Moby - Innocents

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Moby on 'Going Wrong':

“This song is just delicate. It starts delicate, and stays delicate – even when it expands a little bit, it still has this quality of warmth and delicacy. It never needs to become ironic and cynical and step back and see what it’s doing; it’s just this little jewel box of a song.”

Innocents

Going Wrong

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Moby on 'Almost Home':

“One thing that makes L.A. great is you live in your cars, so you listen to a lot of radio; there, public radio stations like KXLU and KCRW are actually valid, big stations that people listen to. One day, I was listening to ‘Morning Becomes Eclectic’ on KCRW, and I heard a Damien Jurado song. I simply fell in love with his voice – this most beautiful, vulnerable, pristine, angelic voice. Originally ‘Almost Home’ was a fully finished song, but I love Damien’s approach to melody and lyrics, so I gave it to him as an instrumental. What he did was much better than anything I’d come up with.”


Almost Home (feat. Damien Jurado)

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Moby on 'Everything That Rises':

“I just thought this song had a really odd, strangely beautiful quality to it, which is why I used it to open the record. I like the idea of starting absurdly small and then getting quite big and epic about two-thirds of the way through. Hopefully, people won’t turn up their stereos really loud at the beginning to compensate, because it does get quite loud at the end; but when it begins, it’s just so thin and strange. When you first listen to it, there’s a chance you’ll wonder what’s wrong with your stereo! 

It’s hard to talk about instrumentals because… they’re instrumentals: It’s difficult to say, “The song is about this,” because technically it isn’t about anything. And I never know what to name them, either, so I figure, why not pay homage to my favorite writers and borrow their titles? I’ve named a few of my songs after Southern Gothic stories, and this one comes from “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” which is a Flannery O’Connor story.”

Everything That Rises

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Moby on 'The Perfect Life':

“Wayne Coyne and I ended up doing a duet on ‘The Perfect Life’: we sing the choruses together, and then go back and forth on the verses. Wayne and I first met in 1995, when The Flaming Lips and I were both opening up for a Red Hot Chili Peppers’ European tour. We became friends, shared a dressing room and the same bad craft services, and watched the Chili Peppers from the side of the stage. I thought of Wayne for this song because The Flaming Lips have evolved in this very open, celebratory band when they play live, and that was the perfect vibe for what I was imagining for ‘The Perfect Life.’ I texted Wayne and said, ‘Hey, I have a song – want to sing on it?’ Thirty seconds later, he texted me back: ‘Yes, send it to me, it will be great.’”


The Perfect Life

The Perfect Life (feat. Wayne Coyne)

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Moby on 'Don't Love Me':


“If there’s a more conventional, sexy song on the album, ‘Don’t Love Me’  would be it. It was actually the one song I was thinking of not including on the record: it felt a little more uptempo and lighthearted than the other stuff I’d done. It’s funny – I thought it was too happy: then I played it for a friend of mine, and he said, ‘Have you listened to the lyrics? There’s nothing happy about it!’ I’m glad it made it onto the record, because Inyang Bassey sings on it.

About five years ago, I was looking for someone to sing with me on tour. I auditioned a bunch of very good professional singers, and the last person I auditioned was Inyang Bassey. At the time, she was working in the experimental classical music department at Carnegie Hall, and she’d grown up listening to the Dead Kennedys and Black Flag. Professionally, she shouldn’t have been auditioning for me – she’d never really sung with anyone, but when she walked in and started singing, she revealed these Mahalia Jackson/Etta James pipes! Since then, her career has been taking off, and it’s been great to see her get recognition.”

Don't Love Me (feat. Inyang Bassey)

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Moby on 'The Last Day':

“Spike had become friends with Skyler Grey a few years ago. When I first started working on the record, we were coming up with list of possible collaborators, and her name came up. Skyler just has a remarkable gift for lyrics and melody, and her voice has such a distinctive, beautiful quality. 

For ‘The Last Day,’ we collaborated on the lyrics and the performance: I wanted the vocal to have this specific, delicate vulnerability to it. The last thing I did to this song was add six tracks of Sonic Youth/Glenn Branca-style feedback: I put in earplugs, did open tunings on some guitars, put them through two distortion pedals into the amp, and just recorded track after track of feedback to create this weird subsonic wash. In it, the loud feedback is mixed really quiet, which gives the song a kind of atmospheric space the song wouldn’t have otherwise.”

The Last Day (feat. Skylar Grey)

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Moby on 'Saints':

“‘Saints’ was supposed to be a song with vocals – a big New York 1984 almost freestyle type song. Originally it was just drums, bassline, and synths;
it kind of reminded me of something you would’ve heard at Danceteria in ’84 -’85,  pre house music. But I was never able to write good vocals for it. By the end, I kept adding more strings, more orchestral elements, more drums, so I ended up with an instrumental that was so filled, there just wasn’t room for real vocals on it.
I like music with vocals, but having an instrumental on a record provides a moment where the listener doesn’t have to be as engaged, so you can kind of take a little break; the parts of your brain that are engaged by people singing can quiet down for a minute and you can just relax. 

Spike said ‘Saints” reminded him of ‘Slave to the Rhythm’ and ‘Unfinished Sympathy’: when he told me that, I listened to them, and was like, ‘Oh, yeah – you’re right!’ It wasn’t intentional, and I wasn’t aware of it when I was working on it, but afterwards I was like, “Yeah, I hear it.” If you listen to records enough, eventually they are going to infect how you make your own music. The fact that “Unfinished Sympathy” is one of my favorite songs of all time, and “Slave to the Rhythm” is such an inspirational piece of music, it’s not surprising that some of those elements would come through in what I do.”

Saints


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Moby on 'Tell Me':

“‘Tell Me’ is so much about the atmosphere. The way we mixed it, most producers or mixers wouldn’t mix a song where everything has reverb on it: the kick drum, the snare, the hi-hats, the pads, the vocals. Basically, It was like, ‘Why don’t we just turn up the reverb and see what we have.’ The finished product is really messy, but I like that it creates its own odd, washy, atmospheric, world.”  Oddly enough I was thinking of 'PSK What Does It Mean?' by Schoolly D as the inspiration for the mix."

Tell Me (feat. Cold Specks)

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Moby on 'The Lonely Night':

“‘The Lonely Night’ had just been a really stripped down, vulnerable instrumental – just a synth and a drum machine. It’s electronic music at its most basic and simple, a cheap univox organ from 1972 and an old drum loop I was playing. 

I had talked to Mark Lanegan about signing on my record, so I sent him a bunch of instrumentals. I expected him to gravitate towards the darker stuff, but he chose this very gentle piece. Mark wrote the lyrics and melody, and then came in, I put a microphone in front of him, and we recorded it in one take. That’s it. I started adding more stuff to it, to expand on what he’d done; then for the mix, we mixed all the music – strings, bass, guitars - through a distortion pedal into a guitar amp; it’s about as broken down and lo-fi as a song can possibly be. 

A big problem I have with modern music is every song is mixed the same. With a song like ‘The Lonely Night,’ it’s such a vulnerable, beautiful delicate song, how could you mix it in a bombastic way? The mix needs to be just as broken and vulnerable as the song.”

The Lonely Night (with Mark Lanegan)

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Moby on 'The Dogs':

“The Dogs” is the last song that we made for the record. When I make a record, I’ll write about 300 songs, narrow them down to 75, and then narrow that down to 30; and then six months ago, we narrowed them down to 15. But when Spike and I started, we agreed there could only be 12 songs on the records, so I got rid of three of them. On the very last day of making the record, I finished “The Dogs” and thought I’d just put it on the very end, because no one’s going to listen to it. I like it, but as it's the last song on the record in an age when people don't buy or listen to records I don’t really expect many people will hear it.”

The Dogs

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Moby on 'A Long Time':

“‘A Long Time’ was the first song written for Innocents. Originally the whole record was going to all sound like that – lo-fi downtempo dance music. Early dance music was futuristic, but had these sounds that had a broken-down warmth to them. It’s why so many electronic musicians love Bladerunner: there’s all this high tech stuff, but it’s grimy at the same time. 

I like letting an element of wistful nostalgia creep in, specifically through sampling things that happened a long time ago. The vocals that are sampled on ‘The Long Time’ are probably seventy years old: they’re filled with longing and pathos, recorded by someone who’s been dead for quite a long time. It’s futuristic nostalgia, or maybe nostalgic futurism? Electronic music has this openness to bygone aesthetics and technologies that have sort of a naïve wistful quality to them.

A Long Time

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Moby on 'A Case For Shame':

“I had this idea to make a video for ‘A Case For Shame’ which actually ended up informing the entire visual scheme of Innocents. In the video, someone dies – maybe they killed themselves out of a sense of shame – and they enter this other world, populated by these ghost creatures wearing masks. They look scary, but they’re actually covering their face because they’re ashamed. When you see someone wearing a scary mask, the first thought is, “What’s going on? That’s intimidating.” But they’re actually hiding – it’s the most blatant act of concealing oneself. ‘A Case For Shame” is one of two songs I collaborated on with Cold Specks. She’s quite shy, and preferred to be left alone in the studio, so I’d hit ‘record,’ go have some tea, then come back in and press ‘stop.’”


Moby - Innocents

stephenwmoss