Sometimes, Moby envies musicians who seem aloof and mysterious, like Radiohead singer Thom Yorke, who disappears from public view for extended periods of time, then reappears to widespread adoration, prized even more for being gone. “How do I learn how to do that?” he wonders. But he’s realized that elusiveness isn’t possible for a highly sociable person who gives candid interviews about his life and struggles. “You can’t be reclusive and esoteric, but also go out seven nights a week and talk to everybody,” he says with a laugh.
This year, he’ll be less reclusive than ever. The 55-year-old musician, who was born Richard Melville Hall, has a new album, Reprise, released on May 28, for which he rerecorded his best-known songs in unvarnished new arrangements that feature the Budapest Art Orchestra, as well as guest singers including Mark Lanegan of Screaming Trees, soul singer Gregory Porter, and country stalwart Kris Kristofferson. Also on May 28, director Robert Bralver will release Moby Doc, a playful, surrealistic, but also quite raw feature-length documentary.
Moby Doc covers his childhood as a fatherless kid who grew up poor in a wealthy part of Connecticut, a hardcore punk fan adrift in a suburban sea of Izod shirts. After high school, he squatted in an abandoned factory, became a vegan, put out a few records, had moderate success for several years, then suddenly became electronic music’s biggest star and lost his mind to drugs, booze, and sex. Fame, he says in the movie, “completely corrupted and ruined me, but at the time, it was so much fun to go from being kind of a washed-up has-been to dating movie stars and going to parties and making a lot of money.” The doc completes an autobiographical trilogy that also includes his thoughtful 2016 book, Porcelain: A Memoir, and its 2019 successor, Then It Fell Apart.
There are a lot of things that annoy people about Moby, including, but not limited to, his veganism, his advocacy of animal rights, his music, his voice, his face, and more broadly, his earnestness and compulsive honesty, which can sometimes backfire—as when he mentioned a relationship with the actress Natalie Portman in his second memoir. (She denied the relationship; he insisted it was true, apologized for disclosing it without her consent, and pledged to “go away for a while.”)
But he’s also funny and droll, especially when discussing his neuroses, as he did in this interview from his home in Los Angeles, near the Griffith Observatory. “I’m wearing my daytime sweatpants,” he said, explaining that his nighttime sweatpants are thicker and heavier. In addition to sweatpants, he discussed David Bowie’s nickname for him, giant rats, jokes about vegans, jazz solos, finding comedy in stories of misery and degradation, and whose music puts him to sleep.
GQ: What’s interesting about you?
Moby: It’s a legitimate question. Writing memoirs, releasing a documentary, rerecording songs, it does ostensibly seem like an exercise in narcissism. And here's where I get to sound really pretentious. It's informed by [Marcel Proust’s] Remembrance of Things Past, combined with going to AA meetings. When I started to go to AA meetings, 12 or 13 years ago, it amazed me that complete strangers would tell their story in the most honest, heart-wrenching, vulnerable ways. It really affected me. The one thing that we all have is our story.
That’s hopefully what's interesting—my experience with being a dysfunctional human and all the terrible things I did to try and address it, that then led me to address the underlying issues in ways that actually seemed to work.
You’re very open about mistakes you’ve made and problems you’ve had in your life. Are there things you kept out of your memoirs and out of Moby Doc?
I'd read Morrissey's memoir and [record executive] Seymour Stein's memoir, and there's a lot of ax-grinding. I wanted to make sure that the only person who was consistently thrown under the bus is me. That was my only criterion. The movie is basically just looking at all of my shame and glory.
You’re an easy target for mockery. But you’ve made more fun of yourself than anyone else could ever do, haven’t you?
It’s like that 30 Rock episode, “Into the Crevasse.” The idea is, if someone pushes you into a crevasse, go deeper. There is a sort of liberation and protection in that.
Everybody has an opinion, everybody feels comfortable sharing those opinions, and the algorithms prioritize incendiary, salacious content. When Gawker and Gothamist were in their ascendancy, my self-obsession led me to look up myself on social media. There was a little article one of the two sites wrote about me, something snarky, and the first comment was a guy writing that he hated me so much he wanted to stab me and watch me bleed to death.
[Laughs]
There are a lot of crazy people on the streets in New York. If someone runs up to you and starts screaming that you are the son of Satan, you probably won’t take it to heart. But give that same person a social media account, and all of a sudden, it ruins your life! So I tried to implement a discipline where I don't read comments, reviews, or articles about me, because I'm not psychologically well-equipped enough to handle them. Maybe I should be so enlightened that I could read them and celebrate the diversity of hatred in the world. But I can’t. Bad reviews make me want to blow my brains out.
[Laughs] I hope it’s okay that I’m laughing at your misery.
I’m comfortable with that. In 12-step meetings, people say the most horrifying stuff, and everyone will laugh. Some friends and I use the acronym NTS, which is Never Too Soon. Dark comedy is the best comedy.
In Moby Doc, there’s a very evident Seventh Seal reference in the scene where you’re talking to Death. But when I watched it, I wasn’t thinking about Ingmar Bergman; I was thinking about Woody Allen.
I mean, we’re not allowed to talk about Woody Allen. But you’re right, in the structure of that scene, it was supposed to be like Alvy Singer meets Death in The Seventh Seal.
Would it be fair to say that you’re influenced by a particular kind of comedy that is self-effacing and often Jewish?
As an inbred white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, I don't feel like I have a legitimate claim to the Semitic tradition. But having said that, my aunts and uncles married South American Jews, for the most part. The WASPs are slowly dying off in my family, and the South American Jews are taking control, which is great. My Spanish still isn't very good, so I just sit around and pretend to know what they're talking about.
Did anyone try to talk you out of using a pun as the title of your documentary?
[Laughs] The only person who tried to talk me out of it was me. We understood that having a pun as a title was not the best idea. But the pun was good, and we couldn’t think of a better title. I also think the majority of people won't get that it's a pun. Like David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane album—I didn’t figure out that it’s a pun until the mid-’90s. Maybe this will be something similar, where, 20 years from now, in the underwater city of Miami, people being chased by giant rats will think, Oh, Moby Doc. That was a pun!
Can I tell you what I would have suggested as an alternate title?
Sure, but I have a concern: If I go out to dinner with someone, and they love their food and offer to let me try it, I usually don't, because if it's really good, I'll be sad with what I have. So please tell me, but if it's better, I'm going to be sad.
Moby, Dick.
That one got kicked around a little bit, no pun intended. But, going back to people who don’t like me, there had been a lot of press headlines using that. Some British magazine that disappeared a long time ago was doing a feature on me. I was very excited, and the giant, bold-faced headline was “Moby: Dickhead.”
On your new album, Reprise, in the new version of “Porcelain,” there’s a note you sing about two and a half minutes in that is clearly not in your range. Why did you leave it in?
I love a good Auto-Tuned, technically perfect pop vocal, but this record was supposed to be vulnerable. When I listen to that, it makes me uncomfortable. But why should imperfection, which is shared by every human being on the planet, make me uncomfortable?
And sorry if this is a little esoteric, but when I was growing up—and Nietzsche talked about, "Be careful if you stare in the void too long, it'll stare back at you," and Jung talked about the shadow self—it always seemed like the hidden self was dark and menacing. What if it's just embarrassing? What if the shadow self is actually just the part of you that farted on a date in high school, or did karaoke badly in front of someone you had a crush on?
Isn’t that one of the things that separates pop fans from rock fans? Pop fans want to hear a technically perfect, idealized voice. Rock fans want to hear a voice that reminds them of themselves.
Perfection is great if it's an airplane. But when it comes to art, I don't understand the need for it. I enjoy an Auto-Tuned pop song, but it’s not what I want to listen to during the dark night of my soul.
What do you want to listen to in the dark night of your soul?
When I started working on Reprise, I listened to a lot of rock orchestral arrangements, and I found the late-’60s, early-’70s approach was wonderful. So lately, my dark-night-of-the-soul playlist would be “Vincent,” by Don McLean. Or if I’m feeling really despairing, “Hurt,” by Johnny Cash.
In the movie, you talk about how messed up your family was—your alcoholic father killed himself just after you turned two, and your mom had a series of scuzzy boyfriends—and the tone brightens when you find the punk rock and electronic music communities. That became your new family. Then, after Play comes out in 1999 and sells more than 12 million copies worldwide, there’s a giant backlash against you. Did it feel like it wasn’t just fans who turned on you, but family?
Yeah. A more specific subset of that was getting bad reviews. A big part of my community growing up was the music press. I'd go to the library at Mather Junior High School [in Darien, CT] and read any music magazine I could get my hands on. I read every review and thought music journalists were enlightened beings. When I started making records, I occasionally got good reviews. The gatekeepers liked me. So in a way, the journalists turning against me was one of the hardest things. I'm just too much of a weakling and a sissy to actually process it.
Let’s talk about something you tweeted in March: “In a vegan world there would be no pandemics.” There were doctors and scientists who said that wasn’t accurate. Do you stand by it?
It comes down to an issue of nomenclature. People think vegan means eating vegan food. And I meant it in the broader sense of not using animals for human purposes, and not encroaching upon animal habitats. It’s hard for a college dropout musician to argue with a Ph.D. [laughs] But how do you explain that in a nuanced way? So I just let it go.
You didn’t read the replies to your tweets about veganism and pandemics, but I did. Can I read you two funny responses?
Just give me a minute, I'm going to go get a razor blade. By all means tell me, if you're okay with my death on your hands [laughs].
I’m okay with that. When you asked, "Can anyone name a viral pandemic that doesn't have a zoonotic etiology?" one person replied, "EDM?"
It’s a good joke. A solid B.
Where would you rate this reply, from @yorkslass1972?: "The clitoris has 8,000 nerve endings. It's still not as sensitive as a vegan on social media."
The subtext to a lot of vegan dialectic with non-vegans is people saying, "Oh, relax. Why do you care about this?" Well, there are one trillion animals being brutally killed by humans every year, and the consequence is pandemics, climate change, rainforest deforestation, obesity, cancer, and heart disease. So what someone like that is really saying is, “You need to relax about the fact that as a species, we are destroying ourselves.” It’s a little weird. Also, I’ve heard versions of that joke for the last 34 years. So sadly, that’s a C-minus.
You grew up poor and thought that becoming rich and famous would make you happy. It didn’t. Do you think people are essentially either happy or unhappy, as determined by their childhoods, and changes of circumstance don't matter much?
A huge part of human confusion is simply the act of being human in a universe that’s 15 billion years old, with no idea if our lives have meaning. That's a scary thought. There are so many ways for people to cobble together a happy response to that: fame, success, likes on social media, degeneracy, cynicism, religion, jazz solos. There are so many ways people are essentially avoiding the void, or trying to throw Weather Report records into the void.
Are you happy now?
Yes. I took a New York Times quiz the other day on fulfillment, and according to the quiz, I am happy. Who am I to dispute a quiz in The New York Times?
Well, as you mention in Moby Doc, that’s the newspaper that referred to one of your albums as “the end of music.” You might want to take the quiz with a grain of salt.
[Laughs] Years ago, before I got sober, I read an interview with the Dalai Lama, and he talked about how happiness could really only be had by being of service. I hated that idea, because at the time, I was drinking and doing drugs and being a selfish dick, per your name for the documentary. And as time passed, especially with AA stuff, I realized, oh, he's right. One of the only things that delivers a bedrock to me is a desire to be of service to animals, to address climate change.
This is esoteric, but since you and I both grew up in Connecticut, I’ll ask: Who’s the greatest musician who ever came out of Connecticut?
There haven’t been many. Who is there? Meat Loaf, Youth of Today, John Mayer, me, Miracle Legion. It’s like comparing Sweden to Finland in terms of global creative output. So many phenomenally successful companies and musicians have come out of Sweden. And Finland? Maybe Nokia. Not to malign Finland, but I'm just saying, Connecticut is the Finland of New England.
You lived across the street from David Bowie when you were a New Yorker, and you two became friends. He liked to give people nicknames. Did he have one for you?
Sort of. He had a song called “The Disco King,” and he did sometimes call me the disco king. But here’s how he would address me in an endearing, funny, insulting way: He’d always say, “You might be younger than me, but my hair is great." There were a bunch of occasions where he reminded me that he had a beautiful, full head of hair, and I just looked like a bald thumb.
Did you have a retort for that?
Just sadness and agreement. [laughs] He was a god among men, and I was just a weird drunk.
I’ve used the Calm app in the past year to help me fall asleep. Their music catalog includes a few long, ambient pieces you made. What do you use when you can’t get to sleep?
I have some meditation tricks, mindfulness practices for dealing with resentment. And self-involvedly, I do listen to the long ambients that I made. I made them for myself. Then I had a self-evident thought that only took me three years to figure out, which was: If this helps me sleep and find calm, it might help other people. Someone I know liked the app and offered them my music. I wish there was a better story, like the CEO of Calm and I were at a mountain retreat in the Urals, and we encountered each other during a shamanic festival. But no, I made that music for myself and gave it to them.
I think we found the headline to the story: “Moby Falls Asleep to His Own Music.”
[Laughs] Please, no. Let me know what I have to do to make the headline not be “Moby Falls Asleep to His Own Music.”
