Dance prodigy Moby returns with his 9th studio album Wait For Me this month. The self-proclaimed bald-headed 43-year-old has achieved a significant amount of success since his official debut in 1991. However it wasn’t until 1999’s Play that garnered the artist worldwide acclaim, success and over 10 million album sales. But being a bona fide pop star wasn’t meant to be the plan.
The super producer talks fame, label politics – and of course music.
You stated that you wanted to produce an emotional and personal record with Wait For Me. Are you proud of the album?
Because I make the record by myself for the most part, you know it is just me and my studio, writing the songs and engineering them, producing them and playing the instruments. I have no objectivity on my own music, it usually takes me at least a couple of years for me to be able to listen to the music that I made with a degree of objectivity and sometimes that’s good – meaning sometimes I can go back and listen to an older record of mine and actually like it. Or sometimes I go back and listen to an older record that I made, and really not like it at all. I made an album about 5 years ago called Hotel, and I go back and listen to it and I actually don’t like it. I like some of the songs but when I listen to that album – I feel it was produced very professionally and became too polished. So out of all the records I’ve made that’s the one I’m most disappointed in. It’s hard to put down my own records because someone out there might really like it – and good on them.
With the new album, you recorded everything at home yourself. How instrumental was that for the production of the album?
I made the album Hotel in a big outside studio, a big fancy outside expensive studio with a really great engineer, and when it was done it became an overproduced big commercial record. So with this album I wanted to make something that was homemade, with a lot of imperfections in it - because I tend to like records where the musicians keep the imperfections. So making this album at home was nice and working at home enabled I could experiment more. I can try out weird ideas I couldn’t try at a big studio. I can work at 3AM and just in general it was a much nicer experience from working in big studios.
How would you describe the new album in your own words?
If I had to describe this album Wait For Me I’d say it’s mournful and atmospheric and melodic and emotional and pretty….and pretty seems like a trite word, but I wanted to make a record that has a sense of beauty to it…but hopefully I’m modest enough to refrain from describing my own music as beautiful it just sounds a little heavy handed. I think it’s a cohesive album.
After years of being signed to EMI Records, you’ve set up your own independent label Little Idiot. Were you pushed by label politics to go it alone?
I never expected to have a career as a musician, I thought that my whole life would be teaching at a school and making music in my spare time that no one would listen to. And then in 1991 I signed with a very small label in New York and I then signed with Mute records here in the UK. I loved being on Mute, but they were bought by EMI so, about 5 or 6 years ago I found myself being to subjected to EMI corporate policy, and I guess it did not agree with me.
Wait For Me is the first album that I’m putting out purely independently. I have a record company with an employee of one, who is me and I thought that my way of celebrating was having a first single Shot In The Back Of The Head that is arguably the least commercial single I’ve ever put out. So it was almost me celebrating the fact that I’m an independent artist and I can for better or worse do pretty much what I want.
Was that part of the reason for hiring the renowned David Lynch to direct the video?
It is an obscure, dark video for an obscure, dark song. I’m not saying TV can’t play it - I’m saying most likely they never would and I love that. Like, being able to put out a song and a video by David Lynch purely because I liked it. We gave the single away for free. So there’s no thought of how do we recuperate our costs, how do we generate revenue, all these questions just never entered into it, and it’s so liberating. Because EMI, they’re very good at putting out pop music but almost everything they do at this point – has to generate money, and I don’t like to think that way. Whenever a musician starts thinking too much about money, they invariably make bad decisions and more often than that end up making bad records. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with making money. A musician who can make a great record and sell a lot of copies of it – more power to them.
You achieved a huge amount of success with Play and 18, and for a certain period you were marketed the same way as a pop star.
Even though I’ve had some commercial success I’m essentially a weird underground musician who makes records in his bedroom and I don’t have any business being a pop artist. I’m 43 years old, I hang out with Sonic Youth, I do experimental performances in New York. At first I felt like an anthropologist, and I’m a part of this commercial music world that I know nothing about and I never wanted to be a part of – but I might as well stay because the girls are pretty, there are good drugs and its interesting. But then after a while it just got depressing. I’m very uncomfortable in the (celebrity) world. Whenever I go to the MTV Awards or anything like that I feel like I am in the Radiohead song Creep, wondering “what the hell am I doing here?” Someone must have made a mistake to invite the bald 43 year old guy to an MTV award to sit between Ludacris and Christina Aguilera.
You’ve been releasing records since the early nineties, did you ever think you’d last this long?
What’s really odd is that the first record I ever put out was in 1983 that no one would ever know about it ‘cause I only made 200 copies of it. It was a 7-inch from this punk rock band called The Vatican Commandos. The next record I put out was in 1991 - the song Go - and it was supposed to be an underground dance track for the New York club scene. It somehow became this big hit single, which seemed like such a mistake to me, like it was such a fluke, such an accident and it really surprised me – I liked it! Then the next ten years some records I made did well, some records I made didn’t do well, some were complete failures, some less so. And then the album Play happened, that started out as a weird underground record, that also became quite successful, and I really do truly believe any success I’ve had has been a complete mistake and an accident, I’m not supposed to be that artist.
That’s a bit negative…
This might sound too simple, but I love music, that’s what I want my life to be devoted to - making music and listening to music, thinking about music and discussing music. What happened after Play was I got a little too caught up in the fame aspect, like I started really enjoying the celebrity parties, and drinking a lot and taking a lot of drugs and going out all the time, I found myself actually, for a couple of years paying more attention to that, than anything else. And that scares me, ‘cos like I only want my energy and time to be spent on music.
Are record sales no longer a factor for you?
If I make a record that I love and other people love it and they wanna to buy it, that’s fine but as odd as this might sound, I don’t trust commercial success and I don’t like the what commercial success makes me feel about myself ‘cos it starts to make me take myself seriously and no good can come from that. When I look at artists who’ve had commercial success they spend their lives sort of holding on to it, it seems to make them really bitter, it makes them angry, they start getting plastic surgery and they wanna hold on to their youth, and I don’t wanna do that. I’m 43 years old, I wanna get old. I don’t wanna try and pretend that I’m younger than I am. One of the greatest challenges, one of the greatest accomplishments one could ever have is just accepting who you are at that moment. This is who I am - there are people on this planet who are much smarter than me, there are people on this planet who are dumber than me. You are who you are and I am who I am, fame makes me pay too much attention to myself, it makes me a little too self-involved and I don’t think it's healthy.
Any plans to return to the UK?
I have been making music for a long time - the first time I came to the UK was 1991. 18 years ago, and I never know whether people here like me or not ‘cos sometimes when I’ve come to the UK I’ve played to nobody. I mean literally there were times in the mid-‘90s where I was on tour in the UK playing to like fifty people a night, a hundred people a night, and the other times I’ve had really big audiences. So I’d like to come back, I just don’t know when or what sort of venues to play. Hopefully in September I’ll come back and do a couple more shows. I’m very pleasantly surprised if anyone makes the effort the come to listen to what I’ve done. If I have a show and someone comes to it I’m grateful, happy and surprised. I expect very little and have a surprise as opposed to expect a lot and be disappointed.
Wait For Me is out June 30th on Little Idiot Recods. Click here to hear Moby's DT Podcast from last year.