Moby is Destroyed.
Not literally, but the New York-born, now L.A.-based electronica-pop star has a new album and accompanying photo book of that name in stores Tuesday, May 17.
Both get their title from a picture Moby took of the final part of an LED security warning in a deserted hallway at LaGuardia Airport: "Unattended luggage will be destroyed."
Turns out, Moby has been snapping away since he was 10, when his uncle and New York Times photographer Joseph Kugielsky gave him his first camera.
"He instilled in me an idea when I was very young which is that, 'What seems banal and familiar to you might not seem banal and familiar to someone else,'" said Moby, 45, seated in his record label offices in Toronto recently.
"This idea that everyone has access to something that could potentially be very interesting to someone else. So I decided to make the photo book as a document of touring. 'Cause touring's been documented in a very romantic way like pictures of backstage and parties. You look at Led Zeppelin on tour and it's like private planes and them being glamourous and having sex on 727s. And I wanted to have a sort of more formal, potentially objective view of life on tour."
Moby, who later studied film and photography at university, had been documenting "everything," from 1998 to 2008, but ended up losing about 600,000 to 800,000 images he thought he had saved digitally.
His artist friends talked him into publishing a book of his more recent photo tour photos including a nun seated at Pearson Airport in Toronto, the sole Canadian shot to make the cut.
"(My friends) expected to not like the pictures," said Mob. "They thought I was just another dilettante musician, with a digital camera who thought he had some interesting, insightful look at the world. So they expected to be patronizing, and say like, 'Why don't you just stick to the music?' But they were all encouraging."
As for the music, it grew out of Moby's insomnia, so instead of sleeping in hotel rooms on the road -- or "strange environments late at night," as he calls them -- he would write and record instead.
"On the one hand, Destroyed reflects the strangeness of being in a hotel room on the 40th floor looking out at empty Hong Kong at 3:30 in the morning," said Moby, who plans on touring Destroyed at summer festivals before a North American fall tour.
"But there's also a comfort in that as well. You're in your little cocoon of a hotel room and even though you're in this strange environment, there is an odd comfort that comes along with it. But also because it's strange, you find yourself wanting to make yourself happy. So I think that's why some of the songs on the record almost have a sort of nurturing, lullaby quality to them, because that's what I respond to."
Moby said if he gets six hours of sleep a night it's a big deal, and he's tried everything to combat his insomnia -- warm baths, meditating, and every sleep aid imaginable.
His inability to sleep -- "only for 43 years," he jokes -- began as a small child, raised by his single mother in Harlem in a "very strange home with a lot of just trauma and oddness.
"I was always on guard. And that's my only theory. I had a wonderful loving mother but she, like most of us, she was trying work out some issues in young adulthood, there just happened to be a young child around. She had some poor choices when it came to boyfriends, like Al the guy who worked at the gas station was a Hell's Angel who collected guns and would invite friends over to shoot guns in the basement. The drug dealers and the what not."
Moby lovin' L.A.
Moby, music-maker, and longtime insomniac, says he's sleeping a bit better these days since moving from New York to L.A. a few years ago.
"It's rural," said a Dodgers hat-wearing Moby, who still maintains his Lower East Side studio. "I essentially live in the centre of the city but it's in the country -- Beachwood Canyon, so it's right below the Hollywood sign -- completely surrounded by Griffiths Park. I have coyotes and owls and raccoons and snakes and spiders and mountain lions and I'm, in a very real sense, not at the top of the food chain. And I think it's so fascinating (for people) to live in an urban environment where there are creatures who can eat them."
Still, it's a bit of a surprise that the Harlem-born and longtime Lower Manhattan resident since 1988 left his hometown.
"Around 1995 New York started getting clean, New York sobered up essentially," he explained. "What happened was New York is a victim of its own success. It's become so fancy and so affluent that the interesting people who made me want to stay in New York have all had to leave. So my neighbourhood, the Lower East Side -- I don't really know anybody in my neighbourhood anymore."
