New 3-Disk version of Destroyed out soon. The album includes a full disk of new music and a DVD filled with video plus a 24-page booklet with all new photos taken by Moby. See the full list of content to the right and download one of the brand new tracks, The Poison Tree, below! http://moby.com/destroyed-deluxe

Destroyed Deluxe

i don't sleep very well when i travel.  and as a result, i tend to be awake in cities when everyone else is asleep.   and that's where this album comes from.  it was primarily written late at night in cities when i felt like i was the only person awake (or alive).  being the only person awake (or alive) in an empty city is strange and disconcerting, but it's also comforting. the streets are empty and quiet.  the streetlights are all on but are only illuminating emptiness.  i don't know if any of this will make sense to anyone listening to the album, but for me 'destroyed' is an album that makes the most sense late at night in an empty city when everyone else has gone to sleep.  and, as always, i presumptuously ask that you listen to the album in its entirety at least once, as it was put together as a, hopefully, cohesive body of work, and i believe that it makes the most sense when listened to from start to finish. a soundtrack for empty cities at 2 a.m, at least that's how i hear it. and, as always, thank you for listening.  and hopefully see you soon.

Destroyed

‘The Broken Places’ starts off with a vocoder loop. See, when I’m making an album, I’ll tend to write about 300 songs and narrow it down to the 15 songs that are on the album, which isn’t to say that the songs that don’t make it onto the record aren’t any good. It’s not like 300 amazing songs and I have to get rid of 285 amazing songs. Some of them aren’t very good. 

This song ‘The Broken Places’ was a weird instrumental that I’d written that I liked and thus assumed no one else would like it. And I played it to a few friends and they were like “Ah actually that’s interesting”. The more I lived with it the more I liked it. And what I love, it’s quiet repetitive and almost every element in there is broken, which I guess in keeping with the title but it’s an old Korg vocoder that barely works. I forget what drum machine I used but one of those, I think it might have been a home made, there is this company from Ohio called Paia and I got a home made kit drum machine that someone built in the 70’s. Again, it just barely, barely works. 

So I felt like this was a broken down, sort of winsome, endearing, electronic piece of music. I needed to come with a title for it. That’s the tricky thing with instrumentals is what you call them. And this one, there is a Ernest Hemingway quote, which I think I’m paraphrasing but basically says, life breaks most of us and some of us are stronger at the broken places, and I’ve always loved that quote, which I’m paraphrasing. And so I liked that as an introductory album title for the album because it does sort of emotionally set the tone for the rest of the record. 

The one regret I have about that first song is the original version is about 8 minutes long and just keeps repeating for 8 minutes. And I was kind of a sissy and I thought that having an 8 minutes repetitive introductory song in an album was just a little too much to expect anyone to get through. So I was a sissy and I edited it down to 3.5 minutes. If anyone wants the full 8 minutes version I am happy to send it to them. 


The Broken Places

The song ‘Be The One’ also started with a vocoder loop. And it was the same broken down Korg vocoder. One of my favourite ways of making songs is to start with a decontextualised loop and then just keep adding stuff to it. So with this one there is the vocoder loop and I added a crummy, old, organ pad to it and a drum machine and then two live drum tracks, two bass tracks, tons of synthesizers to make this weird Phil Spector minus the wig and the prison sentence, this wall of sound. 

The idea was this, once everything kicks in my hope is that no one really knows what they’re listening to. Like you can’t tell if it is a bass, or a guitar, or a synthesizer, it’s just this gestalt, crazy wall of sound. And the very last thing I added to it, my friend Joe, who I was working with, said, “Oh wouldn’t it sound cool with a bunch of feedback?”. So I took a hollow body electric guitar and plugged it in three old punk rock distortion pedals I have and turned each one as loud as it could go and put an old ribbon mic in front of the amp and recorded the nosiest destructive feedback I could get. So it’s there through the whole track mixed really, really quietly. So it’s kind of inspired by spending too much time in little bars listening to Glenn Branca, Thurston Moore. The noisy sort of sonic youth Glenn Branca inspired wall of feedback underneath the track. 

I don’t really like happy lyrics that much. So the lyrics were never written down. It’s just me sort of singing into a vocoder. So it’s completely spontaneous, just about what I generally write about, which is relationships falling apart. Maybe at some point I will write songs about relationships working out but unless you are John Fogerty it seems like no one’s really good at that. 


Be The One

I make a lot of different types of music, I write weird folk music, and punk rock and dance music. And when I was making this record I didn’t know what type of record it should be and then at some point I thought, well it’s a record inspired by empty cities at two o’clock in the morning. And when I am not making music in empty hotel rooms at two o’clock in the morning I listen to a lot of weird, old, electronic music. So I thought, oh, I guess this album should be an album of weird old electronic music. 

So the song ‘Sevastopol’ it’s an instrumental that originally I thought I was the only one who was gonna like it. And I played it to my manager and few other people and they liked it. Which made me think that I should actually put it on a record and the more I lived with it the more I really liked it. 

It’s hard to speak positively about my own music but what I really like about this song is, it’s quiet driving, it’s ostensibly a dance song, but the music is really mournful with quiet a lot dissonance in it. It’s sort of big, enveloping, cinematic, electronic, melodic component with quite cold, repetitive electronic drum loops underneath. 

When I was in the Ukraine, there is a town in Ukraine called Sevastopol and I just thought it’s the coolest sounding name for a town. So there is literally no correlation between the name and the track except that I like the track and I like the name and I thought they somehow make sense together. Maybe in the future I will say that the song was written in Sevastopol except someone could check and realise I never actually been to Sevastopol.


Sevastopol

‘The Low Hum’ was another broken down electronic, instrumental track and I gave it to my friend Emily Zuzik and what’s funny is, I didn’t even tell her what the album was about the theme of music for empty cities at two o’clock in the morning and she basically wrote these lyrics about being in a hotel room at two o’clock in the morning in an empty city. 

So maybe she is psychic. I don’t know but it’s a song without a chorus, which I like. And her voice has this quiet sort of disembodied quality to it, which was really hard for her because she is a big singer. If it was up to her, she would have sang it broadway style but I wanted it to be that sort of disconcerting, warm, womb like quality, where the vocals are almost like someone singing to themselves instead of projecting for all the world to hear, it’s sort of like someone in a bath tub, in a hotel next to the Stuttgart train station at three o’clock in the morning singing to yourself in the bath tub. So vocally I think that’s what I was trying to get her to do.

The Low Hum

I’m not allowed to pick favourite songs because it sounds self serving and also I run the risk of offending the songs that I don’t pick, but at present ‘Rockets’ is my favourite song on the record because it just got a winsome, resigned, melodic, emotional quality to it that I really love. 

I also like the way it appears in the record because it’s sort of like the record is building, building and all of a sudden pulls back with this very broken, messed up piece of quiet, pretty, electronic music. 

My friend Inyang sang on that and she sings in about 4 or 5 songs on the record and she is particularly interesting because she is this very tall statuesque African-American woman and she has a perfect, almost like Mahalia Jackson style gospel voice but she grew up listening to Punk Rock. And when I met her she was working at Carnegie Hall in the world of contemporary classical music. So before she and I started working together, she didn’t really know Gospel and Soul that well. So the irony there is like nerdy, middle-aged, white guy introduces tall, beautiful statuesque African-American woman to Gospel and Soul. Because she grew up listening to the Dead Kennedys. 

The moment she starts singing, it just feels like it’s 1945, and you are driving along an empty stretch of the road in Nebraska, listening to some gospel radio station. 


Rockets

First to start with the title, Victoria Lucas was Sylvia Plath’s pseudo name when she wrote ‘The Bell Jar’. I keep going on bay, trying to find an original copy of ‘The Bell Jar’ written by Victoria Lucas and they show up every now and then but they are very pricy. 

A lot of the titles in the record are inspired by either my favourite writers or works by my favourite writers and this one it’s an instrumental. So there is always that question when you write an instrumental, what do you call it? So why not name it after one of my favourite writers? 

The way I write, composing or compiling a song, I start with one arbitrary, decontextualised element and in this case it was a backwards guitar loop. I have a foot switch where you play something into it, you push a button, and it takes what you played and plays it backwards but really lo-fi. I was playing guitar onto it and I ended up with this really weird sounding guitar loop that doesn’t sound like a guitar loop, I recorded that and started adding different elements. 

At first it was this very slow ballad like song and then I added house music drums to it, and house piano to it and ended up with this weird hodgepodge of quiet, disconcerting, atmospheric elements with house music elements. I hope it works. 

The guitar loop for Victoria Lucas was recorded here in New York. I was just living with the guitar loop listening to it over and over again. I had this terrible case of insomnia in Los Angeles. I was staying in a hotel there and so I started adding the quiet atmospheric elements to the song when I was in L.A. and I brought everything back to New York and turned it into a weird messed up, house music song.


Victoria Lucas

The Poison Tree

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