It’s emancipating knowing that not only should I not try to write hits, but I absolutely couldn’t if I had to. 54-year-old guys should not be trying to compete with 19-year-olds for the attention of other 19-year-olds. For me to be trying to write a hit that will compete with the music of 19-year-olds, the level of sadness and compromise and disingenuousness, even if I tried to do it, I couldn’t do it. One is when I had hits, it didn’t necessarily create any sustainable happiness for me. There are a bunch of things that have helped me shed that need. Do you not feel the need to write a hit anymore? In “Then It All Fell Apart,” you said the need to write hit songs came from a desire to maintain your celebrity. The Einstein quote that everyone loves: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” There isn’t nobility around my philanthropy. If someone is worth $100 million dollars and they have three planes and five houses and they’re miserable, having four planes and six houses is not going to make you happier. I see people who have a lot and are not very happy try to get more. The idea that I would have the right portfolio of perfection and that would give me unspeakable bliss and a sense of belonging until the day I die. My idea of happiness when I was growing up was, in a way, divorced from the human condition, as I think a lot of people’s conception of happiness is. It led me to think, ‘Being a materialist doesn’t make me happy, what are the alternatives?’ To me, the alternative was to live a relatively simple life, and enjoy the work that you make, and if you can, use your platform and money to help organizations who are trying to fix problems. I wasn’t good at it, and it made me miserable. I was bending over backwards, trying to be a big public figure. There was an empirical aspect to it, which was: the more time and money and energy I spent trying to impress people, trying to have great stuff and to live in Jay Gatsby-esque homes, the less happy I was. I moved into some unnecessarily over-the-top apartments and houses and I had an assistant whose job was throwing parties. But in the early 2000s, I went to the other extreme of trying to be a really good materialistic rock star. It partially comes from being raised by hippies who were not very materialistic, and then getting involved in punk rock when I was in high school, which is also either not materialistic or ashamed of the profit motive. What brought on your sense of philanthropy? For the last 10 years, you’ve been giving away profits, not just from your music, but many of your other ventures as well. Moby spoke to Variety by phone ahead of the album’s release. “All Visible Objects” taps into both ends of the ’90s spectrum: euphoric rave-y tracks of the early part of the decade and the emotive ambient ones that came towards the turn of the millenium (plus a spooky cover of Roxy Music’s “My Only Love”) creating a musical Venn diagram all his own. The astronomical success of his 1998 release “Play” cemented the artist’s place in the annals of modern music history.
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