Q1: How did it feel, making another album against the backdrop of 'Play' selling 10 million copies?

Moby: As far as, like, going to a studio and trying to make a follow up to 'Play', which was such a successful record, I probably should have felt a lot more pressure, but, to be honest with you, I didn't really feel any pressure. I mean, I didn't feel this pressure to come up with a record that was going to sell better than 'Play' or to be better than 'Play'. I guess the idea was just to go and make another record, 'cause in some ways, I saw the success of 'Play' being such an anomaly and most of the records I'd made up until 'Play' sold in the realm of like 80 000 copies to 200 000 and then to suddenly have a record that sells 10 million copies, I just assumed that the records I make in the future will not sell 10 million copies and just be a lot less successful, so as result I didn't feel like I had to sort of like 'one up' myself.

Q2: Was there a point when the scale of the success of 'Play' actually hit you and you realised what it meant?

M: When we first put out 'Play' in May of '99, our pie in the sky goal was to sell 250 000 copies world wide and that was like. That seemed like almost like an unattainable goal and when we passed 250 000 copies, I was really happy, you know. When we had sold 300 000 copies world wide, I thought I had made this record that was incredibly successful and then it just kept building and building. It was just the strangest thing to be a part of. To put out a record and have such low expectations for it and have it go on, not just to be fairly successful, but to be, by most people's standards, extremely successful and it was. every single day after the release of 'Play' was a surprise for me, a nice surprise and the success of it was just so strange, because the music marketplace that 'Play' had been released into seemed like it was a music marketplace that would ensure that 'Play' would never be successful and the fact it went on to be successful was just so bizarre.

Q3: Did you have a sense of vindication about your success, because there have been times when people have been sceptical about what you do?

M: I don't necessarily feel a sense of vindication about the fact that 'Play' was so successful, more just a sense of gratitude, like genuine surprise and gratitude. Because the truth is, if I were a music journalist in 1997, I would have written me off too. I mean, I don't blame anyone for being dismissive of me or writing me off, because, you know, a lot of the things I have done in my career kind of engendered that, so that when 'Play' became successful, I didn't feel this sense of like holy righteousness and vindication, like I had been right all along and everyone else was wrong. I kind of felt like, "Oh, what a nice surprise!"

Q4: In retrospect, what are your feelings regarding the use of the music from 'Play' in advertising or film?

M: When we released 'Play', our expectations for its success were so low that when people came to us and wanted to use the music from 'Play' in TV shows or advertisements or movies or whatever, it was so flattering that we said yes to everything, because I kind of felt like the fat kid going to the school dance and you go to the dance and expect to sit in the corner and no-one's going to pay attention to you and suddenly people are asking you to dance, so you say yes to everybody, because it's so much more than you ever expected and with 'Play', also when the record came out we weren't getting any radio support or MTV support, so the only people who seemed interested in it were people making advertisements and TV shows and movies, so it was a way of exposing the music to people when we didn't really have any other vehicles with which to expose the music to people.

Q5: Following the commercial success of 'Play', how do you feel about the old cliché of wealth being corrosive to the soul? Do you find there's any truth in that?

M: As far as wealth being corrosive to the soul, it might be. I'm probably in a bad position to judge that. I know that I don't really ever spend money. I mean, yeah, 'Play' was successful and I made a lot of money from it, but I don't spend any of it, because, and I hope this doesn't sound naïve or disingenuous, but to spend money takes time and I mean a lot of my friends who have a lot of money, their occupation becomes spending their money and they're always going on trips and buying cars or buying this or that or the other thing - and this might sound really simple, but I'd rather spend my time making music and hanging out with my friends, both of which are things that don't require a lot of money, so I tend to put the money in the bank and just let it sit there, because, I mean, when the touring for 'Play' ended, I came back to New York and I was toying with the idea of finding a bigger, fancier apartment, because it would be nice to have a bigger and fancier apartment, but then I realised that it would take so much time, looking for a place, finding, renovating, moving, what have you, that it would be years before I made another record and I see that happen to a lot of people, like someone will have success, they make a lot of money, then they spend a year spending all the money when they should have spent that time making another record.

Q6: When you came to make '18' did you have a really clear idea about what you wanted to do?

M: When I started making this new record, '18', to be honest with you, I had no idea what I wanted the record to be like, apart from like the most vague generalities - I wanted it to be a warm record and I wanted to make. My goal as a musician now is to make records that people can love, you know, records that people can take into their lives and really, hopefully, fall in love with and get a lot of use out of. I kind of feel like in the past I went out of my way to be confrontational at time and to make records that were difficult and challenging and now I feel like if I want to be difficult, I can be difficult in my own time. I'd rather make records that can be important to people on a much more warm, human level.

Q7: Were you planning '18' while you were touring, because you toured for two years pretty much beforehand?

M: On days off while we were on tour, I became a terrible cliché of a touring musician and would sit in my hotel room, playing guitar and writing songs, always aware in the back of my mind that I looked like such a cliché, you know, like the earnest musician sitting at the end of his hotel bed, playing guitar and writing songs about how difficult life is on the road and I wrote a lot of songs on tour. Some of them were good, some were really mediocre, so when the tour ended I already had 30 or 40 songs written and then I wrote about, I guess, another 100 or so songs as well.

Q8: After the release of 'Play', you were quoted as saying you wanted to make an album in the spirit of Bill Wi thers or Al Green meeting Massive Attack. Was that still in your mind when you actually started to make it?

M: Over the last few years I developed this really strange love for old Soul music and r'n'b from the 60s and the 70s and the 80s and when the tour for 'Play' ended, if I had been allowed to make the record that I really wanted to make right when the tour ended, I would have made basically a sort of romantic, slow, r'n'b ballad record, but then I realised, as time went on, that my musical interests were a little broader than just Romantic Soul ballads, so there are a few Romantic Soul ballads on the new record, but I wanted to make something that was hopefully a little bit more diverse. There are very few types of music that give me greater satisfaction than a good Romantic Soul ballad.

Q9: Do you think the punk rock thing has gone forever? You laughed at the success of 'Everything Is Wrong', you made 'Animal Rights' and you said that was like a contrary thing to do. Do you think that now you've abandoned that kind of oppositional thing?

M: I think that, in many ways, at this point of my life, I've given up the idea of making music that is aggressively confrontational and part of that is the fact that I've learned that, when it comes to music, I like just about everything, so I don't feel the need to get in people's faces and say, "I like punk rock and either agree or with me or disagree with me," but here, you know, I've given up on the idea of just confronting people like that. I'd rather make records that I love, that other people can love. Who knows, I might. I still write a lot of punk rock, I still play guitar all the time. I just don't necessarily feel the need to put them on records I'm making right now.

Q10: So the kind of stuff that you were listening to that was feeding into this new record was old Soul and r'n'b?

M: Yeah, well, when I was on tour for 'Play', pretty much all I listened to was old Soul and r'n'b and some hip hop and just warm, romantic black music from the 70s and 80s, but the tour ended and I came back to New York and started going out to bars and hanging out with friends and listening to the radio and suddenly realising that I liked all these other . being reminded of the fact that I love House music, being reminded of the fact that I love Heavy Metal and I love Jazz and I love all these different things.

Q11: the album was recorded from February 2001 to recently. What else was happening around that time?

M: Well, I started making this new record, '18', in February of 2001 and so for about six and a half months I spent most of my time here in my studio, just writing songs and sort of fine-tuning them and then, just as I had all the songs pretty much finished, September 11th happened and I live quite close to the World Trade Center, so that was really difficult, because my neighbourhood was shut down. There were military, the army and National Guard was everywhere, and it also. The world changed drastically on September 11th and the way in which people invite art and music into their lives changed quite a lot. Suddenly music that people might have been interested in before September 11th, they might not have been interested in after September 11th, so I suddenly had this new litmus test to apply to the music that I was writing. The one thing that I found really gratifying is that a lot the songs I had written before September 11th still felt warm and attractive to me after September 11th, so the record that I've made, it's same record I would have made even if we hadn't been attacked by terrorists, but it made me happy that the record I've made still has a warmth and a resonance in light of what happened on September 11th.

Q12: How much of the material on '18' was written after September 11th?

M: On '18', you know all the songs on '18' were written before September 11th. I think the only song that might have been written after September 11th was the song 'We Are All Made of Stars', the first single, but I think I actually wrote it right, just a few days before the 11th, like the beginning of September.

Q13: there is a wide range of musical styles on '18'. Was that a deliberate decision when you set out to make the record?

M: It's funny. Whenever I've made records, like, I made a record in 1995 called 'Everything Is Wrong', that people, when it was being reviewed, the reviews always said how extremely eclectic it was and when I put out 'Play', a lot of the reviews said the same thing, like it's got all these different styles. From my perspective, I don't think that anything I've done has ever been particularly eclectic. Like with this new record, I think that it's stylistically the most cohesive record I've ever made, so if, in fact, it is eclectic, I'm not aware of it. I'm not saying it isn't eclectic, I'm just saying that from my perspective. I don't. like the Beatles' 'White Album', that's an eclectic record. The records I make, I think, are lot more simple.

Q14: the new album deals with extreme emotions, which is what you've always done. How do you get yourself into the state of mind where you can produce that kind of material, when you have to do it every day?

M: That's a really good question - how do I come into my studio day after day and summon up the emotions to make really emotional music? I don't know. A lot of times, like I can be working on a really mournful piece of music and be in a relatively happy state of mind. Likewise, I can be working on a really happy piece of music and be in a very mournful state of mind. A lot of it depends upon, I guess when. sounds. It's a strange thing to say, but I guess throughout my life I've been a very emotional person, so I know what it feels like to feel euphoria, I know what it feels like to feel great sorrow, so that's the litmus test that I apply to music that I'm working on. Even if I'm sad and I'm making a happy song, I still know when a happy song is effective and I think that, at least from my perspective, the music I make. Obviously some of the songs are quite mournful, some of the songs are quite euphoric, but I tend to, from my perspective, just think of them as being emotional, in the broadest possible sense of the word. So when I'm working on a piece of music I don't. I'm not thinking to myself, "How effective is this as being a sad song?" Or, "How effective is this as being a euphoric song?" I tend to think, "How effective is this as just being an emotional piece of music?"

Q15: Is there a direct correlation between what's going on in your life at the time and the way your music evolves or is it more a question of drawing on the history of the emotional experience?

M: I rarely write songs that are specifically about an event. The music that I make tends to be just more generally descriptive, so if it's a sad song, it's not a sad song about one specific thing, it's just a song that hopefully encapsulates the emotional life that I've had up until that point.

Q16: In terms of putting this record together, did you bring in any other people as players or at a production level?

M: On a musical level and on a production level, I do everything myself. I write the songs and play all the instruments and do all the engineering and production. I've had a few guest vocalists - I have a song with Sinéad O'Connor, a song with MC Lyte and Angie Stone and then some other guest vocalists, who I don't think anyone's ever heard of.

Q17: Do you ever consider the idea of working with other musicians?

M: I love the idea of musicians getting together and playing music together and having that evolving dialectic, but at the same time I love making music by myself and who knows, maybe at some point in my life I'll involve other people and create music in a more communal environment, but for the last 15 years the majority of the music I've made has just been me sitting alone in my studio writing music.

Q18: On '18' did you want to make less obvious use of samples?

M: I think that on this record I might've, maybe on some conscious or slightly subconscious level, made an effort to move away from sampling field recordings, but at the same time, a lot of the songs are still based around samples. I mean of the 18 songs on the record, half of them at least are based around sampled vocals and the reason for that is the reason I've always used sampled vocals, is I just like nice vocals, and whe ther it's vocal samples from 50 years ago or whe ther it'svocal samples from quite recently, whe ther it's me singing or somebody else singing, as much as I love instrumental music, I really get great satisfaction out of writing a song that's based around a beautiful vocal performance.

Q19: After the success of 'Play', you had a great abundance of possibilities. Was having such huge resources available to you a problem?

M: I think because I'm a fairly simple person, I know a lot of people can get overwhelmed by having too many options, but because I'm sort of a simpleton, I tend to not see all the options I have. I tend to just focus on, like, in making a record, I don't think of the thousands of singers I could work with or the thousands of samples I could use or the thousands of different ways a song could be mixed. I tend to think, "Oh, I have this one vocal sample. Let me write a simple song around it, " and I'll mix it until it sounds nice, until it works well and then its done. A lot of people, especially with contemporary recording technology, do get really overwhelmed with all the options. In the old days records were. To make a record you were documenting a performance by a bunch of musicians and you couldn't control that much. The variables were all contributed by the musicians themselves in the context of that performance. So if you recorded the musicians performing and you didn't like the way the hi-hat sounded, you couldn't do anything about it. Now, with technology, if you don't like the way the hi-hat sounds, you can spend a month just working on a hi-hat sound and I know a lot of musicians who do get caught in that trap. I think that's one reason why it takes Trent Reznor such a long time to make records, because he focuses on all this minutiae, all these details, like he'll obsess over making a kick drum sound perfect and I'm lazy. As long as a piece of music sounds good to me and as long as it has that emotional quality, I don't really care what the high hat sounds like or the kick drums, as long as it feels right to me. That's the only litmus test I really apply to music.

Q20: the album starts with 'We Are All Made Of Stars', which is a kind of euphoric, an themic thing with guitars and syn thesisers. How did that come about?

M: the. 'We Are All Made Of Stars' came about because I basically finished the record. I had written all the songs that I knew I wanted to have on the record and I spent a couple of months fine-tuning all those songs. In making a record, there's this process where I'll sit down and write a bunch of songs and then figure out which songs I think are OK and hopefully work on them and do the craftsmanship stuff, which is fine-tuning and developing a song and I'd gotten to the point where I thought they were all finished and fine-tuned and I was about to start mixing them and I thought to myself, "Why not just have fun in the studio and just make music?" 'Cause you know sometimes I can get a little too focused on the fact that this is work as opposed to. I also love just coming in here and writing songs and making music and I sat down one Sunday evening and just. I wanted to write. I probably shouldn't tip my hand and give away what was the motivation behind it. I wanted to write a sort of New Wave song that reminded me of that Blur song, 'Girls and Boys', is that what it's called? "Girls who like boys who like girls." So I sat down and 'We Are All Made Of Stars', I guess it was written in about 5 minutes, but it was originally supposed to be this very slightly clunky New Wave song, in the vein of that Blur 'Girls and Boys' song, and then all of a sudden it took on this whole other life and when I was making it, I didn't think that it was going to make its way onto the record, but then I realised it had this kind of naïve charm that I really liked.

Q21: In terms of when you are looking for samples, what is the process? Do you have a library?

M: When it comes to sampling vocals, I tend to. which is one reason why I never really know. I mean, legally, obviously everything is taken care of, but I'll get a huge stack of records and just go through and sample vocals and sample vocals, then I'll hand the records off to my managers and to my lawyer and they go off and clear everything, but I never remember where the samples actually came from.

Q22: What are you looking for in a voice when you are searching for a suitable sample?

M: If I'm looking for vocals, basically I'm just looking for vocals that have a wonderful emotional quality and hopefully an interesting or relevant lyrical quality and a great performance or an interesting performance. One wonderful thing about working with sampled vocals is they're all recorded in such strange environments that when you sample the vocal you also get the environment in which it was sampled, so you have all these strange and disparate environments showing up on one record, which I find kind of exciting.

Q23: Which vocalists feature on 'Jam For the Ladies'?

M: 'Jam For the Ladies', the male vocal is a guy called Mic Geronimo, who is an obscure hip hop artist from New York, and then I have MC Lyte and Angie Stone on it as well and my goal with 'Jam For the Ladies' is. I wanted to have a song that if I'm out at 2 or 3 in the morning, there's this select group of songs that a DJ will play in a bar at 2 or 3 in the morning, like Aerosmith's 'Walk This Way' or a Prodigy song or a Chemical Brothers song. Just once or twice in my life, I want to have the song that gets played at 2 or 3 in the morning that, you know. you're in a bar, you're with your friends, it'd be nice to hear one of your songs. That was the idea behind 'Jam For the Ladies', just a sort of like fun, slightly silly, funky hip hop track.

Q24: 'Sunday ( the Day Before My Birthday)', was that really the day before your birthday? Was that a literal title?

M: the song ' the Day Before My Birthday' wasn't written any time around my birthday. My birthday is September 11th and so the lyrics are about, well, the lyrics take on a sort of. even though the song was written way before September 11th, in retrospect, I felt like the lyrics described the day before my birthday quite well, so that's the genesis of that title.

Q25: Does 'Sunday ( the Day Before My Birthday)' feature a sampled vocal or a performance?

M: the vocals on ' the Day Before My Birthday' came from a woman named Sylvia Robinson, who started Sugar Hill Records and before she started Sugar Hill Records she was an artist / musician and she had a really successful record called 'Pillow Talk' and there was a song called 'Sunday Was A Bright Day' or 'Sunday Was A Fine Day' and that's where I sampled the vocals for ' the Day Before My Birthday'.

Q26: Are you ever surprised at how well the songs featuring vocal samples turn out?

M: It's funny, when I listen back to music that I've made, I never remember how it happened and I'll sit down in my studio and it's this strange process where, and I don't want to sound all New Age and crazy, but it's like I almost cease to exist. I don't remember writing these songs. I remember when they were done, but the actual process of writing them, I don't remember what I was thinking when I was writing them. They just happen. I know I was here. I was sitting in this chair, playing on the keyboard, but rarely, if ever, is there a lot of conscious stuff going on. And I think that's one of the reasons why I like working alone, as well, that I can just get lost.

Q27: Can you tell us about the piece you were asked to compose for the Olympics?

M: For the Olympics, it turns out I've had to write four songs for the Olympics, so the Olympics theme I'm doing starts with '18', then it goes to this two other pieces of music and it'll end with a very up-tempo version of 'We Are All Made Of Stars', but the song '18' was originally a piece of music that I wrote a few years ago. I liked it, but I didn't know what to do with it and then the people from the Olympic committee called up and said, "Oh, we'd really love you to write the music for the closing ceremonies of the Olympics," and for some reason I thought of this piece of music, so I dug it out and recycled it and worked on it a little bit and came up with what I thought was like a really touching instrumental piece of music.

Q28: In order to write the piece for the Olympics did you have to visualise the event, because it was to be used for the moment they extinguish the torch?

M: I don't how to pronounce this word - 'elegiac' - this piece, '18', it's an elegy. It has. The extinguishing of the flame at the end of the Olympics, has. it's a sort of wistful. There's a quality of celebration and there's a quality of wistfulness to the end of the Olympic games as well, and I thought that this piece of music kind of summed that up.

Q29: 'Harbour' is the song with vocals from Sinéad O' Connor. How did you end up working with her?

M: the song 'Harbour' I actually wrote when I was 19, so I wrote it 17 years ago and it's always just been floating around. I'd wanted to find someone to sing it, but I never could find the right person, I guess Sinéad O'Connor's manager met my manager and they were talking and Sinéad's manager said, "Oh, Sinéad likes Moby's music and would love to do something with him," so for some reason, I instantly thought of this song that I'd written 17 years ago and sent it to her and she did a really wonderful job with it.

Q30: Did you meet Sinéad and work with her on the track?

M: On '18', some of the songs, the vocals were recorded here. Angie Stone, there's these two girls, Azure Ray, who sang on a song called 'Great Escape' and a song 'At Least We Tried' and all my vocals were recorded here, but Sinéad O'Connor's vocals were recorded in London. We talked on the phone quite a lot and MC Light recorded her vocals in Los Angeles, so a lot of it's just convenience and whatever's expedient. I think also Sinéad's not comfortable flying. She's much more comfortable flying 45 minutes from Ireland to London than 6 hours from Ireland to New York. I think Sinéad O'Connor's amazing. And what a wonderful and idiosyncratic and interesting public figure. I wish. I mean, she could've had such an easy career, and the fact that she sort of went out of her way to make things difficult, but in a really interesting way. I find that really fascinating.

Q31: 'Great Escape' features another female vocalist. Who is that?

M: the vocals are done by these two women, Orenda and Maria, who are in a band called Azure Ray and they are from A thens, Georgia and they sent a demo tape to my managers and my managers then sent it to me and I fell in love with their voices, soI asked them to sing that song.

Q32: 'Fireworks' seems to hark back to some of the ambient minimalist instrumentals you've done previously. Is that area of music still an interest to you?

M: When it comes to music, I tend to like everything. I mean, I love minimalist instrumental atmospheric pieces of music, I love full on songs, I really like everything, so a song like 'Fireworks', I just thought it was a lovely two and a half minute long piece of music that made a nice interlude between two other songs and the title comes from one of my favourite movies, which is a Takeshi Kitano movie called 'Fireworks', so the song itself isn't an homage to him, but the title of the song is.

Q33: 'Extreme Ways' features one of the fullest lyrics on the album. Could you tell us something about this song?

M: Well, 'Extreme Ways' is fictionalised, but autobiographical at the same time. I think a lot of times when I'm writing songs and I'm writing lyrics, it tends to be like, I'll take something I've experienced or something that I've experienced, a lot of times and almost, not to sound like a grad student, but create a sort of like meta-narrative, based on a bunch of different experiences and where it's not literal, but it's figuratively
descriptive. So a song like 'Extreme Ways' is a just a song about degeneracy and debauchery and what motivates people to be degenerate and debauched and what the consequences can be.

Q34: Can you tell us something about 'Sleep Alone'?

M: 'Sleep Alone' is that song that's going to be the strangest one for me to talk about on the record, because the story behind it is quite surreal, in a way. It was a song that I wrote. I actually had to change the lyrics from the original version I wrote to the final version, because it was a song that I had written five days before September 11th and it was written with the idea of these people who had just died in a plane crash walking around lower Manhattan, looking back into the places where they lived and the original chorus was "At least we died together, holding hands, flying through the sky," and, you know, my managers have a hard time listening to it, because it always freaks them out, especially if you listen to the original. I mean, I don't want to say I have any Proustian or psychic abilities, but if you listen to the original in light of what happened five days after it was written, it's very disconcerting.

Q35: What about 'At Least We Tried'?

M: 'At Least We Tried' is. if I had a made an entire album the week that I finished touring, every song would have sounded like 'At Least We Tried', because all I was listening to were these Romantic Soul ballads and. but of the Romantic Soul ballads that I had written, I thought 'At Least We Tried' was one of the more effective ones, and it's in that great tradition of Teddy Prendergass' 'Love TKO' or the Manhattans' 'Kiss And Say Goodbye', like these Romantic Soul songs that are about relationships ending. You have a lot of. In that world of Romantic Soul there's a lot of songs about people celebrating the love that they're having or being upset that they're alone or wanting to be with someone, but there's this select little genre of r'n'b break up songs and 'At Least We Tried' was my attempt at writing an r'n'b break up song. And in a weird way I think that 'At Least We Tried' might be, as time goes on, the most iconic song off the record. I have a feeling that's the song most people are going to be putting on mix tapes to send to their ex-boyfriends and ex-girlfriends.

Q36: Who sang the vocal on 'At Least We Tried'?

M: A guy named Freedom Bremner, a session singer from New Jersey, so. and with 'At Least We Tried', I met this guy Freedom, who's a great session singer and he came in and I was like, "Oh, will you just try singing this song," so I put a microphone in front of him and he sang it once and it was perfect and then, in the great tradition of uptight musicians like myself, I had him come back weeks later and sing it like twenty times and we ended up just using the original version, when I, you know, stuck a crummy microphone in front of him and just said, "Oh, try singing this song".

Q37: 'Look Back In' acts as a kind of musical interlude on the album. Did you compose the piece with this specific purpose in mind?

M: 'Look Back In' was very specifically put together as an interlude piece between the song 'Harbour' and the song 'Rafters'. I guess when I'm constructing a record, I'm looking for ways to make the record flow in hopefully a really satisfying way and sometimes, if you have juxtapositions between songs that are too abrupt, it doesn't contribute to the overall nice quality of the record. So 'Look Back In' was a song I'd written 9 or 10 months ago and I sort of truncated it and made a condensed version that worked as a sort of interlude.

Q38: Towards the end of the album there are two songs, ' the Rafters' and 'I'm Not Worried At All', which seem to be a lot more joyful. Was that intentional?

M: Well, I have a couple of really dear friends that give me a lot advice on the music that I make and both of them had the same. My friends Kelly and Damian, they both had the same piece of advice, which was, "You need to end the record on a slightly happy note, because there's so many mournful songs on the record. If you end the record on a sad note people will just be killing themselves left and right" (laughs) and I agreed with them. I like the idea of a record that, stylistically and emotionally, just has so many peaks and valleys, but I did like the idea of ending the record on what is a sort of like gentle upbeat. I'd love to leave people with a smile on their face, but maybe just leaving people with a sense of like peace and calm, although, I should probably keep this to myself, but ' the Rafters', there's, at least from my perspective, there's a pun in the title, because on one hand, rafters, you know, like in churches, if someone's singing, they sing up to the rafters, you know, their voice is so big it goes up to the top of the roof, but also traditionally people hang themselves, they get hung from rafters, so it's a little double entendre, to an extent.

Q39: Who was the vocalist on 'I'm Not Worried At All'?

M: Yeah, the vocalist on 'I'm Not Worried At All' is the same guy who sang 'Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad?', so that sample, I know where it came from, it's this group called the Shining Light Gospel Choir.

Q40: Do you think that the amount of different musical influences on '18' make it a difficult album for the listener to understand?

M: It might be kind of tragic that when I made this record, I thought I was making a really warm, lovely, emotional record and it would be tragic if, in fact, against all my best intentions I'd made a record that people might find difficult. I think, from my perspective, it's this very warm, cohesive, emotional record. Most people. I think most people are a lot smarter and more open minded than they are traditionally given credit for. I mean, a record like 'Play', people really loved 'Play' and 'Play' was a very eclectic record. I didn't intend for it to be eclectic, but it goes from hip hop inspired tacks to weird, quiet instrumentals and almost rock songs and what have you, so with this new record, I don't know, I hope that people like it and I hope that people don't feel too assaulted by it, because my goal was the exact opposite, to make something that was really warm and inviting.

Q41: Do you think that your life experiences have made it possible for you to make particularly moving music?

M: I don't know what compels me to make music that is emotional and moving. Um. I mean, certainly, whoever I happen to be as a person and a musician is very much the product of my genetic inheritance and upbringing and I don't think I have had a particularly difficult life. I think most people have had much more difficult lives than I have. You know, even if there were times when I was very poor, that still didn't feel difficult. I've always been able to eat and I've always had a pillow to put my head on when I go to sleep, so I certainly can't complain about anything I've experienced when I was growing up.

Q42: Previous albums have come with statements, essays on religion and animal rights. Is there going to be anything similar on this one?

M: In the past when I made records I included essays, because that was my only way of communicating my written thoughts to people, but now I have my web site, moby.com, and I write essays on it every day, so it feels a little strange if I'm writing essays every single day for my web site to then include essays in the record, so what I might do instead in the record is maybe have one or two essays, but otherwise just direct people to my web site. If they're interested, they can read what I have to say there and also, I don't know, maybe this is a product of just me getting older, but I feel so much less strident and didactic about things. You know, when I was younger, I really saw the world in these very simple terms - good versus evil and right versus wrong - and I always felt like I was right and everybody else was wrong. As I get older, I just see the world as being so much more subtly nuanced and complicated and it's really hard to write polemical treaties when you see the world as being a very ambiguous place.

Q43: Are you planning to tour this record as hard as you did with 'Play'?

M: With 'Play', the reason the tour went on so long is because we, and I hope this doesn't sound immodest, but the record just kept doing better and better and better, so, like, performing in London, for example. When 'Play' first came out, we played a concert at the Scala, which didn't quite sell out. I think the Scala holds like 600 and we had like 500 people there and then the record started to pick up and then we played a show at London Astoria and them we played a show at the London Forum and then did some festivals and then came back and played Wembley Arena and Brixton Academy back to back, so the first show of the tour on 'Play' in London was for 500 people and the last was 24 000 people over two days and that happened in so many places, where we just had to keep going back, because the record just kept doing better, which was wonderful. It was like beyond my wildest dreams as a musician, but with touring for this record, I don't think we're going to need. like, we played, throughout the course of the 'Play' tour, we performed in London, I think, 7 times and with this tour I don't think we're going to need to go to every city 7 times, so I think the tour'll be a little shorter.

Q44: Are you ready to go through the media treadmill all over again?

M: When I was getting ready to release 'Animal Rights', I went to the UK to do promo for it and they could only find two journalists who wanted to talk to me - one was from the Big Issue, but I think like the Big Issue in Birmingham and the other was from like a student paper in Nottingham and I know what's it like to make records that no one is interested in and I know what it's like to make records and be met with apathy from the media, so now that I'm in this position in my life where people seem to actually be interested in talking to me, I'm I can't complain, so I'm happy to go out and do as many interviews as they want me to do.

Q45: Do you think we're in a good phase for pop music at the moment or do you think it's harder for people who are unorthodox, like you are thought to be?

M: It's certainly, like, if you look at the music charts. I mean, the UK is quite different. The UK has a much healthier commercial music scene than any other country. You can have records successful in the UK that aren't successful anywhere else. I mean, a band like the Manic Street Preachers, they do wonderfully in the UK and they can't get arrested anywhere else, because radio in the UK is much more open, much more progressive, the music press there is much more open, much more progressive, so if we're talking about pop music in the UK, from my perspective, it seems really healthy. Pop music in the rest of the world, yeah, things are a little bit grim. Especially, I mean, you look at charts from like 1971, go back 30 years and the charts were full of Creedence Clearwater Revival, and Led Zeppelin and Sly and the Family Stone and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, and Bob Dylan and stuff that was like records that sold really well, but they were also wonderfully crafted, beautiful songs with great political and cultural resonance and it's hard to look at the pop charts in most countries and say that the music is wonderfully crafted songs with great political and social resonance.

Q46: Do you have total confidence that you are achieving everything you want to achieve in life by working exclusively within music?

M: Working in music, that's my life's work. There's a part of me that would love to be better, more well-rounded or more dilettantish, but at the same time, I'm not really good at anything else. I'm not saying that I'm particularly good at making music, but I know that I'm dreadful at doing a lot of other things. If I were a plumber or if I were a carpenter, I would be the least employed plumber or carpenter in the world, because I would be disastrous at it, so I'm quite comfortable just spending my life working on music, even if it means there are long periods when no-one pays attention to what I'm doing, that still. I mean, I understand a lot of people really thrive in diversity and I admire that, like I have some friends who can build a house or make a beautiful painting or produce a film or fix a car - I don't know how to do any of that. It would be nice to know how to do that,but time spent learning how to fix a car is time taken away from making music.

Q47: Is there anything that you particularly want to pursue outside of music?

M: the only career aspiration I have apart from making music is architecture, but it's so complicated that I know I'll never do it, because it would mean going back to school for a long time and developing ma thematic skills that I just don't have.

Q48: Do you have a long term plan - a long term Moby plan?

M: My long term plan is to make music and maybe tour a little bit and at some point I would love to have a house with nearby running water, with a lot of dogs. I mean, I do have this sort of pie in the sky fantasy of waking up and going swimming and running around with a bunch of dogs and making dinner with friends and you know falling asleep next to a woman that I'm in love with. That's. you know, maybe at some point. If it never happens, it never happens. I certainly won't be able to complain, but it would be nice.

Q49: Why do you think you've collaborated with so many diverse artists over the course of your career?

M: When I was growing up I had so many musical heroes and the weird thing is, in the last couple of years, I've ended performing with so many of them. I played guitar for David Bowie at Carnegie Hall, while he sang 'Heroes' and I sang 'New Dawn Fades', the Joy Division song with Joy Division, you know. I played guitar for Bono, I played guitar for Michael Stipe, I played guitar with Mission of Burma. When I was growing up, these were my heroes and to suddenly. like Bowie was definitely the most amazing experience of like playing guitar with someone who was my hero, 'cause I bought - no pun intended - I bought 'Heroes', his album in 1977 or 78, whenever it was made, and I loved it and then suddenly, in 2001, to find myself on stage introducing David Bowie and then playing guitar with him during 'Heroes', that's pretty amazing. I mean, I think, from my perspective, I honestly think he was the greatest musician of the twentieth century. I can't think of anyone else who even really comes close, so, but it's just so interesting having been. To suddenly find yourself on stage playing with your heroes and it's disconcerting, but really gratifying.

Q50: Last question - so what would be better: an appearance in South Park or selling more than 10 million albums?

M: If given the choice between being in South Park and selling ten million albums, I would have to choose ten million albums, but being in South Park, especially if they could work me into the movie. If they make South Park 2 and they need me to do anything, you know, if they want to stick me with exploding potatoes and, you know, have me ripped apart by wild dogs, fine. I would do it in a second. The South Park movie, I think, is one of the most wonderful things I've ever seen.