Moby muses on sobriety and leaving NYC
When New York expat Moby returns to his longtime hometown, he says he feels like a “ghost.”
The electronic music pioneer and self-described “middleaged monk” is sober, vegan and has been living in Los Angeles since 2010. He still has a house in Westchester, but the city is tainted with fuzzy and debauched memories, and temptations in which he, at 52, is too disciplined to indulge.
“I had this experience when I first got sober,” Moby tells The Post, “walking from my studio on Mott Street to my apartment down on Orchard. I was passing every bar and every nightclub, every place where I used to get blind drunk, and I was going home to eat cereal and watch ‘The Daily Show.’ Don’t get me wrong — I love cereal and ‘The Daily Show,’ but it was really hard walking by all these places filled with people getting drunk and having a great time.”
Now, when he visits, the animalrights activist enjoys it like a tourist — on the Brooklyn Bridge and admiring the view of Lady Liberty. With a new album — his 15th, called “Everything Was Beautiful, and Nothing Hurt” — and two shows at Williamsburg’s Rough Trade NYC next week, he’ll be passing through again, indulging his two remaining guilty pleasures: vegan chocolate and his iPhone. Did you leave the city because you got sober?
Sobriety was a huge part of it. When I was a drunk, stumbling around the Lower East Side, going to parties and bars and desperately looking for anyone to take me home, New York was just the most magical place in the world. But when I was sober, I wanted to live in a place where I could go hiking in the winter. Being a drunk in New York is so easy and wonderful, but I imagine being a degenerate in Los Angeles must be so frustrating, because the bars close at 1 or 2, and everyone wakes up early to go to the farmers market. The album is beautiful, yet dark, with songs like “Welcome to Hard Times” and “A Dark Cloud Is Coming.” Where is this worldview coming from?
I was sitting in traffic on the 10 [freeway], driving down to Coachella — I was looking around and I realized that every single person sitting in traffic was probably really unhappy: going from a job they hated to a home that they didn’t feel happy with. I expanded on that and realized that there are hundreds of millions if not billions of people sitting in traffic every day, miserable. And the question is: Why do we keep doing it? The main inspiration for the album is that — of humanity destroying itself. The cover is a strange painting of two cows in people’s clothing, commuting. What made you choose it?
I was scrolling through Instagram and I saw this painting of the big cow with the little baby cow on the subway, and the sweetness resonated with me. I contacted the artist, who lives around the corner from me in LA, and asked him if I could use it. I just wanted the title and the art to be this naive representation that things could be better. The only thing keeping them from being better is us.