Moby 'Go: The Very Best of Moby' album

In reconciling the triumphs and obstacles of one's past, an artist must completely examine their points of reference. For some, the past is littered with letdowns and haunting reminders, but for Moby the past is a unique landscape of varied styles built to stunning heights of success. In fact, Moby¹s latest, Go: The Very Best Of Moby, resonates deeply with a determinate sense of value. It is a collection that clearly delineates the musical character of a man who has become one of the premier names in popular music.

Go: The Very Best Of Moby, is a 15-track collection from Moby's notable back catalogue (15,000,000 records sold), including songs from multi-platinum albums Play and 18. Also included is the never-before-released "New York, New York," which features Debbie Harry on vocals, and was recorded over the summer in Manhattan. This record is a must-have for avid listeners keen on keeping a thumb firmly over the luminary pulse of the globe. Standout songs such as "Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad?," "Porcelain," and leadoff track, "Go," stand as benchmarks to Moby's singular style. Here we see the chronicles of a man who has existed as successful underground DJ, punk rock drummer, outspoken political activist, socially conscious entrepreneur and much more, fused into one cohesive musical timeline. Go: The Very Best Of Moby, is an exceptional marker of the moment.

Biography

“I make music because I love making music and it’s the only thing I know how to do,” says Moby. “Of all the art forms, it’s the one that is best at communicating emotion. I never sat down at an early age and thought: ‘The feelings that live inside of me can only be given a voice by expressing them in music’. It was purely instinctual – and it still is.”

Moby’s career has been a story of extremes and paradoxes. This intense, driven individual has been an underground New York DJ, a punk rock drummer, an ascetic maker of euphoric dance music, a highly aware environmentalist and social commentator who jumps around stage like a dervish and, finally, the biggest dance music star on the globe.

Moby’s has been a music career unlike any other, and V2 are now releasing the definitive story-to-date resume. Go: The Very Best Of Moby compiles 15 songs from his unique back catalogue, including seminal tracks from multi-million-selling albums like Play, 18, and Hotel, as well as featuring the brand new, previously unavailable track ‘New York, New York’.

It’s been a long strange trip for Moby from punk rock-loving New York dance DJ to globally renowned purveyor of yearning, visceral electronica. However, to his puzzled amusement, one epithet has been constantly attached to him more than any other – controversial.

“I don’t actually think I AM that controversial,” he says now. “When I appeared on the electronic dance music scene in the early ‘90s, most people on that scene only had views about electronic dance music. I came from a punk rock background and, for better or worse, had views about everything. That seemed to be a problem for some people.”

Born Richard Melville Hall and nicknamed Moby after his great-great-grand uncle Herman Melville, the author of Moby Dick, Moby’s first musical awakenings were punk rock and new wave-inspired. He played drums with hardcore punks The Vatican Commandos before moving to New York in the late ‘80s, where he released a number of dance singles and EPs for independent label Instinct.

The first single to attract interest outside of the insular NY dance scene, and the track for which the Best Of Moby album is named, was Go, which fused a hypnotic techno beat to the signature string passage from David Lynch’s cult TV series of the time, Twin Peaks. It reached No 10 in Britain.

“Go was actually the B-side to my first single, which was a quiet ambient track called Mobility,” recalls Moby. “I was a huge Twin Peaks fan and thought the theme was just a wonderful, profound piece of music, which gave me the idea of putting the two together.”

Moby continued to release mesmerizing, often hard-edged techno tracks through the early ‘90s, signing a UK deal with Mute in 1993. However, as his public profile grew, he found some journalists as interested in his ethics and lifestyle as in his music.

“I did an interview 15 years or so ago in which I said I was a vegan and a Christian, and at the time I wasn’t drinking,” he sighs. “That image still follows me around – in Britain at least; in the rest of the world, they just see me as this weird New York guy who makes records.

“I was ideologically quite uptight in those days and very rigid in my belief systems, but I’ve become a lot more relaxed in recent years. Why? I realized it’s a very complicated, nuanced, multi-faceted world, and having inflexible belief systems just doesn’t work.”

Yet it was this ascetic philosophy that produced Moby’s 1995 album Everything Is Wrong, which gained critical acclaim in America(Spin magazine's Album Of The Year) and spawned one of his trademark songs – the giddy, celebratory this-is-now catharsis of ‘Feeling So Real’.

“In 1995, I was obsessed with politics and I felt everything in the world from a social and environmental perspective was wrong, which is why I released an album with that title,” says Moby. “It’s ironic that the hit single from it was a euphoric track like ‘Feeling So Real’, but at the time I felt one of the few things that WAS right in the world was people going out and getting sweaty dancing to euphoric house music.”

Moby’s ambient yet compelling music has always had a cinematic aspect, and in 1997 he released an album, I Like To Score, featuring tracks that had been used in films. The ‘James Bond Theme’ included on Go: The Very Best of Moby was commissioned by the producers of Tomorrow Never Dies, and Moby tracks have also appeared in Cool World, Scream, The Bourne Identity, Heat, Gone In Sixty Seconds and many others.

The following year saw Moby return to his leftfield rock roots to record the militant thrash metal album Animal Rights. It remains his personal favorite record in his oeuvre, but its relative lack of commercial success meant that as he began to record his next album, 1999’s Play, he feared the worst.

“While I was making Play, I was convinced my career was over,” he admits. “I thought I was making a strange, obscure little record that nobody would pay attention to. I figured if it sold 100,000 copies round the world, it would be a great success. After that, I was thinking of maybe going to study architecture.”

For Play, Moby turned to samples of 1930s and 1940s blues and gospel singers collected by noted American folklorist and musicologist Alan Lomax. He dropped these keening, often hauntingly moving snatches of bygone lives onto his trademark sheer, streamlined ambient techno compositions. Play was slowly shaping up to be something special, but initially the world – or, at least, the media – wasn’t interested.

“The samples were not a new way of working for me,” explains Moby. “I had first sampled a blues vocal and written a song around it in 1989, so to me Play was just continuing something I had always done. What attracted me about those voices was that they were beautiful, very emotional, and the emotion was very clear and straightforward – not couched in metaphorical imagery, but a simple description of what the singer was feeling.

“But when Play was released, it got hardly any radio support, nothing from TV, very little interest from press. Basically, it came out dead in the water. I remember the LA Times reviewer said ‘There is a song on it called “Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad?” And the answer is that I had to listen to this terrible record’. The only people who expressed interest in Play were people making advertisements, TV shows and movies.”

Yet a string of licensing deals, constant touring and word-of-mouth recommendation were to lead to Play becoming one of the great slow-burner albums of all times. Moby recalls Danny Boyle and Pete Tong showcasing the symphonic-yet-spartan ‘Porcelain’ on the soundtrack to the smash hit movie The Beach as being a particular boost.

Suddenly, Play seemed to be ubiquitous – and was welcome everywhere. To date, the record has sold over 9 million copies. “This success came,” says Moby, a wry master of understatement, “as a complete surprise to me”.

Having experimented with celebrity and become an unexpected occasional habitant of gossip columns, as the millennium turned Moby turned his attention to crafting a follow-up to Play. Remarkably, he didn’t feel under pressure to deliver a similar spectacular unit-shifter.

“After Play I felt liberated and thought: ‘OK, now I can make the record I want to make,” he confirms. “I was more concerned with making a record that I loved than with trying to replicate the success of Play, and luckily I did so with 18.”

A febrile progression and development of the ideas and mood shifts on Play, 18 included wistful songs such as the plaintive ‘In This World’ and ‘In My Heart’, both of which feature on Go, The Very Best of Moby. The album’s biggest hit, though, was its opener and mood-setter, the fragile yet ecstatic ‘We Are All Made Of Stars’.

“That’s actually a song about the material of which 99% of the universe is composed,” says Moby. “On a periodic chart, every element except two comes from the furnace of a star, so on a quantum level, all the matter around us and in us literally does come from stars. It is me being a science nerd and writing a pop song about quantum physics.”

From 18, Moby moved on to 2005’s Hotel, an album on which tracks like ‘Lift Me Up’ and ‘Slipping Away’ eschewed the samples of Play and 18 in favor of vocals from Moby himself. Even more so than previous records, the album appeared suffused with a spectral, intangible yet highly powerful air of melancholy.

“For Hotel I had written a lot of songs that were very personal to me, so I figured it made a lot of sense for me to sing them,” says Moby. “Singing is something I have always enjoyed a lot, even if I'm not very good at it...

“As regards the melancholy, when you are young, mortality and life seem like an infinite resource. Old age and death are things that happen to other people. Then as you get older, you realize life is a very precious, finite resource, and that was the metaphor behind Hotel. You check in to a hotel, you are there for a very brief period of time, and then you leave and it’s like you were never there.”

Having just turned 40, a landmark that he confesses engendered ‘approximately five minutes of absolute panic”, Moby has an extraordinary career behind him, as evidenced by the remarkable body of work that is Go: The Very Best of Moby.

As politically and socially engaged as ever (few other electronic music stars are given to adorning their album sleeve notes with essays in praise of environmental awareness, or critiquing the rise of fundamentalism), Moby is facing the future with confidence and an informed, and very open, mind.

“Working in my studio at home, I just try to make music that pulls at my heart strings and affects me in a very profound way,” he concludes. “If it does that to me, hopefully there is a chance it will do it to other people as well. That’s been my sole motivation, right from the start. I never remotely expected my music to go out and enter the lives of millions of people in the way that it has – but the fact that it has done that makes me very happy.”

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Moby - Go: The Very Best of Moby