On his duet on “Reprise” with Kristofferson he said: “I knew Kris my whole life through her music. My mother used to listen to his records, and she loved songs like ‘Make me help throu the night’. About 20 years ago we met at a charity show and eventually we became friends. I thought it was perfect for this album and especially for a song like ‘The Lonely Night’, it was one of the most emotional moments along with the cover of ‘Heroes’ by David Bowie. Not only because ‘Heroes’ is one of the most beautiful songs in history but because it is a tribute to a friend. Bowie and I were good friends, and we played this song with him in my living room. “
Other musicians that one would not associate with a techno artist like Moby are soul singer Gregory Porter and Icelandic classical pianist Vikingur Olaffson, who plays an important role in “Reprise”: “Regarding Porter, I love gospel and spiritual music in general, although now I don’t have a definite religious belief. I had moments in which I was a convinced Christian, and others in which I became interested in Sufism, but now I am nothing, or I am interested a little in each belief, not a defined one. As for Olafsson, he is a great musician, different from other classical music performers who, as sometimes happens, are perfect on their instrument but they do not transmit anything emotionally. But Olaffson is a great musician both in virtue as an instrumentalist and in the emotion he brings to his performances. Because of the pandemic he had to play his piano alone in Iceland, and I listened and arranged it here in Los Angeles. So I don’t know him personally, something I would have loved ”. Regarding the pandemic, Moby almost apologizes when having to admit that his lifestyle did not affect him much: “Almost not at all. My life remained practically the same all of last year as in the previous ones, and now that here in Los Angeles everything is liberated and open, I am still locked up at home. It is that with my 55 years I never go out to bars, much less to discos. I am not sociable at all ”.
However, what it will affect you is the possibility of taking “Reprise” to a stage: “That is the big question, how we could take him to a live concert. But I don’t think about it much because, as things are, a wave is coming, and then the plague is supposed to end, and when you start opening businesses and theaters another wave comes, you can’t foresee everything that it takes to stage a record with so many different musicians who must come from all over the place ”.
As indicated by his surname, Melville, Moby is the great-great-nephew of Herman Melville, the great writer of literary masterpieces such as “Moby Dick.”
“Has it ever occurred to you to compose a concept album about your great-grandfather’s novel?” Moby thinks a bit and responds “I really appreciate your work, I find it very interesting, and I think that your novels are important, but I prefer contemporary literature because the nineteenth century usually has a medium slow pace, which can be heavy, and the The truth is that it is difficult for me to get to the end of a book. But I do admire the symbolism in ‘Moby Dick’. His ideas are more interesting as existentialist allegories than in their plot aspect, because I tend to imagine Gregory Peck with a harpoon trying to kill the white whale. I wouldn’t think of doing a concept piece on ‘Moby Dick’, but I did use a quote from the character Ahab on my previous album, ‘All visible objects.’
On the other hand, an artist very different from Herman Melville who has caught the attention of Moby is the filmmaker David Lynch, of whom he remixed some passages of the music from the series “Twin Peaks” in one of his classic songs that now appears in version orchestral in “Reprise”. “David Lynch is one of the most important artists in the history of the United States,” says Moby in an almost solemn tone.
“And I am not saying this because I believe that the United States has not had great artists, quite the opposite. It is that I admire and think that it is brilliant the way in which Lynch has managed to combine surrealism with popular American themes in films like ‘Blue Velvet’ or ‘Wild Heart’, or in the series ‘Twin Peaks’. But the new ‘Twin Peaks’ that Lynch made a couple of years ago I only liked partially, it has interesting things but also a little silly humor that I didn’t think was good. I would edit all those funny parts and make an excellent film of about three hours. ” Just this year Moby has been the subject of a documentary film, in which one of the interviewees is David Lynch.
Almost ending the dialogue, we took Moby out of the present and asked him about his experiences in his shows in Buenos Aires that delighted his fans in 2005 and 2010 at La Rural and Luna Park. The answer is surprising: “It was very important to visit Argentina because it is a country that is always present in my life. It is that my mother has a part of her family that is Jewish, and she always lived in Buenos Aires, which may seem strange since I grew up in a traditionally Caucasian and Western environment like Connecticut, New England. But the truth is that since I was a child I listened to telephone conversations from your country with constant references to Judaism and Argentina. So when I went to play it was like experiencing something that had always been present. I just couldn’t connect much with my family members who came to visit me backstage. My Spanish is already very bad and, on top of that, you Argentines speak a different Spanish from what one hears in the United States. They speak very fast and nothing is understood ”.
“Do people who know him intimately call him Moby or Richard?” “Everyone has called me Moby from the day I was born, Richard is just my legal name. 10 minutes after I was born my mom held me up and showed me my father, and said that Richard was too big a name for such a tiny little thing as I was. Then my old man said, yeah, let’s call him Moby. And there it was. The only one Richard tells me is my dentist, because he’s a too big guy to try to explain about Moby ”.
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