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, 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.
The demise of the monolithic record industry has been, for a lot of people, really liberating and emancipating.
My goal is to make one-not a hodgepodge, but just the sort of record that I would want to listen to.
One problem with a lot of musicians is that they remove themselves in a studio and make a record and assume people are going to pay attention to it just because they've made it.
There's not a lot of precedent for weird, bald musicians in the Lower East Side making records in their bedrooms and going on to sell a lot of copies of the record. Especially if you look at the pop climate.
I'm a weird, bald musician who makes records in his bedroom and lives in the Lower East Side.
You can sit down with Reason or Ableton and literally in a couple of hours make a very good-sounding record. But then a lot of people become contented with that, rather than pushing themselves to making something that sounds great.
People love their favorite records. And I aspire to make a record someone might be able to love in that way.
I love the idea of making records that people can use, records that have a sense of utility.
There are a lot of public figures who, before they take a stand on a issue, they talk about it with their publicist and they figure out how it's going to affect record sales. Life is really too short to worry about that sort of thing.
I've made records that everyone has hated and I've loved, and made records that everyone has loved and I've deemed, at best, mediocre.
If someone writes a nice review of my record, I feel like I should take them out to dinner or go over and clean their apartment.
If you make a record, you should ask yourself, 'Did it make someone cry, in a good way, not a bad way?' There should almost be subjective emotional criteria for evaluating work, instead of just profitability.
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.