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[SPEAKER_02]: That's me Kyle Meredith today.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's gonna be a special rewind episode.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm looking back on my talks with Moby the electric pioneer vegan philosopher the only guy who's ever licensed every track on an album with play back in 1999
[SPEAKER_02]: He went from hardcore punk and house DJ to ambient sage and animal rights warrior.
[SPEAKER_02]: He sold millions of records along the way, worked with Bowie, Orbital, Gwen Stefani.
[SPEAKER_02]: He has scored films.
[SPEAKER_02]: He has written memoirs.
[SPEAKER_02]: He has directed documentaries and still finds time to pick fights with the meat industry on occasion.
[SPEAKER_02]: uh... our first conversation that i believe we ever did together was back in twenty eleven uh... it was uh... it was quickie was kind of a run-and-gun type of interview at south by south west that year and i say run-and-gun because of mostly interviews at south by end of being that way you kind of just you find who you're supposed to talk to you grab a corner you throw the mic in front of them uh... you're all done in like five minutes uh... and it was an enjoyable conversation but it was a very very quick talk
[SPEAKER_02]: just as he was releasing the record destroyed so that's where we're going to start right here heading back to uh 2011 for this uh special rewind episode part one Kyle Meredith with Mobie.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well by the last 2011 with the one I know in the movie.
[SPEAKER_02]: Hang on sir.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm fine thanks are you.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm well let's talk uh a new record you have a new record coming out right and tell us a little bit about this one.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's called Destroied and there's a book coming out as well and both the book and the album were put together on tour because I have bad insomnia So most of the music on the album was written in hotel rooms at four o'clock in the morning and It's an album of sort of like broken down electronics, but very warm and very Atmospheric and very melodic.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm not good at describing the records I make, but I would describe it as a warm emotional broken down electronic record
[SPEAKER_02]: from that description it might think it could be, you know, further down the rabbit hole from where you just left off with the last record.
[SPEAKER_02]: Would that be a fair judge?
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I mean the last top I made was called Wait for me and that was also very atmospheric and this is more atmospheric and futuristic but sort of futuristic from a 1970s perspective because it's all old synthesizers and old drum machines.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I don't think it's not a particularly modern sounding record.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's not the sort of album or the sort of music that we get played in night clubs at 2 o'clock in the morning.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's more the sort of music that to me sounds really good on a highway at midnight.
[SPEAKER_03]: You mentioned a book?
[SPEAKER_03]: Was it going to be with it as well?
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, I've been a photographer since I was 10 years old.
[SPEAKER_03]: As long as I've been making music actually.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I'm finally putting out a photo book.
[SPEAKER_03]: As I said, the album was put together on tour, and the book is also sort of about travel and touring.
[SPEAKER_03]: There's no pictures of set lists, no pictures of guitars, no pictures of monitors or what have you.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's more about how when you go on tour, the familiar becomes disconcerting, and the disconcerting becomes familiar, and things that should be comforting, end up being very off-putting, and sometimes things that are very off-putting actually become quite comforting.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I'll also include all the photography from the book, sort of related, at least in my mind they're related.
[SPEAKER_03]: Someone else could listen to the record and look at the book, and not see any connection between the two, but from my perspective they're related.
[SPEAKER_03]: There's already in the EP out.
[SPEAKER_02]: Is that song that's going to be on the record or these extra tracks?
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, the main song on the EP is a song called Be the One, which sounds sort of like melodic music for the Apocalypse.
[SPEAKER_03]: And it's a repetitive emotional melodic song that was sort of a centerpiece of the last Paul Haggis movie.
[SPEAKER_03]: I like it, but I'm biased because I made it.
[SPEAKER_03]: Look at the port of the new record, and good luck with your self-buy crowd out there.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a bit hot today.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's DJing in a parking lot.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's 6 o'clock in the evening.
[SPEAKER_03]: It has the potential to be object failure, so we'll see.
[SPEAKER_02]: You did say you're playing bass with OMD too, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: Were you knighted and back at it?
[SPEAKER_02]: Everything.
[SPEAKER_02]: What are you going to be?
[SPEAKER_03]: I just somehow managed to work with a lot of my heroes and when I was growing up I loved OMD.
[SPEAKER_03]: So they're playing here and they asked me to play bass on a couple of songs and of course we're not going to rehearse and I've never played this song and I'm playing an upside down left-handed bass.
[SPEAKER_03]: So as is true for everything I do there is that great potential for things to go wrong badly.
[SPEAKER_03]: If you expect things to go wrong and they don't, it's a pleasant surprise.
[SPEAKER_03]: And if you expect things to go right and they go wrong, you're horribly disappointed.
[SPEAKER_03]: So Barlow, a set of our loan, a set of our loan, a surprise and things don't fail.
[SPEAKER_02]: Moby from a 2011 interview, it's South by Southwest, and we'll be right back right after this.
[SPEAKER_02]: Welcome back.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's Kyle and Meredith, special rewind episode.
[SPEAKER_02]: Looking back at my conversations with Moby.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now this second one, you could say, started all of this, the entire podcast.
[SPEAKER_02]: I've been doing interviews of course for years before this podcast officially found its partnership with consequence in 2018.
[SPEAKER_02]: Before that, I didn't call the podcast.
[SPEAKER_02]: I just called it an interview series, but they said, hey, let's make it a podcast.
[SPEAKER_02]: And who do you have lined up?
[SPEAKER_02]: And I said, well, I'm supposed to talk to Moby next.
[SPEAKER_02]: And they're like, great.
[SPEAKER_02]: Ask him about what he said recently about Trump being a secret to Russian operative.
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, and so we had a great conversation and then in the middle of it it just kind of naturally went there Actually even to my surprise to this day and we talked about it for a while and then we go back to the music and then the next day the interview was picked up
[SPEAKER_02]: everywhere.
[SPEAKER_02]: It was on CNN, it was on Fox.
[SPEAKER_02]: It was on Russian television.
[SPEAKER_02]: It was around the world in every website and suddenly it started feeling not just a little exciting, but then weird and even a little bit scary.
[SPEAKER_02]: And it turned out that was the very first episode of this podcast.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's where we're taking it back to right now in the special rewind episode This is from 2018.
[SPEAKER_02]: Mobile had just released everything was beautiful and nothing hurts It's part two, Kyle Meredith with mobile.
[SPEAKER_02]: Great to talk to you It's been so long since we've heard anything from you a whole six or seven months at this point.
[SPEAKER_04]: I guess Yeah, I've been lazy.
[SPEAKER_04]: I'm sorry
[SPEAKER_02]: I like this this work ethic and I think you know the idea of touring less and writing more I guess not every band could do it.
[SPEAKER_02]: You might have to be to a certain level but as a fan like this is I would take this all day long from all the bands I'm a fan of you know just just pumblemouth.
[SPEAKER_04]: Well it yeah it's definitely it's a function of not touring but it's also a strange function of sobriety and attachment disorder.
[SPEAKER_02]: Attachment disorder?
[SPEAKER_04]: Attachment issues meaning like
[SPEAKER_04]: I'm not in a relationship and I don't have a family and I don't have children and I'm sober so as a result I have a lot of free time.
[SPEAKER_04]: You know all of a sudden those like dozens and dozens of hours a week when you're hung over or whatever suddenly have all this time to fill in honestly there are only so many shows on Netflix a lot.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, we're all benefiting from it, so I guess I think you and whatever in the universe for that.
[SPEAKER_02]: And this new record, everything was beautiful, nothing hurts.
[SPEAKER_02]: I want to start with the first single, too, with Motherless Child, which goes back and takes another spiritual, which you've done plenty in the past.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I sort of wondered, what attracts you to those spiritual?
[SPEAKER_02]: What brings those in?
[SPEAKER_02]: Because you always do it in such a great way.
[SPEAKER_04]: I think it's... At its most basic, it's just the sort of...
[SPEAKER_04]: the longing and the pathos and just the emotional quality of those old songs and there's such a simplicity to them because you know I grew up studying classical music and my first music teacher was also obsessed with jazz fusion and so he tried to teach me to love
[SPEAKER_04]: and to play really complicated music and try as I might I just found myself routinely gravitating towards things that were a lot more sort of in a way rudimentary and direct and simple and a lot of those old you know spiritual songs and the gospel songs are just so yet straightforward and emotional when I'm working on music I sort of employ the same criteria
[SPEAKER_04]: affect me emotionally, you know, because my music is capable of doing many things, but I think at its strongest, it delivers really powerful emotion.
[SPEAKER_04]: So that's, you know, whether I'm, you know, incorporating old traditional things into my songs or writing things myself, there ultimately has to be that that criteria of determining how the music affects me when I listen to it.
[SPEAKER_02]: And with the song like this, like a motherless child, you know, if you just go by the lyrics, I thought, and looked at it literally, this could be a follow-up to the day, which you had written actually about, if I read right, a moment with your mother, years ago back in the hospital.
[SPEAKER_02]: Am I close at all?
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, I mean, I guess it's hard to write personal music and not to some extent have it be,
[SPEAKER_04]: autobiographical.
[SPEAKER_04]: But I guess, you know, what I try to do and what I'm not going to say that what I did I do at well, but that it's trying to like take the the very specific and subjective and create something that also has a degree like a universal quality.
[SPEAKER_04]: I don't know if I ever succeed at that, but you think of a song like David Bowie's Heroes and I'm thinking of David
[SPEAKER_04]: And on one hand, it's his very specific love song between two people, but it's somehow create something so generous and universal.
[SPEAKER_04]: Or even like the best-lettered Cohen songs, you know, where sometimes they're very anecdotal and specific, but somehow universal at the same time.
[SPEAKER_04]: So I guess whether directly or inadvertently that's what I'm trying to do as well.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'll tell you, the day is still one of the most beautiful and sad songs, beautifully sad songs that I think I've ever heard.
[SPEAKER_02]: And again, I think it's a fan when I went into this that was one of those things like, you know, but there is that moment like, you know, like, that's the separation from the person who made us, you know, and how could that not be effective, you know, to any artist in the songwriting?
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, I mean, to the separation, again, this sort of, this,
[SPEAKER_04]: idea that that experience can exist in two different ways.
[SPEAKER_04]: Like there's a specific experience of perhaps me losing my mother.
[SPEAKER_04]: But then the emotion of that, you know, that the sadness, the grief, the longing, but that could also apply to the human condition, to how, you know, how we relate towards the universe in which we're born.
[SPEAKER_04]: You know, this feeling of separation, this feeling of, you know, confusion and loneliness.
[SPEAKER_04]: I assume that most people,
[SPEAKER_04]: spend a good portion of their life, you know, confused, separated and alone.
[SPEAKER_02]: More so these days than I feel like maybe a few years ago.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, I mean, it does seem like the world in which we live is sort of, I was gonna say it's going through an existential crisis, but I certainly know as a species, it seems like most of the people I know are going through some pretty serious existential crises, whether it's environmental, personal, political, what have you?
[SPEAKER_02]: And we'll be right back, right after this.
[SPEAKER_02]: Welcome back, it's Kyle Meredith with Moby.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I've certainly never felt despair for something for people that I've never met like I have in the last little bit.
[SPEAKER_02]: And you know, in bringing you back to this record, when I look at the song titles, like you know, welcome to Hard Times, the Wild Darkness, the Dark Cloud is coming.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, that's, that's, it's impossible to not wonder, are we talking about the bigger pictures and political and environment that's happening?
[SPEAKER_02]: Is that the basis for, you know, thoughts and titles like that?
[SPEAKER_04]: Yes, very much so.
[SPEAKER_04]: You know, you can't separate the art from the context in which it's created.
[SPEAKER_04]: But what I'm, I guess I'm more interested in now these days is looking at things on it almost sort of personal, not me personal, but like on a more like human level.
[SPEAKER_04]: rather than political or rather than structural.
[SPEAKER_04]: Because the fascinating thing about this apocalypse that we're suffering through, it's an apocalypse that we've created.
[SPEAKER_04]: You know, in the past, our ancestors, when they struggled and suffered, it was usually because of circumstances outside of their control, like salmon and rotten teeth and hungry bears.
[SPEAKER_04]: But now everything we're struggling with, you know, it's circumstances and situations that we've created.
[SPEAKER_04]: And it really does beg this question like, why as humans do we keep making such bad choices?
[SPEAKER_02]: Do we have any idea of the answer to that right now?
[SPEAKER_04]: So, I don't know if it's an answer, but it's a little bit of a glimpse into it is, I was watching a documentary, which is what middle-aged sober people like me do a lot of.
[SPEAKER_04]: and in the documentary is about a watering hole in Africa during a drought, and it's like every creature in this environment, from lions to hippos to zebras to, you know, alligators, they had all converged on this watering hole, and in the middle of it, were these tiny little monkeys, and the monkeys would run up scoop a handful of water and run back before they got eaten.
[SPEAKER_04]: And they were like, you know, at the very bottom of the food chain at this watering hole, and I had this thought, I was like, oh, those are our ancestors, you know, terrified monkeys, drinking water filled with alligator and hippo poo for a split second hoping that they're not going to get eaten.
[SPEAKER_04]: So I feel like even though we've evolved to an extent, we're still those scared little monkeys at the watering hole.
[SPEAKER_04]: We just assume that we're about to get eaten every threat is a moral threat and we're never going to have enough to eat or drink.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now with all this in mind, big curiosity here, I do want to pull it into a very specific, because while the art does look at the bigger picture in the personal picture, much like the rest of us myself included and judging from, you know, I follow you on the socials.
[SPEAKER_02]: that, you know, your day-to-day is still very much like most of our day-to-day of getting trapped up in the new cycles and everything.
[SPEAKER_02]: And there was that moment last year, a very cryptic post that you put to last February, where you sort of outline things that we're probably going to happen.
[SPEAKER_02]: And some of that has happened, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, so years of touring and spending time in DC and New York, I've managed to make a few friends.
[SPEAKER_04]: in the intelligence community.
[SPEAKER_04]: And I guess this is about a year ago, we were having dinner, and they were really concerned, partially based on this, not to go too much in the weeds, but like this fusion GPS report on Trump, essentially being run as a Russian agent.
[SPEAKER_04]: And these are some active and former CIA agents.
[SPEAKER_04]: who were they're truly concerned they were like they're like this is the mentoring candidate like he have a Russian agent as the president of the United State and so they passed on some information to me and they said like look you have a big you have more of a social media following than any of us do can you please post some of these things just in a way to sort of put it out there and you know you look at diand find signs who release
[SPEAKER_04]: the testimony from when Fusion GPS went before the Senate Judiciary Committee and she just released those notes yesterday and yet does seem like to what extent there's collusion I don't know but the weather's smoke there's fire and when you have so much evidence pointing to the fact that Trump the Trump administration is really in bed with the Russians in a very pernicious way and unfortunately I just don't see
[SPEAKER_04]: people in Congress sort of holding the administration accountable.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's really disturbing.
[SPEAKER_04]: And it's going to get quite a lot darker.
[SPEAKER_04]: Like the depth of the Trump family and business, their involvement with organized crime, sponsors of terrorism, Russian oligarch.
[SPEAKER_04]: Like it's really, it's really dark.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, that was, I did.
[SPEAKER_04]: I guess we should all like fasteners he built and hold on.
[SPEAKER_02]: Because, you know, when I look back at those sweets, there's almost like a glimmer of a hope in those posts that, you know, something is going to, you know, the hammer is going to come down and things would change, but it sounds like, you know, nearly a year later with what's happened and what hasn't happened and what you do, what you do know and might not know, but you don't sound as hopeful that there's going to be that results.
[SPEAKER_04]: Well, I worked under this naive assumption that our elected officials in the Senate and the
[SPEAKER_04]: would be interested in investigating possible collusion between the executive branch and a hot style foreign power.
[SPEAKER_04]: And the degree to which even people like John McCain and Chuck Grassley have sort of abdicated their responsibility, that's what makes me really pessimistic.
[SPEAKER_04]: They seem to be putting
[SPEAKER_02]: country and decency and I'm that that I find that to be really threatening yeah well we're all feeling really threatened day by day by day i mean luckily you know i can and this is probably i'm this is definitely i'm saying this of a place of privilege i know this i'm i'm able to wake up day by day and and look right ahead of me and and enjoy my work and do my day and most of time my life doesn't change but
[SPEAKER_04]: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, and that's what keeps me seem also.
[SPEAKER_04]: And one thing I'm really grateful for is that our president is incompetent.
[SPEAKER_04]: Like just imagine how much more dangerous he'd be if he was intelligent and had emotional impulse control.
[SPEAKER_04]: You know, like some really grateful that if we're going to have a tyrant, at least let him be stupid and incompetent.
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's just hopefully bite our time until the hammer doesn't come down then the election comes around which there's a lot of good names that look to be in the hat next time around so we can only be hopeful of that at least.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah at least you know.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah and like for example there's one really pernicious representative Darrell Isha from California and he just has an outseas resigning so I think a lot of a lot of people on that like and I hate being partisan but like
[SPEAKER_04]: are reading the writing on the wall and are resigning rather than going through an election they know they can't win.
[SPEAKER_04]: But like, and then hopefully my friend and neighbor Adam Schiff want assuming we win next year to, you know, November 6th, 2018, then Adam Schiff becomes the head of the house due to Sherry, and that is when things start to get really serious.
[SPEAKER_02]: And not to go too high in the sky big here, but, you know, as far as the big office with
[SPEAKER_04]: I mean, my dream, which is never going to happen, is that Michelle Obama will run, or Elizabeth Warren.
[SPEAKER_04]: And I mean, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, I mean, I was raised by women and I was raised by feminists, and I just really want to hopefully see a female president sooner rather than later.
[SPEAKER_02]: where there's more momentum now than there's ever been, so we can be very hopeful that.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: The album's gonna be out soon.
[SPEAKER_02]: Sorry to ask you this question, but does that mean your mind is already rolling to the next one, because I know that's sort of how it works with you?
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: I mean what I'm planning on doing at some point this year is releasing an acoustic orchestral album.
[SPEAKER_04]: Like going back and revisiting older songs and doing them orchestrally and with all acoustic instruments.
[SPEAKER_04]: So I'm sort of working on that right now.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I cannot wait to hear that, but, you know, not to get ahead of ourselves.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm really looking forward to the release of this one.
[SPEAKER_02]: Everything was beautiful.
[SPEAKER_02]: And nothing hurts.
[SPEAKER_02]: Hopefully a line that we'll be able to say once again one day.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, I hope I couldn't agree more.
[SPEAKER_02]: It was really great talking to you, Moby.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you so much.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, it was really nice talking again.
[SPEAKER_04]: Thanks.
[SPEAKER_02]: There you go.
[SPEAKER_02]: Part two, that's Moby.
[SPEAKER_02]: And thanks to you for checking out the episode.
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