Moby Part 2

Here is the second part of my talk with Moby about his new album Hotel. Unlike his other popular albums Play and 18, this one does not use sampled blues vocals. He sings everything himself. See part 1.

Let’s talk music. There aren’t any new samples on your album? How come?
It just sort of ended up that way. I get that questions a lot and I guess I should come up with a better answer. In making this record I made about 250 songs and these were just my favourite from 250 songs. Some of them have samples, but I didn’t like them as much as these. In some ways this is a more personal record than records that I’ve made in the past. It just made more sense for me to sing most of the songs. Partially, its more fun to sing… one of things that I am trying to do musically is sorta make records that are personal and not anonymous and sterile. I want to make records that are emotional, warm, and inviting. One thing I do like about my voice is that is has an emotional quality and a vulnerable quality to it. You hear human frailty in my voice and I want to make records that are very human.

It wasn’t because you were getting flack for ripping off black people’s music?
I took some flack for it but I also sold a lot of records because of it. Commercially, to keep things going, I prob should have made a sample based record, but I don’t know. I might again in the future. But for whatever personal, creative, emotional reason at this point in my life I would rather write songs and sing them myself.

Did you get pressure to make a commercial record?
I’m lucky to be signed to a major label that still has an indie ethos to them. I’ve been with them for 12 years, and they’ve let me make what I want. They let me be an artists which doesn’t always working out but it is interesting in the age the music industry is so conservative because they’re scared because they’re all falling apart it interesting to be signed to a label where I have complete control.

What about the second disc?
I had actually made that about a year ago and I really liked it and I realized that if I put it out as just a stand alone ambient record, no one would buy it aside from a few thousand people who like really quite ambient music. But if I put it as a bonus disc with the main record, it just increases the chance that more people will hear it. And selfishly, I just think it’s nice to have really quite melodic ambient music. And the two records serve to very different purposes: hotel is a very song oriented record and ambient record –I don’t want anyone to pay attention to it. I almost feel it should come with instructions like: put this record on don’t turn it up too loud and don’t pay attention to it. I just makes a nice calming, quiet calming background. I really think that if you were to listen to the ambient record once a week overall your health will improve and you’ll live longer it just calms you down. It’s like Xanax for the ears.

You want to make people happy?
I want to reach people on an emotional and human level. I don’t necessarily want to make them happy. I don’t want to depress people but when I make a record I think of someone driving home from school or after work after a really hard day and they get lots in it and feel a connection to it. Or someone is at home in their bedroom and—I usually think about someone who is having a rough time. That is the person I am making music for.

I like the song Streets of Philadelphia by Bruce Springsteen but sometimes I am embarrassed to say that.
Philadelphia is an amazing song.

What kind of advice can you give to people who feel ashamed to like soft, sad music?
I have friends in New York who are music critics that only write about obscure esoteric music and when they do their top ten its music you’ve never heard of. But when its Saturday night and they go out and get drunk and go dancing they dance to AC/DC and Abba. So everyone likes a nice song.

Is there something about sad music?
That’s my favourite music. I don’t like music that is egregiously depressing or egregiously happy. I like music that has a strong emotional core. It speaks to the human condition. Very few of us are depressed all the time and Very few of us are happy all the time. Most of us have complicated, nuanced emotional lives and I think we like music that speaks to that.

Did the politics affect your music?
Not really? I was working so hard on politics that when I went into my studio it almost became a refuge from that. If I listen closely I definitely hear the influence of politics on there. But almost more on a strange anthropological level. I know that may not makes sense but it does to me. I’ve tried to make political music; I’m just not good at it. When ever I do it sounds really strident. That’s why I would rather have my records be a lot more emotional and human.

You come off as a monastic, quiet, introverted person, but you also do all this political work. Are there two sides to you?
Not really. I’m monastic to an extent in that I live alone and I make my records alone, but I have a pretty active social life I go out I get drunk with my friends. I’ll go to a wedding and dance to AC/DC. In the press I’ve had a reputation for being ideologically rigid and monastic but that was never really true – maybe 16 years ago.


Do you feel trapped by your past success?
Not really trapped. For me it is interesting, when I started making music I never expected to have any success, so if one of the trappings of success is that people will misinterpret me than it is a small price to pay to be able to make music and have people listen to it.

How do you feel now that Kerry lost and Bush won?
I don’t know. I hope the next four years will be really boring politically. My other hope at some point Canada will come to the rescue and adopt all the northern states. I would be so much more proud if Manhattan was part of Canada. Let the republicans have the southern states and take the blue states, and make them the united states of Canada – if you guys are willing to take us. We’ll give up our guns, we happy to sign up for socialized health care, you get some nice beaches, you get broadway.

You like Toronto?
I never get to see anything. I’ve probably been to TO 30 to 40 times in my life but I never seen anything beyond hotels, restaurants, and theatres.

You should come around.
Hopefully in the future I will be living in New York carrying a Canadian passport.

I just seems politics in Canada are much more sane. In the us the issues we are dealing with like creationism like evolution? Why in the 21st century is there a huge debate about this. It’s like debating whether we should respect the laws of gravity. It’s just a given.

A Conversation with Moby Part 1

I recently met Moby in his hotel while he stayed in Toronto on a press-promotion tour. His Album, Hotel, comes out in March. Here's what he said about hotels.

I like your hotel!
After staying in a lot of hotels I’ve gotten to really appreciate when hotels get it right. This is an example of how they get it right. It’s contemporary but not cold. My two least favourite kinds are like the ones are like your grandmother’s living room where everything is floral and overstuffed

Like a Laura Ashley explosion…
Ya like someone ate to much Laura Ashley and got sick in the hotel room. Or the egregiously contemporary aesthetic, where it’s stark, where everything is white including the furniture, when it is cold hard plastic. It’s possible to have like a nice contemporary aesthetic that is comfortable and soothing.

Now that you are in a nice hotel, I am curious to know why called your album hotel.

To be honest there is not really a direct correlation between the title and the music. The album was finished before I came up the title. So I wouldn’t say that it’s a concept record. Although maybe in the interest in being a good interview subject I should come up with a good correlation.

But you’ve said there is a reason before…
It’s just my fascination with hotels and my paradoxical relationship I have with hotels. On the one hand, if you have been traveling for 27 hours and finally get to your hotel it’s the greatest thing in the world… but there is sterility and an anonyminity that can also make you crazy. And what fascinates me also is when you check into a hotel you really do feel like the first person checking in there. When I walked in here last night there was no romance of anyone ever having been here. But in the back of your mind there is that nagging doubt that, oh no someone was here only a few hours ago and someone will be here the moment I leave. And it that transient, ephemeral nature of time spent in hotels that makes you feel rootless and lonely inherently because you are put into a anonymous space for a brief period of time. And that is akin to the human condition in a sense that we are put here on the planet for a brief period of time and then we’re gone. And that question becomes: what do we do with our time? Do we sit around and mope that life is ephemeral and we leave at some point. Or do say, ya we die at some point but let try and enjoy it as much as we possibly can.

Even more fascinating about hotels is the privacy aspect of it when you walk down the corridor there are all these shut doors and sorta think to yourself, wow, I wonder what is going on behind these shut doors. Then your realize what people guard…when people are trying to guard their privacy, what they are tying to guard is common behaviour to every person on the planet. Like unless you are a sociopath, what you do in your private time is the same as what everyone else on the planet does with their private. You go to the bathroom, you have sex, you sleep, you cry, you laugh.

When you walk down the hotel corridors, that’s what’s going on. And just think its fascinating that so much energy is expended in protecting our privacy—when our privacy is the one thing we have in common.


When you say you feel lonely an anonymous in your room, do you get that feeling from your music?
Ya when I make music I try to make music that is warm and emotional -- but always against a backdrop of being disconnected from other people. Like, that is one of the themes of this record: its like being in a relationship and loving someone but still feeling disconnected from them; and so like on one hand, you love this person, but for your own failings its not working. That is a recurring theme.

What is the worst thing you’ve come across in a hotel that someone’s left behind?
I’ve stayed in some pretty skanky hotels. First time I went to France with my girlfriend we stayed in a $15-a-night-hotel, and under the pillow there was like a month’s worth of matted human hair.

And once I was in a hotel in Dallas which was essentially a welfare hotel with a really fancy lobby but the bedspread was covered in semen. And I instantly knew what it was from the trajectory of it. And I went to the bathroom and the bathtub was filled with old skanky rags. Like who puts old skanky rags in a bathtub? So I called down and switched rooms. But the next room had toilet that had not been flushed in like a month and it just stank of waste, and at that point, I took things under control and went to a Radisson.

Anything else?
Sometimes you find porn. But usually the hotel staff are good at scouring the room and making it look like no one’s been there. ..Oh and there was a time I did a rave in 1992 in Milwaukee and the sketchy promoters put me up in a welfare hotel across the street – the type with about 3 inches of bullet proof glass in the lobby. And the people next to my room were having a huge crack party and I could smell it coming under the door. I didn’t know what crack smells like but now I do thanks to staying in a welfare hotel in Milwaukee.

What does it smell like?
It smells like a combination of burning chemicals and burnt hair.

Remembering Abe

The memorial

It was a beautiful, sunny day in Washington. Although the city is home to the world’s best museums, a good long walk to explore the Axis of America, from the Lincoln Memorial, past the Whitehouse, to Congress proved to be more educational.

I sat on the steps leading up to the Lincoln Memorial watching visitors watch it: Today, like every other day, people come to pay homage to the man who won the Civil War. There is the constant sound of footfall scuffing and squeaking upon the stone steps. There are photos full of smiles taken in the middle of the stairs. A stranger takes a photo for a stranger. People of all races, colours.

There is a group of school kids wearing matching fluorescent harnesses ambling up the steps towards the great statue of Lincoln. They each don a plastic, imitation confederate hat with the double bayonet crest on their head, clutching a paper cup with the words “Be Proud America” written just below a stylized red and blue map of America.

Even if you are not here to pay respect, the building is designed so you can do nothing else but look at it respectfully. Everyone approaches from below with their eyes transfixed with an unbroken, upwards gaze. That's because the Memorial is perched atop a long flight of stairs so all eyes and lenses must tilt up. In the late afternoon, with the sun high above, its whiteness gleams, almost blinding.

When you reach the top of the stairs you enter Lincoln’s temple. With the sun obscured by the stone above, the air is cool and damp. Before you is the multi-ton statue of Abraham. He is seated like a 19-foot grandfather upon his favourite chair, his eyes fixed in a television-watching gaze. You stop and gaze at him -- gazing out. You remember how many TV shows and movies you’ve watched that take place here, in front of his eyes.

And, thanks to the security camera in the top corner, Abe Lincoln now looks back at you.

As you approach, a small metal sign reads: QUIET: RESPECT PLEASE. As if the millions of tons of pink Tennessee marble, Indiana limestone, Colorado marble and thirty-six 44-foot Doric pillars didn’t already spell R-E-S-P-E-C-T.

I begin to wonder what Abe Lincoln would think if he were to walk up these steps and look up at this statue. He probably never went to Rome and could not appreciate the scale and grandeur. He was a simple, humble man. At least his words were. After all, his famous Gettysburg Address, inscribed in huge letters on the south wall, was a practice in economy and simplicity. In only 278 words, he was able to honour the Civil War dead and chart a new course of his country. In an age of pomp and pageantry, he was mocked for this speech. But today, it is still likely the only speech that most Americans, and people worldwide, have tried to memorize.

I imagine Lincoln turning to the right and going through the small door that leads to the Memorial souvenir shop. Would he thumb through the biographies? Buy a DVD? Or purchase a fake US Constitution printed on parchment that comes wrapped in plastic?

Can you walk away from the memorial with just a memory anymore?

Feeding Frenzy

They wait outside the house of commons like bears beside a stream looking for salmon: The members of parliament. After an hour of grilling and screaming inside, the media wait outside with their lights shining, cameras posted like machine guns atop a tripod. Here the journalists are waiting for their meat. When a politician leaves through the heavy oak doors, the flash bulbs pop. The questions and mumbling begins. "Sir, what about the Gomery Inquiry..." The ministers and leaders of the opposition are herded into the centre of the room the reporters swarm them, aiming their Dictaphones and microphones like knives. Pop pop pop. Wrrr. The cameras whrr.



Other MPs trickle out. But some are not important. They look at the journalists with broad smiles, as if they want to be recognized, as if they want to be asked their opinion. Meanwhile the MPs without power wont look anyone in the eye. They speak short terse phrases and leave when they begin to sweat.



The MPs are all finally gone. The lights switch off. The journalists mill about chatting with each other. Nothing good today. No gossip, no accusations. You can hear their bellies growling.