, and
I was like, what like, this is the l A
Phil How did they screw up? And I realized there
(20:40):
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 plays percussion during classical music. Do you did this
recently with the l A Though, what's the first time
you did that? Well, the first time was actually Michael
Mann for yeah, I had written some classical pieces. He
(21:04):
heard them, and this was unpublished. I there were no
that I'd put them as A B sides on and
somehow he had heard them and I We then had
one of the weirdest phone calls. Do you know, Michael,
I'm sure, so we're friends. I used that word those leaks.
I don't know if in my mind he and I
(21:26):
are friends. But he's a odd, wonderful, creative man. But
like our 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. I didn't say one word apart from hello,
so I was like hello, he said, maybe this Michael
Man forty five minutes soliloquy, telling me in great detail
(21:48):
everything about heat, like the archetypes that are going on
for like the classical element, the moment he has done.
He just hung up and I was like, what just
I'd never spoken two like an esteemed filmed rector before,
And I was like, is this is how film directors
talk to people? Just call up and talk for four
the teve minutes and hang up the phone. That was
the first time you had provided score for a film? Well,
(22:10):
I went to Sunny Purchase briefly, um 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 So technically that would have been
my first foray in the film composing Beyond me I
(22:30):
the Onion, Yeah, I made it. Michael Mann was the first.
Did it lead to how many? How many other films
have you contributed music to? I also I have a
weird website called moby gratis dot com and it gives
free music to independent filmmakers, nonprofits, film students. So if
we count that, ten thousand films, but those are I'm
(22:51):
like three minutes short films where people hired hired. I
wouldn't know hundreds thousands. I mean like not not accessing
your music you published, they hired you to do score
four oh, because there's the licensing music, licensing music, and
that's like it's the greatest thing in the world because
(23:12):
all you have to do is say yes, you don't
there's no work involved apart from that actually writing music.
So when I moved to l A after I got
sober the first time, this most like ten years ago,
I got sober, and I move to twice um yeah,
once followed by a glorious thirteen year long relapse, and
(23:32):
then again in two thousand and eight. And so then
I moved to l A. 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 what
about it, don't you like? Uh, well, I can like
(23:52):
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 were great
film composers. Part of their skill set is knowing how
(24:14):
to deal with twenty different executives at the same time.
And I just it was too tremending skill to have
and a lot of anacs. This is God moving over
the face of the waters. The piece MOBI wrote for
(24:35):
Heat after a lot of input from executives at Warner
Brothers and director Michael Mann. Stephen Daldry is another great
film director with strong opinions about how everyone should do
their jobs. I find it really crazy when it is
coming self prepared because they've done some journey that they're
getting it's commonly my character and you get it's not
(24:56):
your character, and we're gonna make it up now interesting,
I'm gonna be for that. It's ours. Well, my character
wouldn't do that. Well, let's change the character. Then. The
rest of my conversation with Stephen Daldry can be found
in our archive. And here's the thing, dot org more
(25:19):
Moby in a minute. This is Alec Baldwin and you
were listening to here's the thing. M Moby never would
(25:41):
have ended up so low if he hadn't been so
desperate to be lifted up. He craved the affirmation of fame.
I loved it, and I just wanted more. This guy
that was this isolated guy that was left alone. You
can't get enough of that. Yeah, I mean, all of
a sudden, I was being invited to fancy parties, meeting
(26:02):
heads of state, being flown around the world on private plane.
I mean I still have them. 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
for Sacchi and Calvin Klein are like, oh well, let
us send you free tuxedos. I was like, you know,
before this record, I was buying closed at Salvation Army
(26:26):
on the Corner of Life. I had in printed. 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,
two thousand and one, two thousand two, I felt that
all I needed to be happy was constant love and
attention from every person on the planet. Um to make
(26:48):
ten million dollars a year for 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 obviously, in
hindsight I recognize how certain unrealistic it is, but at
the time I just wanted, like every night to be
(27:08):
like this indulgent festival of narcissism. And can you tell
me some of these stories that were in the book? Yeah,
that was a weird one. We took helicopters to Staaten
Island and had this weird dinner with the guy who
apparently invented the cabbage patch doll and then went on
to produce Stephen Sigal movies. And then we left and
I went to a party on Park Avenue, very drunk.
(27:29):
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 touches? You take 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've never done this,
and my date, Miss new Hampshire, challenged me to play
(27:50):
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. No, yes, where
was this being hell some bar in part like one
of those big restaurants on Park Avenue and like it
and this isn't a private party. I mean it was
like a one of those New York style parties where
maybe it was like Ralph Lauren was launching a new
(28:13):
paint color or something. You know, those those things that
you just go to and you're not like, I don't
know why, I have a couple of drinks. Yeah, so
it's very people and I brushed my flaccid the head
of your penis against Donald Trump brush. He didn't know
it was dark. 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,
(28:34):
I think Donald Trump being able to say that I
met him? Yeah. Um, so you're there and and you're
this big superstar. When did you begin to think we
really should get back into the studio and make another album.
So then, like the tour for Play was supposed to
be three and a half weeks long, and it ended
(28:56):
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,
self destruction, I was kept writing music. So the problem, yeah,
(29:18):
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. It 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 its garbage. But I just it's this weird
almost like you know there's that word lag area. I
have that of music where I just keep making it
(29:42):
without any concern for whether it's good or bad. I
just keep writing and so it's like a broken pipe. Yeah, yeah,
just like you turn on the faucet and just leave
it on. So the next album was called eighteen UM,
and I 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
(30:03):
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 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 too,
or more just for the 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
(30:23):
bed with me. And it seems like fame was going
And this is when I say it out loud, it
just sounds so absurd, I honestly, and I wouldn't have
admitted this, but deep down, what I believed was that
fame was going to fix everything, like every all the
trauma from child, the sense the senses of all that fear,
(30:46):
you know, the self centered fear, self sided, 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 is gonna
be taken away from me? Which defines my life. They
say in a twelve step literature, they say that um
our greatest fear is to lose something we already have
(31:07):
or not get something that we want. 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 that I know. They have a sense why.
(31:29):
I think because on an on a sort of artistic level,
there came a time, and I'm so ashamed to admit this,
and around two thousand to two thousand 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. Yeah, And I never thought I don't want
(31:52):
to go backwards. 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 emotion, just beautiful, expressive.
Two thousand to two thousand three, years after the release
of Play, I still wanted it to be beautiful, but
first and foremost commercially Volume, it was a little less
beautiful and it sold more copies. That was okay with me,
(32:15):
and I started thinking Okay, Well, if I produced 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. You know, you were very open with
the press. You courted the press, You would speak to anybody.
(32:37):
You know. For me, the problem has always been the
you know, the press is never it's 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 black jacks me again out of nowhere, like
it's in an alley way. I get mugged by it again,
which is they're never going to interpret who you really
are to the public. Never. They don't have the ability.
(32:57):
It's it's it's so painful that this understanding that goes
hand in hand with it, especially because I when I
don't know if you had this experience, but when I
started getting press attention, I loved it. 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
(33:19):
in the press. And then it turned. And then all
of a sudden, the reviews got bad, 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
and I'm like, in a way, like God, bless them
for turning, because I've since then like when when you're rejected,
when the press rejects you, you then, at least for me,
(33:42):
I had to sort of look like, Okay, well who
am I without that, you know, 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 l a middle
(34:02):
of February, hiking and Griffiths Park and it was one
of those beautiful days, like the 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
(34:24):
would this moment be better? And I was like, it
wouldn't like you know, good reviews, good press, all this
stuff doesn't And I know I sound like a crazy
New Age hippy, but like it wouldn't affect like that
moment of like like standing in the sun wearing a
T shirt, smelling sage and lavender, watching the hummingbirds fly by.
(34:46):
I was like the universe in that moment was so
benign and indifferent to anything that I cared about, and
there was something there's sort of like a transcendent liberation,
almost like emerson Ian style liberation in that that moment.
I'll that feeling at this point, I just turned sixty one,
and I'll take that feeling wherever I can get it
now and and and at my age, I have to
(35:08):
accept that my creative energies may or may not come
to the four 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
from my commercial in a way that I never thought
it was possible. And and there's one because you reference
the twelve and twelve earlier. Um, I don't know if
(35:29):
that's a twelve Steps is part of your life? Okay,
thirty four years sober, so it's I mean. And again
I feel like such a middle age cliche saying this,
but like the Twelve Steps really, of all the like
therapeutic things I've been through, the Twelve Steps really saved me.
And one of the things I learned, as you mentioned,
(35:50):
was like the role of fear and trying to sort
of like deconstruct fear and learn from it. But the
other thing that when 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 omniscience. Like when I had an album
that failed, I was furious because I knew that it
(36:12):
should have succeeded, because if it has succeeded, it would
have been better for me. And then all of a
sudden I realized, like again, in a thirteen point eight
billion year old universe, I don't have omniscience. 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? And in politics as well, because
(36:33):
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 lights on tomorrow, you know,
like they're like they want a job, they want to
keep their and I have to be like, okay, that's
It's like with the press as well. Afe to remind myself,
like most of the people I know were journalists, like
(36:55):
they're barely able to pay the rent. And I don't
want to be patronizing or judgmental, but I've sort of
say like, Okay, my job is not to rely on
them from my sense of happiness and well being, you know,
like my sense of strength. Creative, Yeah, the same thing.
And creatively, if they're too much of a hindrance, you
(37:16):
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 it if I remember reading
when I was like eight or nine years old, And
it's sort of that idea of just keep I just
keep going, not even from strength and fortitude, more just
(37:37):
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.
But this is also if I really became the biggest
movie star in the world and made hundreds of millions
of dollars in private planes, who the funk knows what
I would have done with that. I would have screwed
that luckily in a way, like as as sober middle
(37:59):
age guys. Um, 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 wealth and the fame and the adulation. Boy,
oh boy, I'm gonna be glad. I'm glad with him,
(38:24):
and I'm glad that I was cut off to an
extent from the access to like excessive wealth and fame
that he had in 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,
(38:44):
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. It's an odd, rare, unique lesson.
Let me try and do something with it. What was
(39:04):
there an epiphany? What was the what was the bottom?
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, I went to the
Zen Pallette on Ninth Avenue and I ordered yeah, and
I ordered purple Japanese egg plant, and it disagreed with me.
(39:25):
And I never ordered purple Japanese ig plan again because
I had one bad experience 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
(39:47):
have a night out and the next day you want
to blow your brains, is to say, wow, that was bad.
I shan't do that again. As opposed to give me
more every day for the next fifteen the thing that's
making me SI. Yeah. And as I got older, because
you got sober young. Yeah, I got sober at forty
(40:09):
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 heart time stringing sentences together. Yeah.
I got sober because I moved to l A 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 ship face for two years
before I got get smart. I want to talk um,
(40:30):
When did pure vegetarianism take hold with you? 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
(40:52):
and Dary in Connecticut, and I loved Tucker even more
unconditionally than I unconditionally loved the other animals. And when
I was nineteen, I had this like Saul 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
(41:13):
moment I sort of extrapolated and realized every animal with
two eyes and a central nervous system has a rich
emotional life, and it is a deep desire to avoid
pain and suffering. So that's when I became a vegetarian,
and then seven became a vegan, and my only vegan
relapse was in ninety two I had yogurt ones. So
now I've got thirty one years. What is your diet?
(41:34):
Basically something you you you you you cook at home,
have well. Actually, I own a vegan restaurant in Los
Angeles called Little Pine and it's in Silver Lake. And
what makes it unique is that one 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
(41:57):
percent of the money I make professionally goes 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. I had a couple
of them, and like I had this crazy sixty acre
compound up in um Putnam County, and when I moved
(42:20):
to l A, I moved to a castle. But I
wasn't I wasn't happy in these places. And I was
just ask myself, like why am I having this sort
of like gats Bsque excess, the Citizen Kane style, like
overcompensation if the end result is 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
(42:42):
simpler house. It's got a little simple apartment in Park Slope,
and I can just work for the causes that I
care about, yeah, and and that freedom to like make art, music, books, etcetera.
And if there's money, just give the money two different
cause that that's that's amazing to do that, but that's rare.
That's rare. That One of the benefits of my weird
(43:07):
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 rely on you. Yeah, and so there's it is
like that there's a luxury to that, like almost like
a monastic independence. This is I can't think of any
(43:27):
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 that that that
that that simulates love, it isn't really love. But in
your life, where is the love and the and the
care in your life? Who's caring for you? Okay, well
(43:48):
a few friends, close friends are there for you. 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
(44:09):
our life and our will over the care of God
as we understood God. And I really wrestled with this
because I was like, I was like, the care of
God as 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 and I was like, but I see
evidence again, not to anthropomorphize, but I see evidence of
(44:32):
divinity in kindness, in forgiveness, in the gentleness of puppies,
report in our immune systems, like I see in my eyes.
This is all evidence of the divine, and so in
nature and all these things. And so my honest answer,
(44:53):
that's an uncomfortable, secular twenty one century answer, is divine
love is what I search. That's but also it's a component.
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
(45:14):
have come together arbitrarily. That's okay too. But I I
do somehow, in my dim I don't know, naive way
see evidence of the divine. And so it's always trying
to move towards that. Again, not religious, not denominational, no gender,
it's just simply this idea of the divinity of like
forgiveness and puppies and immune systems and the unredacted MOLA
(45:38):
reports and et cetera. So that's a huge that's that's
where I get a lot of comfort from what's music
in your life? Now? You continue to write? Yeah, I
mean I I work on music mainly for the love
of music. I refused to tour. Hate touring unless it's
going to do orchestral things. I had this wonderful realization.
I guess it's about eleven years ago, the first time
(46:00):
I met David Lynch, and we've since become pretty good friends.
L A has that going for it. I live around
the corner from David Lynch. But when 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.
As he said, very simply, he said, creativity is beautiful,
(46:20):
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 gain and for worldliness? I
was like, 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.
(46:42):
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. 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? Yeah? I'm actually I have a
weird production company. I feel like I used the word
(47:03):
weird too much, um, but I have a production company
in l A. We're working on some documentaries. We've got
some scripted features, an animated feature that we're trying to develop.
But if you're handing that too, do you like baking films?
I love it as long as I have to your
point the recourse of autonomy, meaning like some of the
projects were working on, Like, sure, it would be great
(47:25):
if we have financing, if we get people attached to it,
but we also have projects that we can do on ourselves.
And because as we know, like how much time have
our friends spent waiting, you know, waiting for the financing,
waiting for this to be greenlit approval and with the
production company. Again, my goal is to never make personally,
(47:46):
never make money from it. So if money is generated,
it goes to my foundation, or it goes to causes
I work with. And did 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
gonna have a lot of meetings and l A, You're
not going to get at to make money from it.
Like like the guy who runs my production company and
my head of development and some of our partners. I
(48:08):
want them to be fabulously wealthy. I would rather be
like live in a shitty apartment in Hollywood or I
don't know, in bed sty and work for causes that
I care about. I just don't I don't want to
personally benefit from it. I would like to do a
documentary film, and I'd like to put you together on
(48:29):
a project. I'd like to couple of you on a
film project with someone equally maniacally creative and independent as you.
I'd like to do a film where like we get
you in a in a studio and you're gonna do
like a little project with Coppola to people who don't
want to collaborate with other people really, and you force
them to get they agree to collaborate for this one
time and see what the result would be. Yeah, I
(48:51):
want to produce that. By the way, you don't have
to make anybody. My kids are expensive. I'm keeping all
the money. I think we're done. Then we have a
thank you Moby composer, musician, recovering addict, and proud ex celebrity.
(49:25):
Didn't you think he's cool with them? You do? Okay?
Moby's new book is called Then It Fell Apart. It's
very funny and very sad. This is Alec Baldwin and
you were listening to Here's the Thing
I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing,
O Lot, Travel so hard, Oh love so hid, don't
know that God in You're Cool. Friends put on Mobi's
(00:21):
play at parties in two thousands, it was on the radio.
Popularity snowballed into ubiquity. In two thousand one, Play was
in malls and Volkswagen ads. It became the biggest selling
electronica album of all time. Two fans. Outside the electronic
(00:48):
music world, Moby seemed like an overnight success, but he
was thirty three in 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 to the worst
(01:10):
sort of rock star 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 of
his book. Moby is coming to terms with the album
(01:33):
going platinum. What do you think happened inside the music?
In that album that was different. Did something click? Did
something changed all of a sudden, You're a monolith in
the music business. Yeah, And to contextualize it, before that
album Play came out, my career had essentially ended. I'd
lost my record deal. It's very dark time. My mom
had died, I was I was living on Mott Street, um,
(01:57):
and I recorded Play where in my drum on Mott Street,
And well, actually I slept in the closet, and I
had my my bedroom had been turned into an ad
hoc recording studio, and and I thought, so I had
made Play, my last album had failed completely, and I'd
lost my record deal. I was signed to Elektra, and
(02:19):
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 to fame is they'd never dropped an artist like Yeah,
So I was like, I couldn't really take too much
comfort in the fact that I hadn't lost my deal
with Mute when they had never ever dropped an artists. Well,
Richard Branson started a label called V two, and someone
(02:42):
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 closet. Living in my closet. Well,
(03:04):
the building was from the mid nineteenth century on Mont Street,
and it had been a slaughter house, so the space
I was living in this is weird as an animal
rights vegan. The floor is all sloped to central drains
because when it had been a slaughter house they would
just hose the floors out and all the awful would
just get washed out in the drains. So I'm in
that environment thinking I'm going to move back to Connecticut.
(03:26):
I'm gonna get a job teaching community college, like 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 do your question of, like, musically, why
that happened? I still to this day because a lot
of the vocals on play were like old African American
(03:47):
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 have been dead for a
few decades. Like, that's not a recipe for a hit record.
I remember at some point it's sold fifty thousand records
(04:09):
because I thought it was gonna sell nothing, and I
was amazed that my album has told fifty thou records
and then six months later it was selling a hundred
thousand copies a week. What did people respond to the
only people are listening to your music and buying your
music in a world that has choked with music. It
was there was so much stuff out there they can
(04:31):
listen to, and they buy ten million copies of your album?
Why do you think you know? 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 two I kept. I
was like, how do I recreate that? And I never
(04:52):
really could Like that one sort of weird lightning in
a bottle moment. I don't I mean, I don't want
to anthropomorphize a 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
(05:13):
come close to killing you and you're gonna hopefully learn
something from it. So there was like and again that
that might sound very narcissistic, like I've just anthropomorphized a
thirteen point eight billion year old universe, but it felt like,
at the end of the day, more than anything else, educational,
like the universe is gonna say like, okay, you live
in a time to ANTHROPOMORPHI the universe part of the
(05:35):
human condition. Let's go from there. Then, so the album
comes out, it's difficult for some people to say this
is his style. You've had 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. We went a chorus with a church with
a music school. It was weird. I started playing guitar.
(05:56):
I guess when those are a nine or ten because
one of my mom's boyfriend friends had gone to jail
and left a guitar behind. But your mother is kind
of from a privileged background Connecticut quasi, I mean, like
my grandfather worked on Wall Street. But then my mom
sort of rejected that the sixties progressed and she fully
(06:17):
embraced the hippie lifestyle. But your dad, your dad passed
away when I was too, so when you were too
And how long did you stay in New York? After
he passed away? My mom moved back to Connecticut to
get her undergraduate at East Khan if that is even
still a school, and then we went to San Francisco
in nine where everything sort of fell apart. And that
(06:38):
three so right after your dad passed away, she finished school,
say school, 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 so did you have any ideas why?
I have a feeling half of it was rejecting, like
growing up in Dary in Connecticut, being encouraged by her
(07:01):
parents to sort of be very conservative and very traditional. Um,
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 original paradigm. That's
when it's been copied since. Yeah, that was it. And
she's twenty three years old and she wanted to be
(07:24):
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. What did your dad
do for a living? 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,
but I think he was either an assassin or a sniper.
(07:45):
Um because I've asked me people in my family and like, oh,
what did my dad do in the military, and they're like, well,
he did a lot of things. It's never so I
think because he killed himself and he was 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 a hundred miles an hour into a bridge somewhere. Now,
(08:11):
what would people tell you if it all to do
to do 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. Only in adulthood did
I realize how little I knew about my father. Like,
for example, if I had a child with a woman
(08:33):
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 it to me, and
all I knew was that he had been in the
military and I had photos. And but again it was
(08:55):
only after my mother died that the rest of the
people in my family sort of let me know that
father had been a professor and he had a good
sense of humor. And your mother had to die before
people were allowed to introduce you to your dad. Kind
of yeah, I found And it's sort of had this
quasi like almost like a check off play quality, Like
I found out after my mother had died. I found
(09:17):
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, um,
can I tell you a story about who my half
brother is not? I think he'll appreciate. I was in
d C in two thousand and seven with Alexandra Pelosi,
(09:38):
Nancy's daughter, and we were with Nancy. Nancy was the
Speaker of the House. And this is pret sobriety. So
I got very drunk and ended up talking to a
journalist from Politico and telling this journalist that I have
a half brother, and I jokingly said, maybe it's Carl Rove.
The journalist wrote a little political piece saying our Mobi
(09:59):
and Karl Rove brothers. Two weeks later, I get a
letter on White House stationary and 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
plays the guitar too, your pal Karl Rove? And I
was like, so, I know, as far as I know,
Karl Rove is not my half brother. You have one?
(10:20):
Did you ever meet? I don't 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 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 with people
(10:42):
as Oh, yeah, I mean I'm fifty three and I've
never had a serious relationship. Um 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 there's a sort of utility to being incapable
(11:06):
of having real relationships, which is I get to work
on other things, you know, like I get to be
to spend more use of the time. Yes, 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 in
l A. So I can work more on that. So
(11:27):
I had always thought that the key to happiness, at
least growing up, was like you find your perfect person,
you build a life with them, and at some point
I realize, 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,
which not that you know of not that I mean,
(11:47):
maybe I'll meet the you know, maybe you just it's
it's you don't know. Do you want to vent? Your
word comes from? Does it come from certain obvious childhood signals?
I think I assume so that because you were left
alone a lot as a child, was left alone, and
I was also raised you know, I grew up very
very poor in a very wealthy town in Daryan, Connecticut,
(12:10):
and my mom dated Hell's Angels. There was a lot
of when you went back to Darien and you were
how old when I was five? So were you in
San Francisco just a couple of years? Yeah, so your
mom smoking pot and the taking actresses and taking acid
and 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 then we
moved back to Connecticut. Long well, I lived in Connecticut
(12:34):
from the time I was five until the time I
was twenty one. You basically grew up there. Yeah, I'm
just an inbred, white trash kid from Connecticut. The San
Francisco thing was a brief period of that was just
brief and traumatic and traumatical. 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
(12:55):
with her friends. She was twenty three years old, so
they put me in this very low rent daycare enter
and I was sexually abused there. What did she do
during the day? Did she work? Not? In San Francisco,
she was supported by her family. They were all dependent
on somebody. 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 uh
(13:18):
that short hair wearing I od's, you know, going to
Weburn Country Club, drinking Gin and Tonics, and 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 I sort of got caught up in the middle
of that as a as a three year old. When
you got back to Connecticut and you grew up there,
(13:38):
did your mother, Uh, developed as a parent and she
was getting older, which did she become a better parent?
Was there a continued period of isolation and kind of
uh uh not not good child care for you both
an equal measure, like with a good support system of
my grandmother, aunts and uncles. So there was a lot
of support. But did you spend a lot of time
(14:01):
with your mother's parents. Yeah, um, but also a lot
of time alone because also we were very poor. We
were on food stamps and welfare and we're 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 I didn't live in the garage
(14:25):
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 to again not to overstate it, but like
when you grow up with that, it's hard, even in adulthood,
(14:45):
when your circumstances change, it's hard to move past how
you were formed. When did you start to get this
idea that you were right music? I think, well, my mom,
who was an aspiring musician pianist. I mean, I remember
(15:06):
my mom had the most odd, eclectic record collection, you know.
So she had Crosby Stills, Nash and Young and divor
Jack and Lightning Hopkins and Bob Ala Tunji and so
I just grew up with this constant soundtrack of weirdness
and it made sense to me. And she she dated musicians. Um,
my uncle was a musician. My great grandmother actually taught
(15:31):
classical composition to Arthur Fiedler. She was Arthur Feedler's mentor.
So I grew up in this weird, idiosyncratic musical household.
So I never thought as I was 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
(15:54):
did you do well in school? I did okay. So
my name Moby is an name 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 i Q points.
They would assume, like, oh, he's got to be like
erudite because he's descended from Herman Melville. Same thing. I
(16:16):
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 i Q totally unwarranted. Um. So
I had growing up, had a lot of free time,
(16:38):
had access to instruments, and was raised in this odd
creative family. So I just started writing music when I
was on ten or eleven UM 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 Jr. And so his dad gave
(17:01):
us because his dad was a filmmaker, and Darien he
lived there. Darien has a baffling array of odd public
figures like and Coulter and Gus fan Zant and Robert
Downey Jr. And Chloe seven Ye and Stevo from Jackass
and the author Rick Moody from this little town of
fourteen thousand people, very odd people the fact, and and
(17:24):
Colton and Sans and went to the same high school. Yes,
so Robert and I made with his this super eight
camera his dad when we were not eight 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
(17:44):
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 and make
little movies. How if you were broke, uh super eight camera,
you got your hands on a Super eight camera. Yeah
I'm gonna horn shot so yeah, right, like a really cheap,
shitty super and you could develop film, you know, like
(18:06):
two and a half minutes of Super eight film, and
then you edit it on your kitchen table tape. Yea
a dracula and I'm emerging from the coffin. And then
you develop it and you show it on a sheet
kitchen yeah, you're ready to get a can? What's the
first song you wrote? Do you remember? Do you remember? Boy? Well?
(18:28):
So I started playing guitar, and then 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 Chris Razola. 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 fusion thing, which
(18:49):
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 was going to
(19:11):
go on to be this virtue also guitarist and the
iron Yeah, and the irony is by embracing punk rock
and non virtuosic, if that's the word, I just invented music.
I ended up coming back to the world of classical
music and have since started playing with orchestras. Yeah, I
just I just did a performance with Dudamel in the
(19:35):
l A film. Did you wouldn't know? What did you
guys play? We? Well, they was two programs. The first
program was l A Composers, and they put a piece
of music of mine in. There's a song that I'd
written for a Michael Mann movie years ago for heat Heat,
It's a very end when al Pacino and Robert de
(19:55):
Niro finally, I don't want to spoiler alert, so they
did at as part of the first program, and the
second program was all orchestral versions of my music. During
the rehearsal there was I don't know a 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
(20:17):
stage right now, Like I'm the person who like if
I stopped playing, no one will notice. When God moving
over the face of the waters, there's this big crescendo,
you know, it's like timpani and symbols, and I got
so annoyed because the percussion had come in early, and
I was like, what like, this is the l A
Phil How did they screw up? And I realized there
(20:40):
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 plays percussion during classical music. Do you did this
recently with the l A Though, what's the first time
you did that? Well, the first time was actually Michael
Mann for yeah, I had written some classical pieces. He
(21:04):
heard them, and this was unpublished. I there were no
that I'd put them as A B sides on and
somehow he had heard them and I We then had
one of the weirdest phone calls. Do you know, Michael,
I'm sure, so we're friends. I used that word those leaks.
I don't know if in my mind he and I
(21:26):
are friends. But he's a odd, wonderful, creative man. But
like our 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. I didn't say one word apart from hello,
so I was like hello, he said, maybe this Michael
Man forty five minutes soliloquy, telling me in great detail
(21:48):
everything about heat, like the archetypes that are going on
for like the classical element, the moment he has done.
He just hung up and I was like, what just
I'd never spoken two like an esteemed filmed rector before,
And I was like, is this is how film directors
talk to people? Just call up and talk for four
the teve minutes and hang up the phone. That was
the first time you had provided score for a film? Well,
(22:10):
I went to Sunny Purchase briefly, um 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 So technically that would have been
my first foray in the film composing Beyond me I
(22:30):
the Onion, Yeah, I made it. Michael Mann was the first.
Did it lead to how many? How many other films
have you contributed music to? I also I have a
weird website called moby gratis dot com and it gives
free music to independent filmmakers, nonprofits, film students. So if
we count that, ten thousand films, but those are I'm
(22:51):
like three minutes short films where people hired hired. I
wouldn't know hundreds thousands. I mean like not not accessing
your music you published, they hired you to do score
four oh, because there's the licensing music, licensing music, and
that's like it's the greatest thing in the world because
(23:12):
all you have to do is say yes, you don't
there's no work involved apart from that actually writing music.
So when I moved to l A after I got
sober the first time, this most like ten years ago,
I got sober, and I move to twice um yeah,
once followed by a glorious thirteen year long relapse, and
(23:32):
then again in two thousand and eight. And so then
I moved to l A. 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 what
about it, don't you like? Uh, well, I can like
(23:52):
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 were great
film composers. Part of their skill set is knowing how
(24:14):
to deal with twenty different executives at the same time.
And I just it was too tremending skill to have
and a lot of anacs. This is God moving over
the face of the waters. The piece MOBI wrote for
(24:35):
Heat after a lot of input from executives at Warner
Brothers and director Michael Mann. Stephen Daldry is another great
film director with strong opinions about how everyone should do
their jobs. I find it really crazy when it is
coming self prepared because they've done some journey that they're
getting it's commonly my character and you get it's not
(24:56):
your character, and we're gonna make it up now interesting,
I'm gonna be for that. It's ours. Well, my character
wouldn't do that. Well, let's change the character. Then. The
rest of my conversation with Stephen Daldry can be found
in our archive. And here's the thing, dot org more
(25:19):
Moby in a minute. This is Alec Baldwin and you
were listening to here's the thing. M Moby never would
(25:41):
have ended up so low if he hadn't been so
desperate to be lifted up. He craved the affirmation of fame.
I loved it, and I just wanted more. This guy
that was this isolated guy that was left alone. You
can't get enough of that. Yeah, I mean, all of
a sudden, I was being invited to fancy parties, meeting
(26:02):
heads of state, being flown around the world on private plane.
I mean I still have them. 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
for Sacchi and Calvin Klein are like, oh well, let
us send you free tuxedos. I was like, you know,
before this record, I was buying closed at Salvation Army
(26:26):
on the Corner of Life. I had in printed. 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,
two thousand and one, two thousand two, I felt that
all I needed to be happy was constant love and
attention from every person on the planet. Um to make
(26:48):
ten million dollars a year for 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 obviously, in
hindsight I recognize how certain unrealistic it is, but at
the time I just wanted, like every night to be
(27:08):
like this indulgent festival of narcissism. And can you tell
me some of these stories that were in the book? Yeah,
that was a weird one. We took helicopters to Staaten
Island and had this weird dinner with the guy who
apparently invented the cabbage patch doll and then went on
to produce Stephen Sigal movies. And then we left and
I went to a party on Park Avenue, very drunk.
(27:29):
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 touches? You take 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've never done this,
and my date, Miss new Hampshire, challenged me to play
(27:50):
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. No, yes, where
was this being hell some bar in part like one
of those big restaurants on Park Avenue and like it
and this isn't a private party. I mean it was
like a one of those New York style parties where
maybe it was like Ralph Lauren was launching a new
(28:13):
paint color or something. You know, those those things that
you just go to and you're not like, I don't
know why, I have a couple of drinks. Yeah, so
it's very people and I brushed my flaccid the head
of your penis against Donald Trump brush. He didn't know
it was dark. 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,
(28:34):
I think Donald Trump being able to say that I
met him? Yeah. Um, so you're there and and you're
this big superstar. When did you begin to think we
really should get back into the studio and make another album.
So then, like the tour for Play was supposed to
be three and a half weeks long, and it ended
(28:56):
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,
self destruction, I was kept writing music. So the problem, yeah,
(29:18):
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. It 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 its garbage. But I just it's this weird
almost like you know there's that word lag area. I
have that of music where I just keep making it
(29:42):
without any concern for whether it's good or bad. I
just keep writing and so it's like a broken pipe. Yeah, yeah,
just like you turn on the faucet and just leave
it on. So the next album was called eighteen UM,
and I 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
(30:03):
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 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 too,
or more just for the 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
(30:23):
bed with me. And it seems like fame was going
And this is when I say it out loud, it
just sounds so absurd, I honestly, and I wouldn't have
admitted this, but deep down, what I believed was that
fame was going to fix everything, like every all the
trauma from child, the sense the senses of all that fear,
(30:46):
you know, the self centered fear, self sided, 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 is gonna
be taken away from me? Which defines my life. They
say in a twelve step literature, they say that um
our greatest fear is to lose something we already have
(31:07):
or not get something that we want. 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 that I know. They have a sense why.
(31:29):
I think because on an on a sort of artistic level,
there came a time, and I'm so ashamed to admit this,
and around two thousand to two thousand 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. Yeah, And I never thought I don't want
(31:52):
to go backwards. 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 emotion, just beautiful, expressive.
Two thousand to two thousand three, years after the release
of Play, I still wanted it to be beautiful, but
first and foremost commercially Volume, it was a little less
beautiful and it sold more copies. That was okay with me,
(32:15):
and I started thinking Okay, Well, if I produced 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. You know, you were very open with
the press. You courted the press, You would speak to anybody.
(32:37):
You know. For me, the problem has always been the
you know, the press is never it's 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 black jacks me again out of nowhere, like
it's in an alley way. I get mugged by it again,
which is they're never going to interpret who you really
are to the public. Never. They don't have the ability.
(32:57):
It's it's it's so painful that this understanding that goes
hand in hand with it, especially because I when I
don't know if you had this experience, but when I
started getting press attention, I loved it. 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
(33:19):
in the press. And then it turned. And then all
of a sudden, the reviews got bad, 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
and I'm like, in a way, like God, bless them
for turning, because I've since then like when when you're rejected,
when the press rejects you, you then, at least for me,
(33:42):
I had to sort of look like, Okay, well who
am I without that, you know, 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 l a middle
(34:02):
of February, hiking and Griffiths Park and it was one
of those beautiful days, like the 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
(34:24):
would this moment be better? And I was like, it
wouldn't like you know, good reviews, good press, all this
stuff doesn't And I know I sound like a crazy
New Age hippy, but like it wouldn't affect like that
moment of like like standing in the sun wearing a
T shirt, smelling sage and lavender, watching the hummingbirds fly by.
(34:46):
I was like the universe in that moment was so
benign and indifferent to anything that I cared about, and
there was something there's sort of like a transcendent liberation,
almost like emerson Ian style liberation in that that moment.
I'll that feeling at this point, I just turned sixty one,
and I'll take that feeling wherever I can get it
now and and and at my age, I have to
(35:08):
accept that my creative energies may or may not come
to the four 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
from my commercial in a way that I never thought
it was possible. And and there's one because you reference
the twelve and twelve earlier. Um, I don't know if
(35:29):
that's a twelve Steps is part of your life? Okay,
thirty four years sober, so it's I mean. And again
I feel like such a middle age cliche saying this,
but like the Twelve Steps really, of all the like
therapeutic things I've been through, the Twelve Steps really saved me.
And one of the things I learned, as you mentioned,
(35:50):
was like the role of fear and trying to sort
of like deconstruct fear and learn from it. But the
other thing that when 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 omniscience. Like when I had an album
that failed, I was furious because I knew that it
(36:12):
should have succeeded, because if it has succeeded, it would
have been better for me. And then all of a
sudden I realized, like again, in a thirteen point eight
billion year old universe, I don't have omniscience. 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? And in politics as well, because
(36:33):
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 lights on tomorrow, you know,
like they're like they want a job, they want to
keep their and I have to be like, okay, that's
It's like with the press as well. Afe to remind myself,
like most of the people I know were journalists, like
(36:55):
they're barely able to pay the rent. And I don't
want to be patronizing or judgmental, but I've sort of
say like, Okay, my job is not to rely on
them from my sense of happiness and well being, you know,
like my sense of strength. Creative, Yeah, the same thing.
And creatively, if they're too much of a hindrance, you
(37:16):
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 it if I remember reading
when I was like eight or nine years old, And
it's sort of that idea of just keep I just
keep going, not even from strength and fortitude, more just
(37:37):
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.
But this is also if I really became the biggest
movie star in the world and made hundreds of millions
of dollars in private planes, who the funk knows what
I would have done with that. I would have screwed
that luckily in a way, like as as sober middle
(37:59):
age guys. Um, 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 wealth and the fame and the adulation. Boy,
oh boy, I'm gonna be glad. I'm glad with him,
(38:24):
and I'm glad that I was cut off to an
extent from the access to like excessive wealth and fame
that he had in 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,
(38:44):
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. It's an odd, rare, unique lesson.
Let me try and do something with it. What was
(39:04):
there an epiphany? What was the what was the bottom?
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, I went to the
Zen Pallette on Ninth Avenue and I ordered yeah, and
I ordered purple Japanese egg plant, and it disagreed with me.
(39:25):
And I never ordered purple Japanese ig plan again because
I had one bad experience 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
(39:47):
have a night out and the next day you want
to blow your brains, is to say, wow, that was bad.
I shan't do that again. As opposed to give me
more every day for the next fifteen the thing that's
making me SI. Yeah. And as I got older, because
you got sober young. Yeah, I got sober at forty
(40:09):
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 heart time stringing sentences together. Yeah.
I got sober because I moved to l A 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 ship face for two years
before I got get smart. I want to talk um,
(40:30):
When did pure vegetarianism take hold with you? 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
(40:52):
and Dary in Connecticut, and I loved Tucker even more
unconditionally than I unconditionally loved the other animals. And when
I was nineteen, I had this like Saul 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
(41:13):
moment I sort of extrapolated and realized every animal with
two eyes and a central nervous system has a rich
emotional life, and it is a deep desire to avoid
pain and suffering. So that's when I became a vegetarian,
and then seven became a vegan, and my only vegan
relapse was in ninety two I had yogurt ones. So
now I've got thirty one years. What is your diet?
(41:34):
Basically something you you you you you cook at home,
have well. Actually, I own a vegan restaurant in Los
Angeles called Little Pine and it's in Silver Lake. And
what makes it unique is that one 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
(41:57):
percent of the money I make professionally goes 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. I had a couple
of them, and like I had this crazy sixty acre
compound up in um Putnam County, and when I moved
(42:20):
to l A, I moved to a castle. But I
wasn't I wasn't happy in these places. And I was
just ask myself, like why am I having this sort
of like gats Bsque excess, the Citizen Kane style, like
overcompensation if the end result is 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
(42:42):
simpler house. It's got a little simple apartment in Park Slope,
and I can just work for the causes that I
care about, yeah, and and that freedom to like make art, music, books, etcetera.
And if there's money, just give the money two different
cause that that's that's amazing to do that, but that's rare.
That's rare. That One of the benefits of my weird
(43:07):
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 rely on you. Yeah, and so there's it is
like that there's a luxury to that, like almost like
a monastic independence. This is I can't think of any
(43:27):
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 that that that
that that simulates love, it isn't really love. But in
your life, where is the love and the and the
care in your life? Who's caring for you? Okay, well
(43:48):
a few friends, close friends are there for you. 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
(44:09):
our life and our will over the care of God
as we understood God. And I really wrestled with this
because I was like, I was like, the care of
God as 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 and I was like, but I see
evidence again, not to anthropomorphize, but I see evidence of
(44:32):
divinity in kindness, in forgiveness, in the gentleness of puppies,
report in our immune systems, like I see in my eyes.
This is all evidence of the divine, and so in
nature and all these things. And so my honest answer,
(44:53):
that's an uncomfortable, secular twenty one century answer, is divine
love is what I search. That's but also it's a component.
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
(45:14):
have come together arbitrarily. That's okay too. But I I
do somehow, in my dim I don't know, naive way
see evidence of the divine. And so it's always trying
to move towards that. Again, not religious, not denominational, no gender,
it's just simply this idea of the divinity of like
forgiveness and puppies and immune systems and the unredacted MOLA
(45:38):
reports and et cetera. So that's a huge that's that's
where I get a lot of comfort from what's music
in your life? Now? You continue to write? Yeah, I
mean I I work on music mainly for the love
of music. I refused to tour. Hate touring unless it's
going to do orchestral things. I had this wonderful realization.
I guess it's about eleven years ago, the first time
(46:00):
I met David Lynch, and we've since become pretty good friends.
L A has that going for it. I live around
the corner from David Lynch. But when 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.
As he said, very simply, he said, creativity is beautiful,
(46:20):
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 gain and for worldliness? I
was like, 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.
(46:42):
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. 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? Yeah? I'm actually I have a
weird production company. I feel like I used the word
(47:03):
weird too much, um, but I have a production company
in l A. We're working on some documentaries. We've got
some scripted features, an animated feature that we're trying to develop.
But if you're handing that too, do you like baking films?
I love it as long as I have to your
point the recourse of autonomy, meaning like some of the
projects were working on, Like, sure, it would be great
(47:25):
if we have financing, if we get people attached to it,
but we also have projects that we can do on ourselves.
And because as we know, like how much time have
our friends spent waiting, you know, waiting for the financing,
waiting for this to be greenlit approval and with the
production company. Again, my goal is to never make personally,
(47:46):
never make money from it. So if money is generated,
it goes to my foundation, or it goes to causes
I work with. And did 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
gonna have a lot of meetings and l A, You're
not going to get at to make money from it.
Like like the guy who runs my production company and
my head of development and some of our partners. I
(48:08):
want them to be fabulously wealthy. I would rather be
like live in a shitty apartment in Hollywood or I
don't know, in bed sty and work for causes that
I care about. I just don't I don't want to
personally benefit from it. I would like to do a
documentary film, and I'd like to put you together on
(48:29):
a project. I'd like to couple of you on a
film project with someone equally maniacally creative and independent as you.
I'd like to do a film where like we get
you in a in a studio and you're gonna do
like a little project with Coppola to people who don't
want to collaborate with other people really, and you force
them to get they agree to collaborate for this one
time and see what the result would be. Yeah, I
(48:51):
want to produce that. By the way, you don't have
to make anybody. My kids are expensive. I'm keeping all
the money. I think we're done. Then we have a
thank you Moby composer, musician, recovering addict, and proud ex celebrity.
(49:25):
Didn't you think he's cool with them? You do? Okay?
Moby's new book is called Then It Fell Apart. It's
very funny and very sad. This is Alec Baldwin and
you were listening to Here's the Thing
Host
Alec Baldwin
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