Moby
Moby
Richard Melville Hall, known by his stage name Moby, is an American singer-songwriter, musician, DJ and photographer. He is well known for his electronic music, veganism, and support of animal rights. Moby has sold over 20 million albums worldwide. AllMusic considers him "one of the most important dance music figures of the early 1990s, helping bring the music to a mainstream audience both in the UK and in America"...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPop Singer
Date of Birth11 September 1965
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
When I was growing up, I fetishised New York City. It was the land of Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, it was where Leonard Cohen wrote 'Chelsea Hotel', it was CBGBs and all the punk rock clubs. Artists and musicians lived there, and it was cheap and dangerous.
My interest in gospel music and liturgical art and Biblically-inspired literature has nothing to do with organised religion and everything to do with human beings trying to figure out their place on this planet.
An artist in 2014 who is thinking about album sales is either sadly deluded or has to make so many commercial compromises that it sort of takes the joy out of making music.
I stopped drinking and realised New York still has a lot of charm, but it has become so bourgeois and affluent - and I can't really complain because I'm sort of bourgeois and affluent myself, but I like living in a place where artists and musicians and writers can actually pay the rent.
I don't know many artists who are happy with themselves all of the time.
A lot of people do talk about the demise of the album, but I still believe that if an artist tries hard to make a great album, people will buy it and listen to it as an album, rather than just a collection of random songs.
I feel compelled to make art that on one hand reflects and sometimes almost creates like a sense of comfort when confronted with the strangeness of the world.
David Lynch is my friend, and I love his movies and his art and his music. Few things make me happier than working with him.
I'd much rather go to a Banksy art show than a Moby art show. My art is painfully naive.
Sometimes I love the marriage of art and commerce; I love Donna Summer; I like the Rolling Stones.
One of the central flaws in the state of contemporary music is that the major record companies have failed to incorporate that simple fact into their business plans. They've come into an industry that's based on idiosyncratic artists and tried to erase every idiosyncratic aspect out of it.
Most artists, you know, you spend their entire lives learning how to play music and write songs, and they don't really know how the music business works.
If you care about women's rights, you can't not vote.
When I was growing up, albums were my closest friends, as sad as that may sound - Joy Division's 'Closer,' or Echo and the Bunnymen's 'Heaven Up Here'... I had a more intimate relationship with those records than I did with most of the people in my life.