Speaker 1: This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the
Speaker 1: Thing from My Heart Radio. It's summer and that means
Speaker 1: it's time for our tradition and Here's the Thing, where
Speaker 1: the staff share their favorite episodes from our archives in
Speaker 1: our Summer Staff Picks series. Our last pick is from
Speaker 1: engineer Frank Imperial.
Speaker 2: Thanks Alec. When I think back to the late nineties
Speaker 2: and early two thousands, it's impossible not to hear Moby's music.
Speaker 2: His album play was everywhere in films, commercials, on the radio,
Speaker 2: and yet it never felt manufactured. It felt intimate, like
Speaker 2: he had cracked open his own world and invited everyone in.
Speaker 2: What makes this conversation so compelling is that Mobi doesn't
Speaker 2: just talk about the music. He opens up about the
Speaker 2: struggles that fueled it, the questions of identity and faith
Speaker 2: that have followed him, and his passion for activism from
Speaker 2: animal rights to environmental issues. Sense of an artist who
Speaker 2: always has tried to connect the personal with the political,
Speaker 2: the beats with the bigger picture. Listening back, I was
Speaker 2: struck by how candid he is about fame, sobriety, what
Speaker 2: it means to try to live authentically in a world
Speaker 2: that doesn't always make it that easy. And of course
Speaker 2: you hear the humor and self awareness that makes him
Speaker 2: such a singular voice. Here's Alex twenty nineteen conversation with Boby.
Speaker 1: I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the thing. Ooh,
Speaker 1: lone trouble so ham ooo lone.
Speaker 3: Treboshan don't about and do a job God.
Speaker 1: In nineteen ninety nine, your cool friends put on Moby's
Speaker 1: play at parties. In two thousand, it was on the radio.
Speaker 1: Popularity snowballed into ubiquity. In two thousand and one, Play
Speaker 1: was in and Volkswagen Ads. It became the biggest selling
Speaker 1: electronica album of all time. To fans outside the electronic
Speaker 1: music world, Moby seemed like an overnight success, but he
Speaker 1: was thirty three in nineteen ninety nine and had been
Speaker 1: recording since the eighties. Play was actually his fifth studio album.
Speaker 1: It never occurred to him it would break even, let
Speaker 1: alone break records. The self described loner and nerd succumbed
Speaker 1: to the worst sort of rockstar excess. As his fans
Speaker 1: filled stadiums and models showed up in his dressing room.
Speaker 1: Moby was euphoric but spinning out of control. It's a
Speaker 1: story he shares in his new book Then It Fell Apart.
Speaker 1: I spoke to Moby last month in the early chapters
Speaker 1: of his book. Moby is coming to terms with the
Speaker 1: album going platinum. What do you think happened inside the
Speaker 1: music in that album that was different and something click did?
Speaker 1: Something changed all of a sudden. You're a monolith in
Speaker 1: the music business.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And to contextualize it, before that album Play came out,
Speaker 3: my career had essentially ended. I'd lost my record deal.
Speaker 3: It was a very dark time. My mom had died,
Speaker 3: I was I was living on Mott Street and I
Speaker 3: recorded Play where in my bedroom on Mott Street?
Speaker 1: Of course you did, and.
Speaker 3: Well, actually I slept in the closet and I had
Speaker 3: my bedroom had been turned into an ad hoc recording
Speaker 3: studio and I saw it. So I'd made Play. My
Speaker 3: last album had failed completely, and I'd lost my record
Speaker 3: deal with who. I was signed to Elektra, and then
Speaker 3: I was signed in the UK to a label called
Speaker 3: Mute and they hadn't dropped me. But to put it
Speaker 3: in perspective, they'd never dropped anyone. That was their claim
Speaker 3: to fame is they'd never dropped an artist in the case. Yeah,
Speaker 3: So I was like I could didn't really take too
Speaker 3: much comfort in the fact that I hadn't lost my
Speaker 3: deal with Mute when they'd never ever dropped an artist.
Speaker 1: So play who released Play?
Speaker 3: Well, Richard Branson started a label called V two, and
Speaker 3: someone working at V two somehow heard one of the
Speaker 3: songs on play I still don't know how, and he
Speaker 3: offered me a deal. But yeah, I mean before it
Speaker 3: was released, I thought, Okay, I'm an alcoholic bald has
Speaker 3: been I'm going to release this one last week in
Speaker 3: my closet. Well, the building was from the mid nineteenth
Speaker 3: century on Mott Street, and it had been a slaughterhouse.
Speaker 3: So the space I was living in this is weird
Speaker 3: as an animal rights vegan. The floors all sloped to
Speaker 3: central drains because when it had been a slaughterhouse, they
Speaker 3: would just hose the floors out and all the awful
Speaker 3: would just get washed down the drains. So I'm in
Speaker 3: that environment thinking I'm going to move back to Connecticut.
Speaker 3: I'm going to get a job teaching community college. I'd
Speaker 3: probably be a philosophy professor to students who just had
Speaker 3: no interest in paying attention to philosophy, and then this
Speaker 3: album comes out and rather than failing, it kept doing
Speaker 3: better and better. So to your question of, like, musically,
Speaker 3: why that happened, I still to this day have because
Speaker 3: a lot of the vocals on play were like old
Speaker 3: African American vocals from the mid twentieth century, And if
Speaker 3: I look at there's just no precedent for a middle
Speaker 3: aged musician making a record in his bedroom at the
Speaker 3: end of his career, involving vocals from people who've been
Speaker 3: dead for a few decades. Like, that's not a recipe
Speaker 3: for a hit record. I remember at some point it
Speaker 3: sold fifty thousand records because I thought it was going
Speaker 3: to sell nothing. I was amazed that my album had
Speaker 3: sold fifty thousand records and then six months later it
Speaker 3: was selling one hundred thousand copies a week.
Speaker 1: What do you attribute that to? What did people respond
Speaker 1: to the only people are listening to your music and
Speaker 1: buying your music in a world that is choked with music.
Speaker 1: There was so much stuff out there they can listen to,
Speaker 1: and they buy ten million copies of your album. Why
Speaker 1: do you think you know?
Speaker 3: I was recently doing an interview with Larry King, and
Speaker 3: he asked me that question, and he sort of asked
Speaker 3: me like, if you could replicate it, would you? And
Speaker 3: I was like, oh, I tried, like the following like
Speaker 3: the next three twos I kept I was like, how
Speaker 3: do I recreate that? And I never really could, Like
Speaker 3: that one sort of weird lightning in a bottle moment.
Speaker 3: I don't I mean, I don't want to answer promorphize
Speaker 3: the universe too much, but I almost feel like the
Speaker 3: universe was in a sort of lighthearted educational way saying like, Okay,
Speaker 3: we're going to give you everything you ever wanted times
Speaker 3: a million, and it's going to come close to killing
Speaker 3: you and you're going to hopefully learn something from it.
Speaker 3: So there was like, and again, that might sound very narcissistic,
Speaker 3: like I've just answer promorphized a thirteen point eight billion
Speaker 3: year old universe, but it felt like if at the
Speaker 3: end of the day, more than anything else, educational, like
Speaker 3: the universe is going to say like, Okay, you live.
Speaker 1: In a crime. To anthropomorphize the university part of the
Speaker 1: human condition. Let's go from there.
Speaker 4: Then.
Speaker 1: So the album comes out nineteen ninety nine. It's difficult
Speaker 1: for some people to say this is his style. You've
Speaker 1: let a lot of different you know, kind of tones
Speaker 1: and a lot of different variety to the sound of
Speaker 1: your music. And what was music in your childhood? Were
Speaker 1: you in a chorus, was a church, was a music school?
Speaker 1: It was weird.
Speaker 3: I started playing guitar. I guess when it was are
Speaker 3: a nine or ten because one of my mom's boyfriends
Speaker 3: had gone to jail and left a guitar behind.
Speaker 1: But your mother is kind of from a privileged background Connecticut.
Speaker 3: Quasi, I mean, like my grandfather worked on Wall Street, right,
Speaker 3: But then my mom sort of rejected that the sixties
Speaker 3: progressed and she fully embraced the hippie lifestyle.
Speaker 1: But your dad passed away when you were how I
Speaker 1: was two? So when you were two? And how long
Speaker 1: did you stay in New York? After he passed away.
Speaker 3: My mom moved back to Connecticut to get her undergraduate
Speaker 3: at East Cones. Is that he is even still a school.
Speaker 3: And then we went to San Francisco in nineteen sixty nine,
Speaker 3: where everything sort of fell apart.
Speaker 1: And then three so right after your dad passed away,
Speaker 1: she finished school at Fish School.
Speaker 3: We went to San Francisco and she sort of I
Speaker 3: guess was very torn, like the counterculture was happening, and
Speaker 3: she really desperately wanted to be a part of it,
Speaker 3: you know, And.
Speaker 1: So did you have any ideas why? I have a.
Speaker 3: Feeling half of it was rejecting like growing up in
Speaker 3: day in Connecticut, being encouraged by her parents to sort
Speaker 3: of be very conservative and very traditional. So it was
Speaker 3: a rejection of to an extent her family, but also
Speaker 3: just wanting to be a part of this new, exciting paradigm,
Speaker 3: you know, I mean nineteen sixty nine original paradigm.
Speaker 1: That's why that's been copied since then. Yeah, that was it.
Speaker 3: She's twenty three years old and she wanted to be
Speaker 3: this free spirit artist, but she also had a three
Speaker 3: year old child, and that's where things, a lot of
Speaker 3: tension and trauma really came from.
Speaker 1: What did your dad do for a living?
Speaker 3: He was a chemistry professor at Columbia, but he had
Speaker 3: been in the military and he was It's funny people
Speaker 3: don't really talk about it that much. I think he
Speaker 3: was either an assassin or a sniper, because I've asked
Speaker 3: people in my family. I'm like, oh, what did my
Speaker 3: dad do in the military, And they're like, well, he
Speaker 3: did a lot of things, and never so I think
Speaker 3: because he killed himself and he was a.
Speaker 1: He drove a car off the Arizona.
Speaker 3: He drove I don't know where exactly, but he got
Speaker 3: very drunk. My mom had threatened to take me away
Speaker 3: from him, and so he got drunk and got in
Speaker 3: his car and drove one hundred miles an hour into
Speaker 3: a bridge somewhere and died.
Speaker 1: Now what would people tell you, if at all? Did
Speaker 1: you do any investigation or did you have some curiosity
Speaker 1: as to what your dad was like? Did you learn
Speaker 1: a little bit about him later on in life? Well,
Speaker 1: it's only beyond the CIA credit.
Speaker 3: Only in adulthood did I realize how little I knew
Speaker 3: about my father. Like, for example, if I had a
Speaker 3: child with a woman and she died, as the child
Speaker 3: grew up, I would do everything in my power to
Speaker 3: make sure the child knew who his mom had been.
Speaker 3: You know, we would talk about it. And after my
Speaker 3: dad dies, he was never mentioned. His mother never mentioned
Speaker 3: it to me, and all I knew was that he'd
Speaker 3: been in the military and I had photos. But again,
Speaker 3: it was only after my mother died that the rest
Speaker 3: of the people in my family sort of let me
Speaker 3: know that my father had been a professor and he
Speaker 3: had a good sense of humor, and the.
Speaker 1: Brother had to die before people were allowed to introduce
Speaker 1: you to your dad. Kind of yeah.
Speaker 3: And I found and it sort of had this quasi
Speaker 3: like almost like a check off play quality, like I
Speaker 3: found out after my mother had died. I found out
Speaker 3: that my father had killed himself because my whole life
Speaker 3: up until that point, I thought he had just died
Speaker 3: and no one ever explained how or why. And I
Speaker 3: also found out I have a half brother somewhere, which
Speaker 3: can I tell you a story about whom I have
Speaker 3: half brother? Is not I think you'll appreciate. I was
Speaker 3: in DC in two thousand and seven with Alexandra Pelosi,
Speaker 3: Nancy's daughter, and we were with Nancy. Nancy was the
Speaker 3: Speaker of the house, and this is pre sobriety. So
Speaker 3: I got very drunk and ended up talking to a
Speaker 3: journalist from Politico and telling this journalist that I have
Speaker 3: a half brother, and I jokingly said, maybe it's Carl Rove.
Speaker 3: The journalist wrote a little Politico piece saying, our Mobi
Speaker 3: and Karl Rove brothers. Two weeks later, I get a
Speaker 3: letter on White house stationary, It says, dear Moby, it's
Speaker 3: not me. For one thing, I'm seventeen years older than you,
Speaker 3: and I have no musical ability. Have you considered James
Speaker 3: Carville as your long lost brother because he's bald and
Speaker 3: plays the guitar too, your pal Carl Rove? And I
Speaker 3: was like, so, I know, as far as I know,
Speaker 3: Carl Rove is not my half brother.
Speaker 1: You have one. Did you ever meet the half brother?
Speaker 1: I have no idea who or where he might be.
Speaker 1: You know your story, and we'll get to some of
Speaker 1: the details of this in the book. That the self destructiveness,
Speaker 1: but an impression I get of you, the way you live,
Speaker 1: as you like to isolate, and you talk about this
Speaker 1: panic plateau thing or whatever the terminology is, which which
Speaker 1: which kind of hampered or impacted relationships you would have
Speaker 1: with people as.
Speaker 3: Oh, yeah, I mean, I'm fifty three and I've never
Speaker 3: had a serious relationship, and over time trouble you it
Speaker 3: used to, but then over time I've sort of made
Speaker 3: peace with it. I mean, I guess there's almost in
Speaker 3: a way not to overstate it, but like there's a
Speaker 3: there's a sort of utility to being incapable of having
Speaker 3: real relationships, which is I get to work on other things,
Speaker 3: you know, like I get to be to spend the time. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I get to spend more time doing activism. I get
Speaker 3: to spend more time I don't know, reading, working on music,
Speaker 3: working on art. I have a weird little production company
Speaker 3: in La so I can work more on that. So
Speaker 3: I had always thought that the key to happiness, at
Speaker 3: least growing up, was like you find your perfect per
Speaker 3: and you build a life with them. And at some
Speaker 3: point I realized, oh, that's just not in the cards
Speaker 3: for me, and so there's so far, so far. But
Speaker 3: at the same time, I don't I don't have any
Speaker 3: longing for it. You don't which not that you know of,
Speaker 3: not that I mean, maybe I'll meet them, you know.
Speaker 1: Maybe you just it's it's you don't know. Do you
Speaker 1: want to venture where it comes from? Does it come
Speaker 1: from certain obvious childhood signals? I think so. I assume
Speaker 1: so that because you were left alone a lot as
Speaker 1: a child.
Speaker 3: I was left alone, and I was also raised you know,
Speaker 3: I grew up very very poor in a very wealthy
Speaker 3: town in Darien, Connecticut, and my mom dated Hell's Angels.
Speaker 1: There was a lot of when you went back to
Speaker 1: Darien and you were how old when I was five?
Speaker 1: So you were you were in San Francisco just a
Speaker 1: couple of years. Yeah, so your mom's smoking pot and
Speaker 1: the taking actresses and taking acid and and everybody like,
Speaker 1: you know, kind of cavorting around the hate or whatever
Speaker 1: they were doing. You were only there for a couple
Speaker 1: of years and.
Speaker 3: Then we moved back to Connecticut.
Speaker 1: How long?
Speaker 3: Well, I lived in Connecticut from the time I was
Speaker 3: five until the time I was twenty one.
Speaker 1: You basically grew up there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm just an inbred white trash kid from Connecticut.
Speaker 1: The San Francisco thing was a brief period of cod.
Speaker 3: That was just brief and traumatic, right and well traumatic.
Speaker 3: There was sexual abuse my mom, and I don't want
Speaker 3: to throw her under the bus posthumously, but she wanted
Speaker 3: to hang out with her friends. She was twenty three
Speaker 3: years old. So they put me in this very low
Speaker 3: rent daycare center and I was sexually abused there.
Speaker 1: What did she do during the day? Did she work?
Speaker 3: Not?
Speaker 1: In San Francisco. There she was supported by her family.
Speaker 1: They were all dependent on somebody.
Speaker 3: A lot of kids from Connecticut who in nineteen sixty
Speaker 3: four had been playing lacrosse. Nothing wrong with lacrosse. I
Speaker 3: just was never very good at it. And they had
Speaker 3: short hair, wearing eyes ods, you know, going to Webern
Speaker 3: country Club, drinking gin and tonics. Then all of a sudden,
Speaker 3: they're living on hate Ashbury with fringe jackets and hair
Speaker 3: down to the middle of their back, taking acid. And
Speaker 3: I sort of got caught up in the middle of
Speaker 3: that as a three year old.
Speaker 1: Yeah, when you got back to Connecticut and you grew
Speaker 1: up there, did your mother develop as a parent and
Speaker 1: she was getting older, what did she become a better parent?
Speaker 1: Was there a continued period of isolation and kind of.
Speaker 3: Not good childcare for you both an equal measure, Like,
Speaker 3: we had a good support system of my grandmother had
Speaker 3: aunts and uncles, so there was a lot of support.
Speaker 1: But did you spend a lot of time with their mother's.
Speaker 3: Parents, Yeah, but also a lot of time alone because
Speaker 3: also we were very poor. We were on food stamps
Speaker 3: and welfare and we were in dairy in Connecticut, which
Speaker 3: is per capital, one of the wealthiest places in the world,
Speaker 3: And so I had this constant sense of shame, you know,
Speaker 3: So when I went to school, it was pretending that
Speaker 3: I didn't live in the garage apartment, and that we
Speaker 3: weren't on food stamps and welfare. You know, if I
Speaker 3: had the flu, I would come back and say, oh,
Speaker 3: we went to Switzerland, because that sounded like something that
Speaker 3: wealthy people would say. So just this the sense of
Speaker 3: shame and the sense of inadequacy, and not again not
Speaker 3: to overstate it, but like when you grow up with that,
Speaker 3: it's hard, even in adulthood, when your circumstances change, it's
Speaker 3: hard to move past how you were formed.
Speaker 1: When did you start to get this idea that you
Speaker 1: were going to write music?
Speaker 3: I think, well, my mom, who was an aspiring musician pianist.
Speaker 3: I mean, I remember my mom had the most odd
Speaker 3: eclectic record collection. So she had Crosby, Stiells, Nash and
Speaker 3: Young and Divorge Ack and Lightnin' Hopkins and Baba O
Speaker 3: Latunji and so I just grew up with this constant
Speaker 3: soundtrack of weirdness and it made sense to me. And
Speaker 3: she dated musicians. My uncle was a musician. My great
Speaker 3: grandmother actually taught classical composition to Arthur Fiedler. She was
Speaker 3: Arthur Fiedler's mentor. So I grew up in this weird,
Speaker 3: idiosyncratic musical household. So I never thought as I was
Speaker 3: growing up that I would have a career as a musician.
Speaker 3: I just knew that I loved music and I wanted
Speaker 3: to be a part of it. And I had a
Speaker 3: lot of free time because I wasn't very good at
Speaker 3: sports and.
Speaker 1: Did you do well in school? I did okay.
Speaker 3: So my name Moby is a nickname that I've had
Speaker 3: since birth because I'm related to Herman Melville. So what
Speaker 3: I learned was when teachers found out that I was
Speaker 3: descended from Herman Melville, they just would add fifteen IQ points.
Speaker 3: They would assume, like, oh, he's got to be like
Speaker 3: aerodyite because he's descended from Herman Melville.
Speaker 1: Same thing.
Speaker 3: I went to college and I was a philosophy major,
Speaker 3: and I was not a good student. But I realized
Speaker 3: the moment you tell someone you're a philosophy major, they
Speaker 3: think you're way smarter than you actually are. So, like,
Speaker 3: descended from Herman Melville philosophy major, Like that just added
Speaker 3: thirty bonus points to my IQ, totally unwarranted. So I
Speaker 3: had growing up, had a lot of free time, had
Speaker 3: access to instruments, and was raised in this odd creative family.
Speaker 3: So I just started writing music when I was around
Speaker 3: ten or eleven, and i'd also my uncle had given
Speaker 3: me some hand me down photo equipment, so I started
Speaker 3: taking pictures. And here's an odd, little funny story. My
Speaker 3: best friend when I was nine years old was Robert
Speaker 3: Downey Junior, and so his dad gave us because his
Speaker 3: dad was a filmmaker and Darien he lived there. Darien
Speaker 3: has a baffling array of odd public figures like and
Speaker 3: Coulter and Gus van Zant and Robert Downey Junior and
Speaker 3: Chloe sevig Yee and Steve O from Jackass and the
Speaker 3: author Rick Moody from this little town of fourteen thousand people.
Speaker 1: Very odd people. Yeah, in the fact that and.
Speaker 3: Culture and Zant went to the same high school. Yes,
Speaker 3: So Robert and I made with his this superak camera
Speaker 3: his dad when we were eight and nine years old.
Speaker 3: We started making little films long since disappeared. But it
Speaker 3: was just part of the ethos of just go out
Speaker 3: and make things, with no expectation that there would be
Speaker 3: a career or that you'd even make anything good. But
Speaker 3: I just started writing and taking pictures and making little
Speaker 3: movies and writing songs and doing all this.
Speaker 1: They make little movies. How if you were broke super
Speaker 1: eight camera you got your hands on a Super eight camera? Yeah,
Speaker 1: like in a pawn shot. Yeah, right, like a really cheap, shitty.
Speaker 3: Superand camera, and you could develop film, you know, like
Speaker 3: two and a half minutes of Super eight film, and
Speaker 3: then you edit it on your kitchen table tape.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we used a dracula and I'm emerging from the coffin.
Speaker 3: And then you develop it and you show it on
Speaker 3: a sheet.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you're ready to get a can. What's the first
Speaker 1: song you wrote? Do you remember? Do you remember a boy? I?
Speaker 3: Well, so I started playing guitar, and then I I
Speaker 3: had a very odd music teacher. He played in a
Speaker 3: heavy metal band, but he also loved jazz fusion and
Speaker 3: classical music. So one day we would learn name Chris Rosola.
Speaker 3: He would teach me a van Halen song, even though
Speaker 3: I never really liked Van Halen that much, and then
Speaker 3: we would do a Larry Carlton or weather Report jazz
Speaker 3: fusion thing, which I also didn't like that much, and
Speaker 3: then do a Bach cantata, which I love and I
Speaker 3: still to this day love. And then I broke his
Speaker 3: heart because when I was thirteen, I discovered punk rock,
Speaker 3: and so I sort of cast aside, like music theory
Speaker 3: and the sort of idiosyncratic but formal music education. I
Speaker 3: had to play clash covers and because he thought I
Speaker 3: was going to go on to be this virtuoso guitarist.
Speaker 3: And the irony, Yeah, and the irony is by embracing
Speaker 3: punk rock and non virtuosic, if that's the word, I
Speaker 3: disinvented music. I ended up coming back to the world
Speaker 3: of classical music and have since started playing with orchestras. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I just I just did a performance with Dudamel in
Speaker 3: the LA film.
Speaker 1: Did You Wouldn't Know? What? Did you guys play? We?
Speaker 3: Well, it was two programs. The first program was LA Composers,
Speaker 3: and they put a piece of music of mine in there.
Speaker 3: It's a song that I'd written for a Michael Mann
Speaker 3: movie years ago, which.
Speaker 1: Film for Heat. Yeah, you wrote a song for Heat.
Speaker 3: It's a very end when Al Patino and Robert de
Speaker 3: Niro finally had I don't want to spoiler alert, so
Speaker 3: they did that as part of the first program, And
Speaker 3: the second program was all orchestral versions of my music.
Speaker 1: Oh wow.
Speaker 3: During the rehearsal. There was I don't know one hundred
Speaker 3: and eighty of us on stage because we had a
Speaker 3: huge choir, full orchestra. And I realized, like, okay, we're
Speaker 3: doing my music, and I'm without question the least talented
Speaker 3: musician on the stage right now, Like I'm the person who, like,
Speaker 3: if I stopped playing, no one will notice. But in
Speaker 3: God Moving over the Face of the Waters, there's this
Speaker 3: big crescendo, you know, it's like timpany and symbols. And
Speaker 3: I got so annoyed because the percussion had come in early,
Speaker 3: and I was like, what, like this is the La Fel?
Speaker 3: How did they screw up? And I realized there was
Speaker 3: a thunderstorm and I was like, so this song is
Speaker 3: called God Moving over the Face of the Water. Keep
Speaker 3: in mind this is in September. This is sort of
Speaker 3: good theological argument for the existence of God, that he
Speaker 3: plays percussion during classical music.
Speaker 1: Do you did this recently with the La Fell? What's
Speaker 1: the first time you did that? Well, the first time
Speaker 1: was actually Michael Mann for Heat. Yeah.
Speaker 3: I had written some classical pieces. He heard them and
Speaker 3: this was nineteen ninety.
Speaker 1: Foudy, how did he unpublished?
Speaker 3: I they were no, I'd put them as a B
Speaker 3: sides on they were out there and somehow he had
Speaker 3: heard them. And we then had one of the weirdest
Speaker 3: phone calls. Do you know, Michael, I'm sure. I so
Speaker 3: we're friends. I used that word loose leakause I don't
Speaker 3: know if in my mind he and I are friends.
Speaker 3: But he's a odd, wonderful creative man. But like our
Speaker 3: first phone call was, he got my number and he
Speaker 3: called me up and he spent forty five minutes telling
Speaker 3: me the story of heat and hung up the phone.
Speaker 1: I didn't say one.
Speaker 3: Word apart from hello, so I was like, hello, he said,
Speaker 3: mobe this Michael Man forty five minutes soliloquy, telling me
Speaker 3: in great detail everything about heat, like the archetypes that
Speaker 3: are going on for like the classical element, the moment
Speaker 3: he's done, he just hung up, and I was like,
Speaker 3: what just I'd never spoken to like an esteemed film
Speaker 3: director before, and I was like, is this is how
Speaker 3: film directors talk to people? He just call up and
Speaker 3: talk for forty five minutes and to hang up the phone.
Speaker 1: That was the first time you had provided score for
Speaker 1: a film?
Speaker 3: Well, I went to Sunny Purchase briefly, and I had
Speaker 3: some friends in the experimental film program there, and so
Speaker 3: my friend Paul made an experimental movie called me I
Speaker 3: the Onion in nineteen ninety or ninety one, So technically
Speaker 3: that would have been my first foray in the film composing.
Speaker 1: Beyond me I the Onion, Yeah made it. Michael Mann
Speaker 1: was the first. Yeah. Did it lead to how many?
Speaker 1: How many other films have you contributed music to other
Speaker 1: than sourcing your I also I have.
Speaker 3: A weird website called mobigradis dot com and it gives
Speaker 3: free music to independent filmmakers, nonprofits, film students. So if
Speaker 3: we count that ten thousand films. But those are like
Speaker 3: three minute short films where people hired you hired, I
Speaker 3: wouldn't know hundreds thousands.
Speaker 1: I mean like, oh, you're not not accessing your music
Speaker 1: you published, they hired you to do score four oh films.
Speaker 3: Oh, because there's the licensing music. I'm licensing music, and
Speaker 3: that's like, it's the greatest thing in the world because
Speaker 3: all you have to do is say yes, you don't
Speaker 3: there's no work involved apart from that actually writing music.
Speaker 1: So when I moved to.
Speaker 3: La after I got sober the first time, this most
Speaker 3: like ten years ago, I got sober.
Speaker 1: And I got sober twice.
Speaker 3: Yeah, once in nineteen eighty seven, followed by a glorious
Speaker 3: thirteen year long relapse. We're going to get to that,
Speaker 3: and then again in two thousand and eight. And so
Speaker 3: then I moved to LA and I thought, Okay, I'm
Speaker 3: middle aged, I'm sober, I'm in Los Angeles. I need
Speaker 3: to fully commit myself to film composing. And then I
Speaker 3: realized I really don't like film composing, Like it's.
Speaker 1: What about it? Don't you like? Uh? What I like?
Speaker 3: When I work on my own music, it's just me
Speaker 3: in the studio. There's no music supervisor, there's no director,
Speaker 3: there's no producer. I can kind of I have some
Speaker 3: complete self sufficiency. I don't have to respond to other
Speaker 3: people's comments, and as an only child who doesn't do
Speaker 3: well with people, that's nice. And my friends who were
Speaker 3: great film composers, part of their skill set is knowing
Speaker 3: how to deal with twenty different executives at the same time.
Speaker 1: And I just it was too skill have Yeah and
Speaker 1: a lot of X acts. Yeah, this is God moving
Speaker 1: over the face of the waters. The piece Moby wrote
Speaker 1: for Heat after a lot of input from executives at
Speaker 1: Warner Brothers and director Michael Mann. Stephen Daldry is another
Speaker 1: great film director with strong opinions about how everyone should
Speaker 1: do their jobs.
Speaker 4: I find it really crazy when actors come in self
Speaker 4: prepared because they've done some journey that they getting in
Speaker 4: this comment my character and you go, look, it's not
Speaker 4: your character. Okay, it's ours, and we're going to make
Speaker 4: it up there.
Speaker 1: Interesting, I'm going to remember that it's ours. Well, my
Speaker 1: character wouldn't do that.
Speaker 4: Well, let's change the character. Then.
Speaker 1: The rest of my conversation with Stephen Daldry can be
Speaker 1: found in our archive a Here's the Thing dot org
Speaker 1: more Moby in a minute. This is Alec Baldwin and
Speaker 1: you were listening to Here's the Thing. Moby never would
Speaker 1: have ended up so low if he hadn't been so
Speaker 1: desperate to be lifted up. He craved the affirmation of fame.
Speaker 3: I loved it, you did, and I just wanted more.
Speaker 1: This guy that was this isolated guy that was left alone.
Speaker 1: You can't get enough of that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, all of a sudden, I was being
Speaker 3: invited to fancy parties, meeting heads of state, being flown
Speaker 3: around the world, on private.
Speaker 1: Play and freeing clothes to wear in public. I mean
Speaker 1: I still have them, sure.
Speaker 3: You know, it's like suddenly like people are competing about
Speaker 3: who gets to dress you for the Red carpet, and
Speaker 3: you know, it's like Versace and Calvin Klein are like, oh,
Speaker 3: let us send you free tuxedos. I was like, you know,
Speaker 3: before this record, I was buying clothes at Salvation Army
Speaker 3: on the corner of Lafayette.
Speaker 1: In Prince A, Republic.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like it was great, And then of course it
Speaker 3: wasn't great. You know, like my narcissism got out of
Speaker 3: control of my entitlement because I felt at the time,
Speaker 3: like two thousand and two thousand and one, two thousand
Speaker 3: and two, I felt that all I needed to be
Speaker 3: happy was constant love and attention from every person on
Speaker 3: the planet, to make ten million dollars a year for
Speaker 3: the rest of my life, and to make sure that
Speaker 3: I could be as promiscuous as possible, do as many
Speaker 3: drugs as possible, and drink as much as possible without consequences.
Speaker 3: So like, obviously, in hindsight, I recognize how absurd and
Speaker 3: unrealistic it is, but at the time I just wanted,
Speaker 3: like every night to be like this indulgent festival of
Speaker 3: narcissism and the mobsters.
Speaker 1: Can you tell me some of these stories that were
Speaker 1: in the book.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that was a weird one. We took helicopters to
Speaker 3: Staten Island and had this weird dinner with the guy
Speaker 3: who apparently invented the cabbage patch doll and then went
Speaker 3: on to produce Steven Segall movies. And then we left
Speaker 3: and I went to a party on Park Avenue, very drunk.
Speaker 3: We show up and I met some friends and they
Speaker 3: were talking about this game that they played in college
Speaker 3: called knob Touch. And what knob touch is You take
Speaker 3: your flaccid penis out of your pants and you brush
Speaker 3: up against people and you win by the number of
Speaker 3: people you can brush up against. And I'd never done this,
Speaker 3: and my date, Miss new Hampshire, challenged me to play
Speaker 3: knob touch. And there's only one human being on the
Speaker 3: planet I have brushed my flaccid penis against. That man
Speaker 3: is currently the President of the United States.
Speaker 1: Now, yes, where was this being held?
Speaker 3: Some bar in park like one of those big restaurants
Speaker 3: on Park Avenue, And like twenty first it.
Speaker 1: Was like in public and this isn't a private party.
Speaker 3: I mean it was like a one of those New
Speaker 3: York style parties where maybe it was like Ralph Lauren
Speaker 3: was launching a new paint color or something, you know,
Speaker 3: those things that you just go to. Yeah, and you're
Speaker 3: not I don't know why.
Speaker 1: I have a couple of drinks. Yeah. So I was
Speaker 1: very famous.
Speaker 3: People, and I brushed my flacid piece against that of.
Speaker 1: Your penis against Donald Trump brush.
Speaker 3: He didn't know it was dark, he was. And what's
Speaker 3: funny is the publisher of the book said, like, in
Speaker 3: this climate, I don't know if you should include that.
Speaker 3: I was like, you know what, I think Donald Trump
Speaker 3: being able to say that, I me tooed him.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So you're there and you're this big superstar. When
Speaker 1: did you begin to think.
Speaker 5: We really should get back into the studio and make
Speaker 5: another album.
Speaker 3: So then the tour for Play was supposed to be
Speaker 3: three and a half weeks long, and it ended up
Speaker 3: being twenty six months long. But the whole time, because
Speaker 3: I've always compulsively written music, I have now probably like
Speaker 3: eight or nine thousand pieces of unreleased pieces of music.
Speaker 3: So even at the bottom of my like alcoholism, drug addiction, narcissism, entitlement,
Speaker 3: self destruction. I was at break. I kept writing music.
Speaker 3: So the problem break, Yeah, the problem with albums was
Speaker 3: to look at like a thousand songs and figure out
Speaker 3: how do you get fifteen to put on an album?
Speaker 3: Doesn't mean they're good. And when I say eight thousand
Speaker 3: pieces of unreleased music, I'm not speaking to the quality
Speaker 3: of them, like a lot of it's garbage. But I
Speaker 3: just it's this weird almost like you know there's that
Speaker 3: word laggeria. I have that of music where I just
Speaker 3: keep making it without any concern for whether it's good
Speaker 3: or bad. I just keep writing and so.
Speaker 1: It's like a broken pipe.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, just like you turn on the faucet and
Speaker 3: just leave it on. So the next album was called eighteen,
Speaker 3: and I thought like, okay, this is like Play was big.
Speaker 3: I want this to be bigger, and so like I think,
Speaker 3: the promo tour for the next album was five months long,
Speaker 3: like five months of just like you've done it as well,
Speaker 3: like traveling around the world, sitting in hotel rooms, going
Speaker 3: to every country, every TV show, everything, And I just
Speaker 3: wanted to be more famous, have more money, sleep with
Speaker 3: more people, drink more, do more drugs tour more just
Speaker 3: for the.
Speaker 1: Guy that was isolated. Are you sitting there saying this
Speaker 1: is more like it? Now? Everybody wants to take their
Speaker 1: clothes off and jump in bed with me.
Speaker 3: And it seemed like fame was going And this is
Speaker 3: when I say it out loud, it just sounds so
Speaker 3: obs heard I honestly, and I wouldn't have admitted this,
Speaker 3: but deep down, what I believed was that fame was
Speaker 3: going to fix everything.
Speaker 1: Like every all.
Speaker 3: The trauma from child really be the senses of all
Speaker 3: that fear, you know, the self centered fear.
Speaker 1: But self centered narcissistic fear is the root of all
Speaker 1: of our problems. And living in a constant state, living
Speaker 1: in a constant state of agitation, worrying about am I
Speaker 1: going to get this? This is going to be taken
Speaker 1: away from me? Which defines my life. They say in
Speaker 1: a twelve step literature, they say that our greatest fear
Speaker 1: is to lose something we already have or not get
Speaker 1: something that we want.
Speaker 3: I just thought, oh, fame will fix it as long
Speaker 3: as I can keep getting invited to great parties and
Speaker 3: drinking and doing drugs, and as long as I get
Speaker 3: good reviews. But then the universe, with its sense of humor,
Speaker 3: took away all the things.
Speaker 1: That I do. You know, why do you have a sense? Why?
Speaker 3: I think because on a sort of artistic level, there
Speaker 3: came a time and I'm so ashamed to admit this,
Speaker 3: and around two thousand and two, two thousand and three,
Speaker 3: I wanted to make great music, but I wanted music
Speaker 3: to be a means to an end where I wanted
Speaker 3: it to like sustain my career. So before my life
Speaker 3: had just been spent it going yeah, and I had never.
Speaker 1: Thought I don't want to go backwards.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I was like and before that, all I wanted
Speaker 3: to do was make music that I loved, you know,
Speaker 3: that music that somehow was like it was just beautiful, expressive.
Speaker 3: Two thousand and two, two thousand.
Speaker 1: And three, years after the release of Play, I.
Speaker 3: Still wanted it to be beautiful, but first and foremost
Speaker 3: commercially viable.
Speaker 1: But it was a little less beautiful and it sold
Speaker 1: more copies. That was okay with.
Speaker 3: Me, Yes, And I started thinking, oh, okay, well, if
Speaker 3: I produce this type of song, it'll get on the radio.
Speaker 3: And if I produce this it'll sell more. And like
Speaker 3: the paradox, the wonderful In hindsight, the wonderful paradox is
Speaker 3: the more of an effort I made to be famous,
Speaker 3: the less famous I became here.
Speaker 1: You were very open with the press, You courted the press,
Speaker 1: You would speak to anybody, you know. For me, the
Speaker 1: problem has always been the you know, the press is
Speaker 1: never it's a sad. It does sometimes make me sad.
Speaker 1: I get I get over it, and then every now
Speaker 1: and then it comes up in blackjacks me again. After nowhere.
Speaker 1: It's like it's like in an alley where I get
Speaker 1: mugged by it again, which is they're never going to
Speaker 1: interpret who you really are to the public.
Speaker 4: Never.
Speaker 1: They don't have that ability. It's so painful, the misunderstanding
Speaker 1: that goes hand in hand with it, especially.
Speaker 3: Because I when I don't know if you had this experience,
Speaker 3: but when I started getting press attention, I loved it.
Speaker 3: And in the beginning they were so nice, and the
Speaker 3: reviews were gentle, and then the reviews were great, and
Speaker 3: then you have this sweet spot where you have like
Speaker 3: fame and you're lauded in the press, and then it
Speaker 3: turned and then all of a sudden, the reviews got bad,
Speaker 3: the articles got bad, and I felt so betrayed. I
Speaker 3: was like, why why can't you guys just be nice?
Speaker 3: But then time passes. I'm like, in a like god,
Speaker 3: bless them for turning because I've since then like when
Speaker 3: when you're rejected, when the press rejects you, then, at
Speaker 3: least for me, I had to sort of look like, Okay,
Speaker 3: well who am I without that?
Speaker 1: You know?
Speaker 3: And where does my worth and sense of self come from?
Speaker 3: And like realizing, oh, if it comes from the opinions
Speaker 3: of people I've never met, there's something really unstable and
Speaker 3: unhealthy there, you know. I had this epiphany recently. I
Speaker 3: was in la middle of February hiking and Griffiths Park
Speaker 3: and it was one of those beautiful days, like the
Speaker 3: sun is shining, coyotes are running around, hummingbirds are flying by,
Speaker 3: and I suddenly thought like, Okay, if my last album
Speaker 3: had sold ten million copies, and if every journalist on
Speaker 3: the planet loved me and wrote great things about me,
Speaker 3: and if I was dating the most beautiful woman on
Speaker 3: the planet, how would this moment be better? And I'm
Speaker 3: like it wouldn't like, you know, good reviews, good press,
Speaker 3: all this stuff doesn't And I don't know, I sound
Speaker 3: like a crazy New age hippie, but like it wouldn't affect.
Speaker 3: It's like that moment of like the public radio, like
Speaker 3: standing in the sun wearing a T shirt, smelling sage
Speaker 3: and lavender, watching the hummingbirds fly by. I was like
Speaker 3: the universe in that moment was so benign and indifferent
Speaker 3: to anything that I cared about, and there was some
Speaker 3: there's sort of like a transcendent liberation, almost like Emersonian
Speaker 3: style liberation in that moment.
Speaker 1: I'll take that feeling. At this point, I just turned
Speaker 1: sixty one, and I'll take that feeling wherever I can
Speaker 1: get it now, and at my age, I have to
Speaker 1: accept that my creative energies may or may not come
Speaker 1: to the foe here, and if they don't, I have
Speaker 1: to find something else to do to get off creatively,
Speaker 1: which is what I do. I completely segregate my creative
Speaker 1: from my commercial in a way that I never thought
Speaker 1: it was possible.
Speaker 3: And there's one because you reference the twelve and twelve earlier. Yep,
Speaker 3: I don't know if that's a twelve steps is part
Speaker 3: of your life?
Speaker 1: Yes? Oh, okay, I'm thirty four years sober. Oh right,
Speaker 1: eighty five?
Speaker 3: Yeah, so it's I mean, and again I feel like
Speaker 3: such a middle age cliche saying this, but like the
Speaker 3: Twelve Steps really, if all the therapeutic things I've been through,
Speaker 3: the Twelve Steps really saved me. And one of the
Speaker 3: things I learned, as you mentioned, was like the role
Speaker 3: of fear and trying to sort of like deconstruct fear
Speaker 3: and learn from it. But the other thing that when
Speaker 3: I did the Twelve Steps that I really loved was
Speaker 3: all of my judgment up until that point was sort
Speaker 3: of based on the misperception of omniscience or fake omniscientce.
Speaker 3: Like when I had an album that failed, I was
Speaker 3: furious because I knew that it should have succeeded, because
Speaker 3: if it had succeeded, it would have been better for me.
Speaker 3: And then all of a sudden I realized, like again,
Speaker 3: in a thirteen point eight billion year old universe, I
Speaker 3: don't have omniscients. I don't know causality. If I want
Speaker 3: something to work out and it doesn't work out in
Speaker 3: a way, I'm like, who am I to judge? In
Speaker 3: politics as well, because I got really involved in politics
Speaker 3: for a while, it was like the vast majority of
Speaker 3: people on the planet, their goal is to keep the
Speaker 3: lights on tomorrow, you know, like they're like they want
Speaker 3: a job, they want to keep.
Speaker 1: Their understand where they're coming from.
Speaker 3: And I have to be like, okay, that's It's like
Speaker 3: with the press as well. If to remind myself, like
Speaker 3: most of the people I know were journalists, like they're
Speaker 3: barely able to pay the rent. And I don't want
Speaker 3: to be patronizing or judgmental, but I have to sort
Speaker 3: of say, like, Okay, my job is not to rely
Speaker 3: on them form my sense of happiness and well being,
Speaker 3: you know, like my sense of.
Speaker 1: Strength or my creative Yeah, output the same.
Speaker 3: Thing, and creatively, if they're too much of a hindrance,
Speaker 3: you move on. You sort of say like okay, God
Speaker 3: bless you know, like have healthy boundaries. And I just say,
Speaker 3: like it almost makes me think of like that like
Speaker 3: the Rudyard Kipling poem is that.
Speaker 1: If I remember reading when like eight or nine years old,
Speaker 1: and it's.
Speaker 3: Sort of that idea of just keep I just keep going,
Speaker 3: not even from strength and fortitude, more just sort of
Speaker 3: like like a post apocalyptic cockroach, just keep plowing forward,
Speaker 3: like someone steps on you. Okay, you stepped on me.
Speaker 3: Have a good day. I'm going to keep going.
Speaker 1: But this is also if I really became the biggest
Speaker 1: movie star in the world and made hundreds of millions
Speaker 1: of dollars in private plans, who the fuck knows what
Speaker 1: I would have done with that. No, I would have
Speaker 1: screwed that up.
Speaker 3: I mean, luckily i'd be dead in a way, like
Speaker 3: as as sober middle aged guys. I feel like, maybe
Speaker 3: this is an indelicate thing to say, but like a
Speaker 3: lot of people have done the work for us, Like,
Speaker 3: for example, yeah, twenty years ago, I would look at
Speaker 3: Michael Jackson and say, like, wow, look at that. The
Speaker 3: wealth and the fame and the adulation. Boy, oh boy,
Speaker 3: I'm glad.
Speaker 1: I'm glad hanging out with him.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I'm glad that I was cut off to
Speaker 3: an extent from the access to like excessive wealth and
Speaker 3: fame that he had and me. Again, it's a hard
Speaker 3: thing to talk about because I don't want to malign anyone,
Speaker 3: especially if they're dead or struggling. But like we know,
Speaker 3: I mean the number of public figures who have had
Speaker 3: profound success, profound wealth and it destroys them. I mean,
Speaker 3: like people like you and I are the ones who
Speaker 3: sort of like hopefully emerge unscathed and chastened, with hopefully
Speaker 3: an understanding that we can almost use in the form
Speaker 3: of service, you know, to go out and be like, Okay,
Speaker 3: I've learned a lesson. That's an odd, rare, unique lesson.
Speaker 3: Let me try and do something with it.
Speaker 1: Yea, was there an epiphany? What was the bottom?
Speaker 3: The bottom was do you remember a restaurant in New
Speaker 3: York called zen Palette, vegan Chinese restaurant. So this is
Speaker 3: a little analogy. New Year's Eve nineteen ninety two, I
Speaker 3: went to the zen Palette on Ninth Avenue, Sure, and
Speaker 3: I ordered fourties. Yeah, and I ordered purple Japanese egg plant,
Speaker 3: and it disagreed with me. And I never ordered purple
Speaker 3: Japanese ig plan again because I had one bad experience
Speaker 3: with it. Vodka, cocaine everything. I would do it every
Speaker 3: day and it would kill almost kill me and make
Speaker 3: me sick. And I kept going back. And basically the consequence,
Speaker 3: what I mean is like the rational response to vodka
Speaker 3: and cocaine if you have a night out and the
Speaker 3: next day you want to blow your miserable, is to say, wow,
Speaker 3: that was bad. I shan't do that again, as opposed.
Speaker 1: To it's a great definition of addiction. Act.
Speaker 3: Let's give me more every day for the next fifteen
Speaker 3: this thing that's making me sick.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And as I got older, because you got sober young.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I got sober at forty three and basically to ride
Speaker 3: the range and the hangovers just got worse and worse,
Speaker 3: and it got to the point where I was having
Speaker 3: hard time streaming sentences together.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I got sober because I moved to LA and
Speaker 1: I was driving a car, and I thought, well, the
Speaker 1: consequence is caught up with Yeah, I thought I came
Speaker 1: and I still drove around shiitface for two years before
Speaker 1: I got I got smart. I want to talk, when
Speaker 1: did pure vegetarianism take hold with you?
Speaker 3: When I was growing up, I had that weird paradox
Speaker 3: of loving animals and loving Burger King, you know, when
Speaker 3: I was in junior high school high school, like, we
Speaker 3: had a bunch of rescue animals and I loved them unconditionally,
Speaker 3: But I also loved Pepperoni pizza. And I had this
Speaker 3: one rescue cat named Tucker who had found it the
Speaker 3: dump in Dairia in Connecticut, and I loved Tucker even
Speaker 3: more unconditionally than I unconditionally loved the other animals. And
Speaker 3: when I was nineteen, I had this like Saw on
Speaker 3: the Road to Damascus moment where suddenly I looked at
Speaker 3: Tucker and I was like, he has two eyes, a
Speaker 3: central nervous system, and a profoundly rich emotional life and
Speaker 3: a deep desire to avoid pain and suffering. And in
Speaker 3: that moment I sort of extrapolated and realized every animal
Speaker 3: with two eyes and a central nervous system has a
Speaker 3: rich emotional life and a deep desire to avoid pain
Speaker 3: and suffering. So that's when I became a vegetarian, and
Speaker 3: then eighty seven became a vegan, and my only vegan
Speaker 3: relapse was in ninety two I had yogurt once. So
Speaker 3: now I've got thirty one years.
Speaker 1: What is your diet basically something you cook at home
Speaker 1: or you how you eat well.
Speaker 3: Actually I own a vegan restaurant in Los Angeles called
Speaker 3: Lil Pine and where it's in Silver Lake, And what
Speaker 3: makes it unique is that one hundred percent of the
Speaker 3: profits go to animal rights organizations. Because at this point
Speaker 3: in my life, I don't I mean, I still am
Speaker 3: selfish and probably pretty narcissistic, but all of my work
Speaker 3: one hundred percent of the money I make professionally goes
Speaker 3: to the charities I work with, because I'd rather live.
Speaker 3: You were sort of addressing this, like live a simple life,
Speaker 3: like live very much within my means and make art
Speaker 3: and music for the love of art.
Speaker 1: Amazing. I had a couple of them.
Speaker 3: And like I had this crazy sixty acre compound up
Speaker 3: in Putnam County, and when I moved to La I
Speaker 3: moved to a castle. But arms I wasn't happy in
Speaker 3: these places. And I was just asked myself, like why
Speaker 3: am I having this sort of like Gatsbesque excess, the
Speaker 3: citizen cane style, like overcompensation if the end result is
Speaker 3: like I've tied up my resources in real estate and
Speaker 3: I'm miserable and no one's benefiting. So like now I
Speaker 3: live in a much simpler house, got a little simple
Speaker 3: apartment in Park Slope, and I can just work for
Speaker 3: the causes that I care about. Freedom, yeah, and freedom
Speaker 3: and that freedom to like make art, music, books, et cetera.
Speaker 3: And if there's money, just give the money to different
Speaker 3: very causes.
Speaker 1: That's amazing to do that, but that's rare. That's rare.
Speaker 3: One of the benefits of my weird attachment issues. Is like,
Speaker 3: I'm not married, I don't have kids, so like I
Speaker 3: have this odd autonomy, so I'm able to be relying
Speaker 3: on you, and so there's it is like that there's
Speaker 3: a luxury to that, like almost like a monastic independence
Speaker 3: more after.
Speaker 1: The break this is I can't think of any better
Speaker 1: way to ask this, and I'm sure there's a better
Speaker 1: way to ask this, but I want to ask, like,
Speaker 1: who cares for you? Where is love in your life?
Speaker 1: If you're so autonomous and you don't have the fans
Speaker 1: and the public and the press, which is a form
Speaker 1: of love, it's like an energy that simulates love. It
Speaker 1: isn't really love. But in your life, where is the
Speaker 1: love and the care in your life? Who's caring for you? Okay,
Speaker 1: well a few friends, so close friends are there for you.
Speaker 3: I have a few family members. But there's the answer
Speaker 3: that I'm uncomfortable giving because it's one of the hardest
Speaker 3: things to say in our world. Is so when we
Speaker 3: do the twelve steps. When I got to the third
Speaker 3: step and the third steps has made a decision to
Speaker 3: turn our life and our will over to the care
Speaker 3: of God as we understood God, and I really wrestled
Speaker 3: with this because I was like, I was like, the
Speaker 3: care of God is I understood God? Like I don't
Speaker 3: understand God. And that was my epiphany. I was like, oh,
Speaker 3: the God of my understanding is a God that I
Speaker 3: do not understand. And I was like, but I evidence again,
Speaker 3: not to answer promorphize, but I see evidence of divinity
Speaker 3: in kindness, in forgiveness, in the gentleness of puppies.
Speaker 1: In the redacted parts of the molor reports in our
Speaker 1: immune systems, like I see in my eyes.
Speaker 3: This is all evidence of the divine, and so in
Speaker 3: nature and all these things. And so my honest answer,
Speaker 3: that's an uncomfortable, secular twenty first century answer, is divine
Speaker 3: love is.
Speaker 6: What I search your oxygen. That's but also and it's
Speaker 6: a component of it other people in yours. And if
Speaker 6: I die and someone says, oh, guess what, there's no God.
Speaker 6: We live in this empty existential cipher void, like you're
Speaker 6: just a bunch of like weird molecules that have come
Speaker 6: together arbitrarily. That's okay too, But I do somehow, in
Speaker 6: my dim I don't know naive way see evidence of
Speaker 6: the divine. And so it's always trying to move towards that. Again,
Speaker 6: not religious, denominational, no gender. It's just simply this idea
Speaker 6: of the divinity of like forgiveness and puppies and immune
Speaker 6: systems and the unredacted MOLA reports and etc. So that's
Speaker 6: a huge That's where I get a lot of comfort from.
Speaker 1: What's music in your life? Now? You continue to write?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean I work on music mainly for the
Speaker 3: love of music. I refuse to tour. I hate touring
Speaker 3: unless it's going to do orchestral things. I had this
Speaker 3: wonderful realization. I guess it was about eleven years ago,
Speaker 3: the first time I met David Lynch, and we've since
Speaker 3: become pretty good friends. LA has that going for it.
Speaker 3: I live around the corner from David Lynch. But when
Speaker 3: I first met him, he was being interviewed at BAFTA
Speaker 3: in London and he said something so reductive and simple,
Speaker 3: and it really struck me is he said, very simply,
Speaker 3: he said creativity is beautiful, And all of a sudden
Speaker 3: I was like, oh my god, he's right, Like, why
Speaker 3: am I compromising my creativity in the interest of like
Speaker 3: commercial game, for saking that and for worldliness? I was like,
Speaker 3: as we know, like music is that ineffable beauty, like
Speaker 3: it can communicate love and transcendent and beauty. That should
Speaker 3: be my goal, not that I'll ever reach it, not
Speaker 3: that I'll ever make beautiful, ineffable, wonderful music, but like
Speaker 3: if every day I wake up with that as the
Speaker 3: goal and not in the interest of worldliness and other people.
Speaker 1: I mean, you've written a book, You at points in
Speaker 1: your life have conquered the music business. Have you ever
Speaker 1: wanted to try other media? Have you ever wanted to
Speaker 1: make films?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm actually I have a weird production company. I
Speaker 3: feel like I use the word weird too much, but
Speaker 3: I have a production company in LA. We're working on
Speaker 3: some documentaries. You've got some scripted features, an animated feature
Speaker 3: that we're trying to develop, but.
Speaker 1: Have your hand in that too. Do you like making films?
Speaker 3: I love it as long as I have to your
Speaker 3: point the recourse of autonomy, meaning like some of the
Speaker 3: projects we're working on, like sure, it would be great
Speaker 3: if we have financing, if we get people attached to it,
Speaker 3: but we also have projects that we can do one
Speaker 3: hundred percent ourselves. And because as we know, like how
Speaker 3: much time have our friends spent waiting you know, waiting
Speaker 3: for the financing, waiting for this to be greenlit approval,
Speaker 3: and with the production company again. My goal is to
Speaker 3: never make personally, never make money from it. So if
Speaker 3: money is generated, it goes to my foundation, or it
Speaker 3: goes to causes I work with.
Speaker 1: And if you say upfront, I'm going to be involved
Speaker 1: in projects in the film business and I never want
Speaker 1: to make money with them, You're not going to have
Speaker 1: a lot of meetings in LA You're not going to
Speaker 1: get to make money from it.
Speaker 3: Like like the guy who runs my production company and
Speaker 3: my head of development and some of our partners, I
Speaker 3: want them to be fabulously wealthy. I would rather be
Speaker 3: like live in a shitty apartment in Hollywood or I
Speaker 3: don't know, in bedsty and work for causes that I
Speaker 3: care about.
Speaker 1: I just don't.
Speaker 3: I don't want to personally benefit from it.
Speaker 1: I would like to do a documentary film, and I'd
Speaker 1: like to put you together on a project. I'd like
Speaker 1: to couple you on a film project with someone equally
Speaker 1: maniacally creative and independent as you. I'd like to do
Speaker 1: a film where we get you in a in a
Speaker 1: studio and you're gonna do like a little project with Coppola.
Speaker 1: Two people who don't want to collaborate with other people really,
Speaker 1: and you force them to do. They agree to collaborate
Speaker 1: for this one time and see what the result would be.
Speaker 1: I watched that. Yeah, I want to produce that. And
Speaker 1: by the way, you don't have to make any money.
Speaker 1: My kids are expensive. I'm keeping all the money. I
Speaker 1: think we're done.
Speaker 5: Then we have a deal than you.
Speaker 1: Moby composer, musician, recovering addict and proud ex celebrity. Didn't
Speaker 1: you think he's cool with that? Okay? Moby's new book
Speaker 1: is called Then It Fell Apart. It's very funny and
Speaker 1: very sad. I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the thing is brought
Speaker 1: to you by iHeart Radio.