Moby - Summer Staff Picks

Our summer tradition at Here’s the Thing continues, as staff members choose their favorite conversations from the archives for our Summer Staff Pick series. This week, we revisit Alec’s interview with Moby, who reflects on the unexpected success of his 1999 album Play—a record that transformed him from playing gigs in record stores to international stardom. Moby shares the chaotic aftermath of fame, from drug-fueled highs to moments of deep despair, and how he eventually found his way to sobriety. He also speaks with Alec about his unconventional childhood, his memoir Then It Fell Apart, and what he’s learned in the decade since leaving drugs and alcohol behind. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:05Speaker 01

  Hey, I'm Niall Rogers. This fall, I'll be driving across the country, meeting some of today's coolest and most fascinating artists. We'll explore the stories before the moments that changed everything. Because every musician remembers the moment where it all began. Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln Original Series on the iHeart Radio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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• 1:36Alec Baldwin?

  This is Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the Thing from iHeart Radio. It's summer, and that means it's time for our tradition at Here's the Thing, where the staff share their favorite episodes from our archives in our Summer Staff Picks series. Our last pick is from engineer Frank Imperial.

• 1:58Speaker 05

  Thanks, Alec. When I think back to the late 90s and early 2000s, it's impossible not to hear Moby's music. His album Play was everywhere: in films, commercials, on the radio, and yet, it never felt manufactured. It felt intimate, like he had cracked open his own world and invited everyone in. What makes this conversation so compelling is that Moby doesn't just talk about the music. He opens up about the struggles that fueled it, the questions of identity and faith that have followed him, and his passion for activism, from animal rights to environmental issues. You get a sense of an artist who always has tried to connect the personal with the political, the beats with the bigger picture.

• 2:43Speaker 05

  Listening back, I was struck by how candid he is about fame, sobriety, what it means to try to live authentically in a world that doesn't always make it that easy. And of course, you hear the humor and self-awareness that makes him such a singular voice. Here's Alec's 2019 conversation with Moby.

• 3:04Alec Baldwin?

  I'm Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the Thing.

• 3:21Alec Baldwin?

  In 1999, your cool friends put on Moby's Play at parties. In 2000, it was on the radio. Popularity snowballed into ubiquity. In 2001, Play was in malls and Volkswagen ads. It became the biggest-selling electronica album of all time.

• 3:50Alec Baldwin?

  To fans outside the electronic music world, Moby seemed like an overnight success. But he was 33 in 1999 and had been recording since the 80s. Play was actually his fifth studio album. It never occurred to him it would break even, let alone break records. The self-described loner and nerd succumbed to the worst sort of rock star excess. As his fans filled stadiums and models showed up in his dressing room, Moby was euphoric, but spinning out of control. It's a story he shares in his new book, Then It Fell Apart. I spoke to Moby last month.

• 4:32Alec Baldwin?

  In the early chapters of his book, Moby is coming to terms with the album going platinum. What do you think happened inside the music in that album that was different? Did something click? Did something change? All of a sudden, you're a monolith in the music business.

• 4:48Speaker 06

  Yeah, and to contextualize it, before that album Play came out, my career had essentially ended. I'd lost my record deal. It was a very dark time. My mom had died. I was--

• 4:58Alec Baldwin?

  Were you living then?

• 4:59Speaker 06

  I was living on Mott Street.

• 5:01Alec Baldwin?

  You recorded Play where?

• 5:04Speaker 06

  In my bedroom on Mott Street.

• 5:06Alec Baldwin?

  Of course you did.

• 5:08Speaker 06

  And, well, actually, I slept in the closet and I had my bedroom had been turned into an ad hoc recording studio. And I thought, so I'd made Play. My last album had failed completely. And I'd lost my record deal.

• 5:21Alec Baldwin?

  With who?

• 5:22Speaker 06

  I was signed to Elektra. And then I was signed in the UK to a label called Mute, and they hadn't dropped me. But to put it in perspective, they'd never dropped anyone. That was their claim to fame, is they'd never dropped an artist.

• 5:34Alec Baldwin?

  Just in case.

• 5:34Speaker 06

  Yeah, so I was like, I couldn't really take too much comfort in the fact that I hadn't lost my deal with Mute when they'd never, ever dropped an artist.

• 5:41Alec Baldwin?

  So Play, who released Play?

• 5:42Speaker 06

  Well, Richard Branson started a label called V2. And someone working at V2 somehow heard one of the songs on Play, I still don't know how, and he offered me a deal. But, yeah, I mean, before it was released, I thought, okay, I'm an alcoholic, bald has-been, I'm gonna release this one last record.

• 6:04Alec Baldwin?

  Living in my closet on Mott Street?

• 6:05Speaker 06

  Living in my closet.

• 6:06Alec Baldwin?

  You can hear the pipes leaking in the kitchen while I'm recording?

• 6:08Speaker 06

  Well, the building was from mid-19th century on Mott Street, and it had been a slaughterhouse. So the space I was living in, this is weird as an animal rights vegan, the floors all sloped to central drains. Because when it had been a slaughterhouse, they would just hose the floors out and all the awful would just get washed out in the drains. So I'm in that environment, thinking, I'm gonna move back to Connecticut, I'm gonna get a job teaching community college, I'd probably be a philosophy professor to students who just had no interest in paying attention to philosophy. And then this album comes out, and rather than failing, it kept doing better and better. So to your question of, like, musically, why that happened, I still, to this day, have-- because a lot of the vocals on Play were like old African-American vocals from the mid-20th century.

• 6:54Speaker 06

  And if I look at, there's just no precedent for a middle-aged musician making a record in his bedroom at the end of his career involving vocals from people who've been dead for a few decades. Like, that's not a recipe for a hit record. I remember at some point it sold 50,000 records. Because I thought it was gonna sell nothing. I was amazed that my album had sold 50,000 records. And then, six months later, it was selling 100,000 copies a week.

• 7:23Alec Baldwin?

  What do you attribute that to? What did people respond to? People are listening to your music and buying your music in a world that is choked with music. There was so much stuff out there they can listen to, and they buy 10 million copies of your album. Why, do you think?

• 7:40Speaker 06

  You know, I was recently doing an interview with Larry King, and he asked me that question. And he sort of asked me, like, if you could replicate it, would you? And I was like, oh, I tried. Like, the following, like, the next three albums, I kept, I was like, how do I recreate that? And I never really could. Like, that one sort of weird lightning in a bottle moment. I don't, I mean, I don't want to anthropomorphize the universe too much, but I almost feel like the universe was in a sort of lighthearted, educational way, saying like, okay, we're gonna give you everything you ever wanted, times a million, and it's gonna come close to killing you, and you're gonna hopefully learn something

• 8:21Speaker 06

  from it. So there was like, and again, I'm, that might sound very narcissistic, like I've just anthropomorphized a 13.8 billion-year-old universe. But it felt like, if, at the end of the day, more than anything else, educational. Like, the universe is gonna say, like, okay, you live in a culture-

• 8:37Alec Baldwin?

  It's not a crime to anthropomorphize the universe.

• 8:39Speaker 06

  It's part of the human condition.

• 8:40Alec Baldwin?

  But let's go from there, then. So the album comes out in 1999. It's difficult for some people to say, this is his style. You've got a lot of different, you know, kind of tones, and a lot of different variety to the sound of your music. And what was music in your childhood? Were you in a chorus? Was it church? Was it music school?

• 8:57Speaker 06

  It was weird. I started playing guitar, I guess when I was around nine or 10, because one of my mom's boyfriends had gone to jail and left a guitar behind.

• 9:08Alec Baldwin?

  But your mother is kind of from a privileged background, Connecticut?

• 9:11Speaker 06

  Quasi. I mean, like, my grandfather worked on Wall Street.

• 9:15Alec Baldwin?

  Right.

• 9:16Speaker 06

  But then, my mom sort of rejected that. The sixties progressed and she fully embraced the hippie lifestyle.

• 9:24Alec Baldwin?

  But your dad, your dad passed away when you were how old?

• 9:26Speaker 06

  I was two.

• 9:27Alec Baldwin?

  So when you were two, and how long did you stay in New York after he passed away?

• 9:30Speaker 06

  My mom moved back to Connecticut to get her undergraduate at East Con, if that is even still a school. And then we went to San Francisco in 1969, where everything sort of fell apart.

• 9:41Alec Baldwin?

  And you were how old then?

• 9:42Speaker 06

  Three.

• 9:43Alec Baldwin?

  So, so right after your dad passed away, she finished school?

• 9:45Speaker 06

  Finished school, we went to San Francisco and she sort of, I guess, was very torn. Like the counterculture was happening and she really desperately wanted to be a part of it. You know, and so.

• 9:58Alec Baldwin?

  Do you have any ideas why?

• 10:00Speaker 06

  I have a feeling half of it was rejecting, like growing up in Derry in Connecticut, being encouraged by her parents to sort of be very conservative and very traditional. So it was a rejection of, to an extent, her family, but also just wanting to be a part of this new exciting paradigm. You know, I mean, 1969.

• 10:21Alec Baldwin?

  An original paradigm, not something that's been copied since then.

• 10:23Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 10:24Alec Baldwin?

  That, that was it.

• 10:25Speaker 06

  And she's 23 years old and she wanted to be this free spirit artist, but she also had a three-year-old child. And that's where things, a lot of tension and trauma really came from.

• 10:37Alec Baldwin?

  What did your dad do for a living?

• 10:39Speaker 06

  He was a chemistry professor at Columbia, but he had been in the military and he was, it's funny, people don't really talk about it that much, but I think he was either an assassin or a sniper. Cause I've asked people in my family, I'm like, oh, what did my dad do in the military? And they're like, well, he did a lot of things. It's never, so I think, cause he killed himself. And he was a.

• 11:00Alec Baldwin?

  He drove a car off the Verazano.

• 11:01Speaker 06

  Uh, he drove, I don't know where exactly, but he got very drunk. My mom had threatened to take me away from him. And so he got drunk and got in his car and drove 100 miles an hour into a bridge somewhere.

• 11:13Alec Baldwin?

  And died. Now, um, what would people tell you if at all, did you, did you do any investigation? Or did you have some curiosity as to what your dad was like? Did you learn a little bit about him later on in life?

• 11:24Speaker 06

  Well. It's only-

• 11:26Alec Baldwin?

  Beyond the CIA cred.

• 11:28Speaker 06

  Yeah. Only in adulthood did I realize how little I knew about my father.

• 11:34Alec Baldwin?

  Yeah.

• 11:34Speaker 06

  Like, for example, if I had a child with a woman and she died, as the child grew up, I would do everything in my power to make sure the child knew who his mom had been. You know, we would talk about it, and after my dad dies, he was never mentioned. His mother never mentioned it to me. And all I knew was that he'd been in the military, and I had photos, and, but again, it was only after my mother died that the rest of the people in my family sort of let me know that my father had been a professor, and he had a good sense of humor, and he was-

• 12:09Alec Baldwin?

  So your mother had to die before people were allowed to introduce you to your dad?

• 12:12Speaker 06

  Kind of, yeah.

• 12:13Alec Baldwin?

  Interesting.

• 12:14Speaker 06

  And I found, and it sort of had this quasi, like, almost like a Chekhov play quality. Like, I found out, after my mother had died, I found out that my father had killed himself, because my whole life up until that point, I thought he had just died, and no one ever explained how or why. And I also found out I have a half-brother somewhere, which, um, can I tell you a story about who my half-brother is not?

• 12:37Alec Baldwin?

  Good, please.

• 12:37Speaker 06

  I think he'll appreciate. I was in DC in 2007 with Alexandra Pelosi, Nancy's daughter, and we were with Nancy. Nancy was the Speaker of the House, and this is pre-sobriety, so I got very drunk and ended up talking to a journalist from Politico, and telling this journalist that I have a half-brother, and I jokingly said, "Maybe it's Karl Rove." The journalist wrote a little Politico piece saying, "Are Moby and Karl Rove brothers?" Two weeks later, I get a letter on White House stationery, and it says, "Dear Moby, it's not me. For one thing, I'm 17 years older than you and I have no musical ability. Have you considered James Carville as your long-lost brother? Because he's bald and plays the guitar, too. Your pal, Karl Rove."

• 13:20Speaker 06

  And I was like, so I know, as far as I know, Karl Rove is not my half-brother.

• 13:24Alec Baldwin?

  You have one, did you ever meet the half-brother?

• 13:25Speaker 06

  I have no idea who or where he might be.

• 13:27Alec Baldwin?

  Yeah. You know, your story, and we'll get to some of the details of this in the book, the self-destructiveness, but an impression I get of you, the way you live, is you like to isolate. And you talk about this panic plateau thing, or whatever the terminology is, which which which kind of hampered or impacted relationships you would have with people.

• 13:47Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah, I mean, I'm fifty three and I've never had a serious relationship. Um, and over time.

• 13:53Alec Baldwin?

  Does that trouble you?

• 13:54Speaker 06

  It used to, but then over time, I've sort of made peace with it. I mean, I guess there's almost in a way, not to overstate it, but like, there's a there's a sort of utility to being incapable of having real relationships, which is, I get to work on other things, you know, like, I get to be.

• 14:16Alec Baldwin?

  You make good use of the time.

• 14:18Speaker 06

  Yes, I get to spend more time doing activism, I get to spend more time, I don't know, reading, working on music, working on art, I have a weird little production company in LA, so I can work more on that, so I had always thought that the key to happiness, at least growing up, was like, you find your perfect person, you build a life with them, and at some point, I realized, oh, that's just not in the cards for me. And so there's.

• 14:43Alec Baldwin?

  So far.

• 14:44Speaker 06

  So far, but at the same time, I don't, I don't have any longing for it.

• 14:48Alec Baldwin?

  You don't.

• 14:49Speaker 06

  Which.

• 14:50Alec Baldwin?

  Not that you know of.

• 14:51Speaker 06

  Not that I know, I mean, maybe I'll meet the, you know.

• 14:53Alec Baldwin?

  Maybe you just, it's, it's, you don't know. Do you want to venture where it comes from? Does it come from certain obvious childhood signals?

• 15:03Speaker 06

  I think so, I assume so, that.

• 15:06Alec Baldwin?

  Because you were left alone a lot as a child.

• 15:09Speaker 06

  I was left alone, and I was also raised, you know, I grew up very, very poor, in a very wealthy town in Darien, Connecticut, and my mom dated Hell's Angels, there was a lot of.

• 15:18Alec Baldwin?

  But you went back to Darien when you were how old?

• 15:19Speaker 06

  When I was five.

• 15:20Alec Baldwin?

  So you were, you were in San Francisco just a couple of years.

• 15:23Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 15:24Alec Baldwin?

  So your mom's smoking pot and the.

• 15:25Speaker 06

  Taking acid.

• 15:26Alec Baldwin?

  Dresses and taking acid.

• 15:27Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 15:28Alec Baldwin?

  And, and, and everybody, like, you know, kind of cavorting around the hate or whatever they were doing.

• 15:33Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 15:34Alec Baldwin?

  You were only there for a couple of years.

• 15:35Speaker 06

  And then we moved back to Connecticut.

• 15:36Alec Baldwin?

  For how long?

• 15:37Speaker 06

  Well, I lived in Connecticut from the time I was five until the time I was twenty one or twenty two.

• 15:43Alec Baldwin?

  So you basically grew up there.

• 15:44Speaker 06

  Yeah, I'm just an inbred white trash kid from Connecticut.

• 15:47Alec Baldwin?

  The San Francisco thing was a brief period of a couple of years.

• 15:49Speaker 06

  That was just brief and traumatic.

• 15:50Alec Baldwin?

  Right. Traumatic how?

• 15:52Speaker 06

  Well, traumatic, there was sexual abuse, um, my mom. And I don't want to throw her under the bus posthumously, but she wanted to hang out with her friends. She was 23 years old, so they put me in this very low-rent daycare center and I was sexually abused there.

• 16:06Alec Baldwin?

  What did she do during the day? Did she work?

• 16:08Speaker 06

  Not in San Francisco.

• 16:10Alec Baldwin?

  She was supported by her family? They were all dependent on somebody?

• 16:13Speaker 06

  A lot of kids from Connecticut who in 1964 had been playing lacrosse. Nothing wrong with lacrosse. I just was never very good at it. And they had short hair, wearing Isods, you know, going to Weeburn Country Club, drinking gin and tonics. Then all of a sudden, they're living on Haight Ashbury with fringe jackets and hair down to the middle of their back, taking acid. And I sort of got caught up in the middle of that as a three-year-old. Yeah.

• 16:40Alec Baldwin?

  When you got back to Connecticut and you grew up there, did your mother develop as a parent? And as she was getting older, did she become a better parent? Was there a continued period of isolation and kind of not good childcare for you?

• 16:56Speaker 06

  Both in equal measure. Like, we had a good support system of my grandmother. I had aunts and uncles. So there was a lot of support, but...

• 17:05Alec Baldwin?

  Did you spend a lot of time with the mother's parents?

• 17:07Speaker 06

  Yeah, but also a lot of time alone. Because also, we were very poor. We were on food stamps and welfare. And we're in Darien, Connecticut, which is, per capita, one of the wealthiest places in the world. And so I had this constant sense of shame. You know, so when I went to school, it was pretending that I didn't live in a garage apartment and that we weren't on food stamps and welfare. You know, if I had the flu, I would come back and say, "Oh, we went to Switzerland." Because that sounded like something that wealthy people would say. So just this, the sense of shame and the sense of inadequacy. And not to, again, not to overstate it, but like, when you grow up with that, it's hard,

• 17:49Speaker 06

  even in adulthood, when your circumstances change, it's hard to move past how you were formed.

• 17:57Alec Baldwin?

  When did you start to get this idea that you were gonna... Write music.

• 18:02Speaker 06

  I think, well, my mom, who was an aspiring musician, pianist, I mean, I remember my mom had the most odd eclectic record collection, you know, so she had Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, and Dvorak, and Lightnin' Hopkins, and Baba Olatunji, and so I just grew up with this constant soundtrack of weirdness, and it made sense to me, and she, she dated musicians. My uncle was a musician, my great grandmother actually taught classical composition to Arthur Fiedler, she was Arthur Fiedler's mentor, so I grew up in this weird idiosyncratic

• 18:44Speaker 06

  musical household, so I never thought, as I was growing up, that I would have a career as a musician, I just knew that I loved music and I wanted to be a part of it, and I had a lot of free time, because I wasn't very good at sports, and...

• 18:59Alec Baldwin?

  Did you do well in school?

• 19:00Speaker 06

  I did okay. So, my name, Moby, is a nickname that I've had since birth, because I'm related to Herman Melville, so what I learned was, when teachers found out that I was descended from Herman Melville, they just would add 15 IQ points, they would assume like, oh, he's gotta be like, erudite, because he's descended from Herman Melville, same thing, I went to college and I was a philosophy major, and I was not a good student, but I realized the moment you tell someone you're a philosophy major, they think you're way smarter than you actually are, so like, descended from Herman Melville, philosophy major, like, that just added 30 bonus points to my IQ, totally unwarranted, so I had, growing up, had a lot of free time,

• 19:43Speaker 06

  had access to instruments, and was raised in this odd creative family, so I just started writing music when I was around 10 or 11, and I'd also...

• 19:53Speaker 06

  My uncle had given me some hand-me-down photo equipment, so I started taking pictures. And here's an odd, little funny story. My best friend, when I was nine years old, was Robert Downey Jr. And so, his dad gave us, because his dad was a filmmaker.

• 20:08Alec Baldwin?

  In Darien.

• 20:08Speaker 06

  In Darien. He lived there. Darien has a baffling array of odd public figures, like Ann Coulter and Gus Van Zant, and Robert Downey Jr., and Chloé Sevigny, and Steve O from Jackass, and the author Rick Moody, from this little town of 14,000 people.

• 20:26Alec Baldwin?

  All of them were very odd people.

• 20:27Speaker 06

  Yeah, and the fact that Ann Coulter and Gus Van Zant went to the same high school.

• 20:31Alec Baldwin?

  Yeah.

• 20:31Speaker 06

  Yeah, so Robert and I made, with his, this Super 8 camera, his dad, when we were eight and nine years old, we started making little films, long since disappeared. But it was just part of the ethos of, just go out and make things. With no expectation that there would be a career, or that you'd even make anything good. But I just started writing and taking pictures, and making little movies, and writing songs, and doing all this.

• 20:57Alec Baldwin?

  And you'd make little movies how, if you were broke?

• 21:00Speaker 06

  Uh, Super 8 camera.

• 21:02Alec Baldwin?

  Right, you got your hands on a Super 8 camera?

• 21:03Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 21:04Alec Baldwin?

  Like in a pawn shop or something, right? Like a really cheap shitty Super 8 camera.

• 21:08Speaker 06

  And you could develop film, you know, like, two and a half minutes of Super 8 film, and then you edit it on your kitchen table with pieces of tape, yeah.

• 21:17Alec Baldwin?

  I used to do Super 8. We used to do Dracula, and I'm emerging from the coffin, and...

• 21:21Speaker 06

  And then you develop it, and you show it on a sheet in your kitchen.

• 21:25Alec Baldwin?

  And you send it to Cannes. You're ready to go to Cannes. What's the first song you wrote? Do you remember? Do you remember?

• 21:30Speaker 06

  Ah, boy. I, well, so I started playing guitar, and then I had a very odd music teacher. He played in a heavy metal band, but he also loved jazz fusion and classical music. So one day, we would learn...

• 21:44Alec Baldwin?

  What was his name?

• 21:45Speaker 06

  Chris Rizzola. He would teach me a Van Halen song, even though I never really liked Van Halen that much. And then we would do a Larry Carlton or Weather Report jazz fusion thing, which I also didn't like that much, and then do a Bach cantata, which I love, and I still to this day love. And then I broke his heart, because when I was 13, I discovered punk rock. And so, I sort of cast aside, like, music theory and the sort of idiosyncratic but formal music education I had, to play Clash covers. And, because he thought I was gonna go on to be this virtuoso guitarist. And the irony-

• 22:20Alec Baldwin?

  It's gonna be Segovia.

• 22:21Speaker 06

  Yeah, and the irony is by embracing punk rock and non-virtuose, if that's a word I just invented, music, I ended up coming back to the world of classical music and have since started playing with orchestras.

• 22:35Alec Baldwin?

  You are now.

• 22:36Speaker 06

  Yeah, I just, I just did a, um, a performance with Dudamel and the L.A. Phil.

• 22:40Alec Baldwin?

  Did you? Well, no, what did you guys play?

• 22:42Speaker 06

  We, well, there was two programs. The first program was L.A. composers and they put a piece of music of mine in there. It's a song that I'd written for a Michael Mann movie years ago.

• 22:54Alec Baldwin?

  Which film?

• 22:55Speaker 06

  For Heat.

• 22:55Alec Baldwin?

  Yeah, you wrote a song for Heat?

• 22:56Speaker 06

  It's the very end when Al Pacino and Robert De Niro finally, I don't want to, spoiler alert. So they did that as part of the first program and the second program was all orchestral versions of my music.

• 23:08Alec Baldwin?

  Oh, wow.

• 23:09Speaker 06

  During the rehearsal, there was, I don't know, 180 of us on stage, because we had a huge choir, full orchestra, and I realized like, okay, we're doing my music and I'm without question the least talented musician on the stage right now. Like, I'm the person who like, if I stop playing, no one will notice. But in God Moving Over the Face of the Waters, there's this big crescendo. You know, it's like timpani and cymbals, and I got so annoyed because the percussion had come in early. And I was like, what, like, this is the L.A. Phil. How did they screw up? And I realized there was a thunderstorm. And I was like, so this song is called God Moving Over the Face of the Water. Keep in mind, this is in September.

• 23:51Speaker 06

  This is sort of good theological argument for the existence of God, that he plays percussion during classical music.

• 23:57Alec Baldwin?

  You did this recently with the L.A. Phil. What's the first time you did that?

• 24:01Speaker 06

  Uh, well, the first time was actually Michael Mann.

• 24:04Alec Baldwin?

  For Heat?

• 24:05Speaker 06

  Yeah, I had written some classical pieces. He heard them, and this was 1994.

• 24:11Alec Baldwin?

  How did he hear them? How did he, were they unpublished?

• 24:14Speaker 06

  I, they were, no, I'd put them as a B-sides on records-

• 24:17Alec Baldwin?

  Oh, they were, so they were out there?

• 24:18Speaker 06

  And somehow he had heard them, and I, we then had one of the weirdest phone calls. Do you know Michael Mann?

• 24:23Alec Baldwin?

  I know of him, yeah.

• 24:24Speaker 06

  So, we're friends. I use that word loosely, because I don't know if, in my mind, he and I are friends, but he's an odd, wonderful, creative man. But like, our first phone call was, he got my number-

• 24:39Speaker 06

  And he called me up and he spent forty-five minutes telling me the story of heat and hung up the phone. I didn't say one word apart from hello. So I was like, hello. He said, Moby, this is Michael Mann. Forty-five minutes soliloquy, telling me in great detail, everything about heat, like the archetypes that are going on, sort of like the classical element. The moment he was done, he just hung up. And I was like, what just, I'd never spoken to like an esteemed film director before. And I was like, is this how film directors talk to people? They just call up and talk for forty-five minutes and hang up the phone?

• 25:10Alec Baldwin?

  That was the first time you had provided score for a film?

• 25:13Speaker 06

  Well, I went to SUNY Purchase briefly, and I had some friends in the experimental film program there. And so my friend Paul made an experimental movie called Me, I, The Onion in nineteen ninety or ninety-one. So technically, that would have been my first foray into film composing.

• 25:33Alec Baldwin?

  Beyond Me, I, The Onion?

• 25:35Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 25:35Alec Baldwin?

  Michael Mann was the first?

• 25:37Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 25:37Alec Baldwin?

  Did it lead to how many, how many other films have you contributed music to?

• 25:40Speaker 06

  Ah.

• 25:40Alec Baldwin?

  Other than sourcing your discography?

• 25:43Speaker 06

  I have a weird website called mobygratus.com, and it gives free music to independent filmmakers, nonprofits, film students. So if we count that, ten thousand films, but those are, I'm like, three-minute short films.

• 25:57Alec Baldwin?

  The ones where people hired you?

• 25:58Speaker 06

  Hired? I wouldn't know. Hundreds? Thousand? I mean, like...

• 26:03Alec Baldwin?

  You're not accessing your music you publish. They hired you to do score for that film?

• 26:08Speaker 06

  Oh, because there's, see, licensing music, licensing music is so much fun.

• 26:12Alec Baldwin?

  I'm sure your music is licensed up the union.

• 26:13Speaker 06

  And that's like, it's the greatest thing in the world, because all you have to do is say yes. You don't, there's no work involved apart from that. Actually, writing music. So when I moved to LA after I got sober?

• 26:24Alec Baldwin?

  The first time?

• 26:25Speaker 06

  This most, like, ten years ago, I got sober, and I moved to...

• 26:28Alec Baldwin?

  But then you got sober twice.

• 26:29Speaker 06

  Um, yeah. Once in nineteen eighty-seven.

• 26:32Alec Baldwin?

  Right.

• 26:33Speaker 06

  Followed by a glorious thirteen-year-long relapse.

• 26:35Alec Baldwin?

  We're gonna get to that.

• 26:36Speaker 06

  And then again, in two thousand and eight. And so then I moved to LA, and I thought, okay, I'm middle-aged, I'm sober, I'm in Los Angeles, I need to fully commit myself to film composing. And then I realized, I really don't like film composing. Like, it's...

• 26:52Alec Baldwin?

  What about it don't you like?

• 26:56Speaker 06

  When I can, like, when I work on my own music, it's just me in the studio. There's no music supervisor, there's no director, there's no producer. I can kind of, I have some complete self-sufficiency. I don't have to respond to other people's comments. And as an only child who doesn't do well with people, that's nice. And my friends who are great film composers, part of their skill set is knowing how to deal with 20 different executives at the same time. And I just, it was too stressful for me.

• 27:23Alec Baldwin?

  Tremendous skill to have.

• 27:24Speaker 06

  Yeah, and a lot of Xanax.

• 27:26Alec Baldwin?

  Yeah.

• 27:34Alec Baldwin?

  This is "God Moving Over the Face of the Waters," the piece Moby wrote for Heat after a lot of input from executives at Warner Brothers and director Michael Mann. Stephen Daldry is another great film director with strong opinions about how everyone should do their jobs.

• 27:52Speaker 01

  I find it really crazy when actors come in self-prepared, because they've done some journey, that they're getting this comment, you know, "My character," and you're going, "Look, it's not your character, okay? It's ours, and we're gonna make it up now."

• 28:03Alec Baldwin?

  Interesting, I'm gonna remember that. It's ours.

• 28:05Speaker 01

  Well, my character wouldn't do that. Well, let's change the character then.

• 28:09Alec Baldwin?

  The rest of my conversation with Stephen Daldry can be found in our archive at hereisthething.org.

• 28:23Alec Baldwin?

  More Moby in a minute.

• 28:35Speaker 01

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• 29:09Speaker 07

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• 29:17Speaker 01

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• 29:23Speaker 07

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• 29:42Speaker 01

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• 31:06Alec Baldwin?

  This is Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the Thing.

• 31:15Alec Baldwin?

  Moby never would have ended up so low if he hadn't been so desperate to be lifted up. He craved the affirmation of fame.

• 31:24Speaker 06

  I loved it.

• 31:25Alec Baldwin?

  You did.

• 31:25Speaker 06

  And I just wanted more.

• 31:27Alec Baldwin?

  This guy that was this isolated guy that was left alone.

• 31:30Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 31:30Alec Baldwin?

  You can't get enough of that.

• 31:32Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, all of a sudden, I was being invited to fancy parties, meeting heads of state, being flown around the world on private planes.

• 31:42Alec Baldwin?

  Given free clothes to wear in public.

• 31:44Speaker 06

  I mean, I still have them.

• 31:45Alec Baldwin?

  Sure.

• 31:45Speaker 06

  You know, it's like, suddenly, like, people are competing about who gets to dress you for the red carpet. And, you know, it's like Versace and Calvin Klein are like, "Oh, let us send you free tuxedos." I was like, "You know, before this record, I was buying clothes at Salvation Army on the corner of Lafayette and Prince."

• 32:02Alec Baldwin?

  Banana Republic.

• 32:03Speaker 06

  Yeah, like, it was great. And then, of course, it wasn't great. You know, like, my narcissism got out of control, my entitlement, because I felt, at the time, like, 2000, 2001, 2002, I felt that all I needed to be happy was constant love and attention from every person on the planet, to make $10 million a year for the rest of my life, and to make sure that I could be as promiscuous as possible, do as many drugs as possible.

• 32:31Alec Baldwin?

  We're gonna get to that.

• 32:31Speaker 06

  And drink as much as possible without consequences. So like, obviously, in hindsight, I recognize how absurd and unrealistic it is, but at the time, I just wanted, like, every night to be like this indulgent festival of narcissism and entitlement.

• 32:47Alec Baldwin?

  Russian mobsters? Can you tell me some of these stories that were in the book?

• 32:51Speaker 06

  Yeah, that was a weird one. We took helicopters to Staten Island and had this weird dinner with the guy who apparently invented the Cabbage Patch Doll, and then went on to produce Steven Seagal movies.

• 33:00Alec Baldwin?

  Yeah.

• 33:01Speaker 06

  And then we left, and I went to a party on Park Avenue, very drunk. We show up, and I met some friends, and they were talking about this game that they played in college called Nob Touch. And what Nob Touch is, you take your flaccid penis out of your pants, and you brush up against people. And you win by the number of people you can brush up against. And I'd never done this. And my date, Miss New Hampshire, challenged me to play knob touch. And there's only one human being on the planet I have brushed my flaccid penis against. That man is currently the President of the United States.

• 33:32Alec Baldwin?

  No!

• 33:33Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 33:33Alec Baldwin?

  Where was this being held?

• 33:35Speaker 06

  Some bar on Park, like one of those big restaurants on Park Avenue in like 21st.

• 33:39Alec Baldwin?

  So like in public, this isn't a private party?

• 33:41Speaker 06

  I mean, it was like a, one of those New York style parties where maybe it was like Ralph Lauren was launching a new paint color or something, you know, those things that you just go to.

• 33:52Alec Baldwin?

  Yeah.

• 33:52Speaker 06

  And you're not like, I don't know why.

• 33:53Alec Baldwin?

  Have a couple of drinks.

• 33:54Speaker 06

  Yeah. So I was very drunk.

• 33:55Alec Baldwin?

  With other famous people.

• 33:56Speaker 06

  And I brushed my flaccid penis against Donald Trump.

• 33:58Alec Baldwin?

  You rubbed the head of your penis against Donald Trump.

• 34:00Speaker 06

  Took a little brush.

• 34:01Alec Baldwin?

  Right.

• 34:01Speaker 06

  He didn't know. It was dark.

• 34:02Alec Baldwin?

  It was like a truth or dare.

• 34:03Speaker 06

  And what's funny is the publisher of the book said like, in this climate, I don't know if you should include that. I was like, you know what? I think Donald Trump being able to say that I me tooed him.

• 34:14Alec Baldwin?

  Yeah.

• 34:14Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 34:14Alec Baldwin?

  You're ready?

• 34:15Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 34:17Alec Baldwin?

  So you're there and you're this big superstar. When did you begin to think, we really should get back into the studio and make another album?

• 34:26Speaker 06

  So then, the tour for Play was supposed to be three and a half weeks long, and it ended up being 26 months long. But the whole time, because I've always compulsively written music. I have now probably like eight or 9,000 pieces, unreleased pieces of music. So even at the bottom of my like alcoholism, drug addiction, narcissism, entitlement, self-destruction, I was still.

• 34:49Alec Baldwin?

  That didn't break.

• 34:50Speaker 06

  I kept writing music.

• 34:52Alec Baldwin?

  You couldn't break that.

• 34:53Speaker 06

  Yeah, the problem with albums was to look at like a thousand songs and figure out, how do you get 15 to put on an album? Doesn't mean they're good. And when I say 8,000 pieces of unreleased music, I'm not speaking to the quality of them. Like a lot of it's garbage, but I just, it's this weird, almost like, you know, there's that word, loggia? I have that of music, where I just keep making it without any concern for whether it's good or bad, I just keep writing. And so

• 35:21Alec Baldwin?

  It's like a broken pipe.

• 35:23Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, just like you turn on the faucet and just leave it on. So the next album was called Eighteen. And I thought like, okay, this is like play was big. I want this to be bigger. And so like, I think the promo tour for the next album was five months long. Like five months of just like you've done it as well, like traveling around the world, sitting in hotel rooms, going to every country, every TV show, everything. And I just wanted to be more famous, have more money, sleep with more people, drink more, do more drugs, tour more.

• 35:51Alec Baldwin?

  But for the guy that was isolated, are you sitting there saying, this is more like it now. Everybody wants to take their clothes off and jump in bed with me and.

• 36:00Speaker 06

  It seemed like fame was going, and this is when I say it out loud, it just sounds so absurd. I honestly, and I wouldn't have admitted this, but deep down, what I believed was that fame was going to fix everything. Like every, all the trauma from childhood.

• 36:16Alec Baldwin?

  You really believed that?

• 36:17Speaker 06

  The sense, yeah, the senses of inadequacy, all that fear, you know, the self-centered fear.

• 36:22Alec Baldwin?

  Self-centered narcissistic fear is the root of all of our problems. And living in a constant state, living in a constant state of agitation, worrying about, am I going to get this? Is this going to be taken away from me? Which defines my life. They say in a 12-step literature, they say that our greatest fear is to lose something we already have or not get something that we want.

• 36:44Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm. I just thought, oh, fame will fix it. As long as I can keep getting invited to great parties and drinking and doing drugs, and as long as I get good reviews. But then, the universe with its sense of humor took away all the things that I, you know.

• 37:02Alec Baldwin?

  Do you know why? Do you have a sense of why?

• 37:05Speaker 06

  I think because on a, on a sort of artistic level, there came a time, and I'm so ashamed to admit this, in around 2002, 2003, I wanted to make great music. But I wanted music to be a means to an end where I wanted it to like sustain my career. So before, my life had just been spent making music.

• 37:25Alec Baldwin?

  How do I keep it going?

• 37:25Speaker 06

  Yeah, and I'd never thought about it.

• 37:27Alec Baldwin?

  I don't want to go backwards.

• 37:28Speaker 06

  Yeah, I was like, I...

• 37:29Alec Baldwin?

  I had that feeling, yeah.

• 37:29Speaker 06

  And before that, all I wanted to do was make music that I loved. You know, that music that somehow was like emotional, beautiful, expressive. 2002, 2003.

• 37:39Alec Baldwin?

  Three years after the release of the play.

• 37:40Speaker 06

  I still wanted it to be beautiful, but first and foremost, I wanted it to be commercially viable.

• 37:46Alec Baldwin?

  Right, it was a little less beautiful and it sold more copies. That was okay with me.

• 37:50Speaker 06

  Yes, and I started thinking, oh, okay, well, if I produce this type of song, it'll get on the radio. And if I produce this, it'll sell more. And like, the paradox, the wonderful, in hindsight, the wonderful paradox is the more of an effort I made to be famous, the less famous I became.

• 38:07Alec Baldwin?

  You were very open with the press. You courted the press. You would speak to anybody. You know, for me, the problem has always been that, you know, the press is never... It's a sad, it does sometimes make me sad. I get over it. And then every now and then it comes up and blackjacks me again out of nowhere. It's like it's in an alleyway. I get mugged by it again.

• 38:26Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 38:27Alec Baldwin?

  Which is, they're never going to interpret who you really are to the public, never. They don't have that ability.

• 38:32Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 38:32Alec Baldwin?

  It's so painful, the misunderstanding that goes hand in hand with being put through the cheese grater there.

• 38:38Speaker 06

  Especially like, because I, when I, I don't know if you had this experience, but when I started getting press attention, I loved it.

• 38:44Alec Baldwin?

  Right.

• 38:44Speaker 06

  And in the beginning, they were so nice and the reviews were gentle and then the reviews were great. And then you have this sweet spot where you have like fame and you're lauded in the press. And then it turned. And then all of a sudden, the reviews got bad, the articles got bad. And I felt so betrayed. I was like, why can't you guys just be nice? But then, time passes. I'm like, in a way, like, God bless them for turning. Because... I've since then, like when you're rejected, when the press rejects you, you then, at least for me, I had to sort of look like, okay, well, who am I without that? You know? And where does my worth and sense of self come from? And like realizing, oh, if it

• 39:28Speaker 06

  comes from the opinions of people I've never met, there's something really unstable and unhealthy there. You know, I had this epiphany recently. I was in LA, middle of February, hiking in Griffith Park, and it was one of those beautiful days, like the sun is shining, coyotes are running around, hummingbirds are flying by. And I suddenly thought like, okay, if my last album had sold 10 million copies, and if every journalist on the planet loved me and wrote great things about me, and if I was dating the most beautiful woman on the planet, how would this moment be better? And I was like, it wouldn't. Like, you know, good reviews, good press, all this stuff doesn't, and I know I sound like a crazy new age hippie, but like, it wouldn't affect like-

• 40:10Alec Baldwin?

  It's okay.

• 40:11Speaker 06

  That moment of like-

• 40:12Alec Baldwin?

  This is public radio.

• 40:13Speaker 06

  Like, standing in the sun, wearing a T-shirt, smelling sage and lavender, watching the hummingbirds fly by. I was like, the universe in that moment was so benign and indifferent to anything that I cared about. And there was some, there's sort of like a transcendent liberation, almost like Emersonian style liberation in that, that moment.

• 40:34Alec Baldwin?

  Yeah, I'll, I'll take that feeling at this point. I just turned 61, and I'll take that feeling wherever I can get it here now. And, and, and at my age, I have to accept that my creative energies may or may not come to the fore here. And if they don't, I have to find something else to do to get off creatively, which is what I do. I completely segregate my creative from my commercial in a way that I never thought was possible.

• 41:00Speaker 06

  And, and there's one, because you, you referenced the 12 and 12 earlier.

• 41:03Alec Baldwin?

  Yep.

• 41:04Speaker 06

  I don't know if that's a, if 12 steps is part of your life?

• 41:07Alec Baldwin?

  Yes.

• 41:08Speaker 06

  Okay, me too.

• 41:09Alec Baldwin?

  I'm 34 years sober.

• 41:10Speaker 06

  Oh, congratulations.

• 41:11Alec Baldwin?

  85 I got sober, yeah.

• 41:12Speaker 06

  So it's, I mean, and again, I feel like such a middle age cliche saying this, but like, the 12 steps really, of all the like therapeutic things I've been through, the 12 steps really saved me.

• 41:22Alec Baldwin?

  Right.

• 41:23Speaker 06

  And- One of the things I learned, as you mentioned, was like the role of fear and trying to sort of like deconstruct fear and learn from it. But the other thing that when I did the 12 steps that I really loved was all of my judgment up until that point was sort of based on the misperception of omniscience or fake omniscience. Like when I had an album that failed, I was furious because I knew that it should have succeeded. Because if it had succeeded, it would have been better for me. And then all of a sudden, I realized like, again, in a 13.8 billion year old universe, I don't have omniscience. I don't know causality. If I want something to work out and it doesn't work out, in a way, I'm like, who am I to judge?

• 42:06Speaker 06

  And in politics as well, because I got really involved in politics for a while. It was like, the vast majority of people on the planet, their goal is to keep the lights on tomorrow. You know, like they're like, they want a job. They want to keep their.

• 42:20Alec Baldwin?

  You have to understand where they're coming from.

• 42:22Speaker 06

  And I have to be like, okay, that's like with the press as well, I have to remind myself, like, most of the people I know are journalists, like, they're barely able to pay the rent. And I don't want to be patronizing or judgmental, but I have to sort of say like, okay, my job is not to rely on them for my sense of happiness and well-being. You know, like my sense of strength.

• 42:43Alec Baldwin?

  Or my creative output.

• 42:45Speaker 06

  Yeah, the same thing. And creatively, if they're too much of a hindrance, you move on. You sort of say like, okay, God bless, you know, like have healthy boundaries. And I just say like, it almost makes me think of like that, like the Rudyard Kipling poem, is it "If"? I remember reading when I was like eight or nine years old. And it's sort of that idea of just keep, I just keep going. Not even from strength and fortitude, more just sort of like, like a post-apocalyptic cockroach, just keep plowing forward. Like someone steps on you, okay, you stepped on me, have a good day, I'm gonna keep going.

• 43:21Alec Baldwin?

  But this is also, if I really became the biggest movie star in the world and made hundreds of millions of dollars in private planes, who the fuck knows what I would have done with that? I would have screwed that up. I'd be dead.

• 43:31Speaker 06

  I mean, luckily, in a way, like as sober, middle-aged guys, I feel like.

• 43:39Speaker 06

  And maybe this is an indelicate thing to say, but like, a lot of people have done the work for us. Like, for example, yeah, 20 years ago, I would look at Michael Jackson and say like, wow, look at that, the wealth and the fame and the adulation. Boy, oh, boy.

• 43:55Alec Baldwin?

  Yeah, it's never gonna go.

• 43:57Speaker 06

  I'm glad.

• 43:58Alec Baldwin?

  I wasn't hanging out with him.

• 43:59Speaker 06

  Yeah, and I'm glad that I was cut off, to an extent, from the access to like, excessive wealth and fame that he had. And me, again, it's a hard thing to talk about, because I don't want to malign anyone.

• 44:08Alec Baldwin?

  Right, in the same way.

• 44:09Speaker 06

  Especially if they're dead or struggling, but like, we know, I mean, the number of public figures who have had profound success, profound wealth, and it destroys them. I mean, like, people like you and I are the ones who sort of like, hopefully emerge unscathed and chastened with, hopefully, an understanding that we can almost use in the form of service. You know, to go out and be like, okay, I've learned a lesson, that's an odd, rare, unique lesson, let me try and do something with it.

• 44:38Alec Baldwin?

  Yeah. Was there an epiphany? What was the, what was the bottom?

• 44:42Speaker 06

  The bottom was, do you remember a restaurant in New York called Zen Pallet?

• 44:46Alec Baldwin?

  Yes.

• 44:47Speaker 06

  Vegan Chinese restaurant. So, this is a little analogy. New Year's Eve, 1992, I went to the Zen Pallet on 9th Avenue.

• 44:55Alec Baldwin?

  Sure.

• 44:56Speaker 06

  And I ordered.

• 44:57Alec Baldwin?

  In the 40s.

• 44:58Speaker 06

  Yeah, and I ordered purple Japanese eggplant, and it disagreed with me, and I never ordered purple Japanese eggplant again, because I had one bad experience with it. Vodka, cocaine, everything. I would do it every day, and it would kill, almost kill me and make me sick, and I kept going back. And, basically, the consequence, what I mean is like, the rational response to vodka and cocaine, if you have a night out and the next day you want to blow your brains out and you're miserable.

• 45:25Alec Baldwin?

  You should have the purple eggplant response.

• 45:26Speaker 06

  Is to say, wow, that was bad, I shan't do that again, as opposed to-

• 45:29Alec Baldwin?

  That's a great definition of addiction, actually. That's great.

• 45:31Speaker 06

  Like, give me more every day for the next 15 years.

• 45:34Alec Baldwin?

  Of this thing that's making me sick.

• 45:35Speaker 06

  Yeah. And, I, as I got older, because you got sober young.

• 45:40Alec Baldwin?

  Yeah.

• 45:41Speaker 06

  I got sober at 43.

• 45:45Alec Baldwin?

  Yeah, that's a lot of time to ride the range.

• 45:48Speaker 06

  And the hangovers just got worse and worse, and it got to the point where I was having a hard time stringing sentences together.

• 45:54Alec Baldwin?

  Yeah. I got sober because I moved to LA and I was driving a car, and I thought, well-

• 45:58Speaker 06

  The consequences caught up with that.

• 45:59Alec Baldwin?

  Yeah, I thought I came, but I still drove around shitfaced for two years before I got, I got smart. I want to talk, um, when did pure vegetarianism take hold with you?

• 46:08Speaker 06

  When I was growing up, I had that weird paradox of loving animals and loving Burger King. You know, when I was in junior high school, high school, like, we had a bunch of rescue animals and I loved them unconditionally. But I also loved pepperoni pizza. And I had this one rescue cat named Tucker, who I'd found at the dump in Darien, Connecticut. And I loved Tucker even more unconditionally than I unconditionally loved the other animals. And when I was 19, I had this like Saul on the road to Damascus moment. Where suddenly I looked at Tucker and I was like, he has two eyes, a central nervous system and a profoundly rich emotional life and a deep desire to avoid pain and suffering.

• 46:47Speaker 06

  And in that moment, I sort of extrapolated and realized every animal with two eyes and a central nervous system has a rich emotional life. And a deep desire to avoid pain and suffering. So that's when I became a vegetarian and then 87 became a vegan. And my only vegan relapse was in 92, I had yogurt once. So now I've got 31 years.

• 47:08Alec Baldwin?

  What is your diet basically something you, you, you, you cook at home or you, how do you eat?

• 47:13Speaker 06

  Well, actually, I own a vegan restaurant in Los Angeles called Little Pine.

• 47:17Alec Baldwin?

  Where is it?

• 47:18Speaker 06

  It's in Silver Lake. And what makes it unique is that 100% of the profits go to animal rights organizations. Cause at this point in my life, I don't, I mean, I still am selfish and probably pretty narcissistic. But all of my work, 100% of the money I make professionally goes to the charities I work with. Because I'd rather live, you were sort of addressing this, like, live a simple life, like live very much within my means. And make art and music for the love of art and music.

• 47:46Alec Baldwin?

  You had a big home at one point?

• 47:47Speaker 06

  I had a, a couple of them. And like I had this crazy 60 acre compound up in Putnam County. And when I moved to LA, I moved to a castle. But.

• 47:59Alec Baldwin?

  Farms.

• 48:00Speaker 06

  I wasn't happy in these places. And I was just asking myself, like, why am I having this sort of like Gatsby-esque excess? This Citizen Kane-style like overcompensation? If the end result is like I've tied up my resources in real estate and I'm miserable and no one's benefiting, so like now I live in a much simpler house. Got a little simple apartment in Park Slope. And I can just work for the causes that I care about.

• 48:24Alec Baldwin?

  Freedom.

• 48:24Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 48:25Alec Baldwin?

  And freedom.

• 48:25Speaker 06

  And that freedom to like make art, music, books, et cetera. And if there's money, just give the money to different causes.

• 48:35Alec Baldwin?

  That's amazing to do that. But then it's rare. It's rare.

• 48:38Speaker 06

  But also, one of the benefits of my weird attachment issues is like, I'm not married. I don't have kids. So like I have this odd autonomy. So I'm able to do that.

• 48:50Alec Baldwin?

  No one's relying on you.

• 48:50Speaker 06

  Yeah. And so there's, it is like that, there's a luxury to that. Like almost like a monastic independence.

• 49:03Speaker 01

  Hey, I'm Nile Rodgers, producer, songwriter, guitarist, and co-founder of the group Chic. A great song has a way of defining a moment. A moment of joy, heartbreak, or anything in between. This fall, I'll be driving across the country, dropping in on some of the coolest, most fascinating artists working today. We'll go deep into their lives and careers and hear what it was like before the moment that made them. From hitmakers like Miguel. That last year, finishing that record was the hardest experience of my life. Regardless of how everyone else buys into this, I believe in this and I'm gonna push.

• 49:48Speaker 01

  To rising stars like Alex Warren. You know, a song is a story and the verse is setting the scene. And.

• 49:55Speaker 05

  For me, at least, it's allowing me to be personal and vulnerable with the audience, whether it's about my wife and I'm being vulnerable about her, or it's about, you know, my parents and I'm being vulnerable to them. And it's almost like a cinematic piece in a way where each song tells that beautiful story.

• 50:09Speaker 01

  It's gonna be one hell of a trip. Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeart Radio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval. Hey, this is Mario Lopez from All Mario Lopez Daily Podcast. Buy smart,

• 50:53Alec Baldwin?

  drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability. And it starts with a great deal on an all-wheel-drive Camry, Corolla Cross, or a Corolla Sedan with the latest features in tech. Or test drive a spacious Grand Highlander or adventure-ready RAV4. And with so many hybrid models available, you can enjoy longer trips without all the stops, while Toyota's legendary resale value means you could get more at traded. So get a great deal today and great value tomorrow. Shop toyota.com for deals and details. Toyota, let's go places.

• 51:27Alec Baldwin?

  This is, I can't think of any better way to ask this. I'm sure there's a better way to ask this, but I want to ask, like, who cares for you? Where is love in your life if you're so autonomous and you don't have the fans and the public and the press, which is a form of love? It's like an energy that simulates love. It isn't really love. But in your life, where is the love and the care in your life? Who's caring for you?

• 51:48Speaker 06

  Okay, well, a few friends.

• 51:51Alec Baldwin?

  So, close friends are there for you?

• 51:53Speaker 06

  I have a few family members, but there's the answer that I'm uncomfortable giving because it's One of the hardest things to say in our world is, so when we do the 12 steps, when I got to the third step, and the third step says, "Made a decision to turn our life and our will over to the care of God as we understood God." And I really wrestled with this, because I was like, I was like, "The care of God is I understood God." Like, I don't understand God. And that was my epiphany. I was like, "Oh, the God of my understanding is a God that I do not understand." And, and I was like, "But I see evidence," again, not to anthropomorphize, but I see evidence of divinity

• 52:35Speaker 06

  in kindness, in forgiveness, in the gentleness of puppies.

• 52:41Alec Baldwin?

  And the redacted parts of the Mueller Report.

• 52:43Speaker 06

  Exactly. In our immune systems. Like, I see, in my eyes, this is all evidence of the divine. And so, in nature and all these things. And so, my honest answer, that's an uncomfortable, secular 21st century answer, is divine love is what I search for.

• 53:03Alec Baldwin?

  Is your oxygen.

• 53:03Speaker 06

  That's, but also, and it's-

• 53:05Alec Baldwin?

  It's a component of it. You have other people in your life.

• 53:07Speaker 06

  And if I die, and someone says, "Oh, guess what? There's no God. We live in this empty existential cipher void. Like, you're just a bunch of, like, weird molecules that have come together arbitrarily." That's okay, too. But I, I do somehow, in my dim, I don't know, naive way, see evidence of the divine. And so, it's always trying to move towards that. Again, not religious, not denominational, no gender. It's just simply this idea of the divinity of, like, forgiveness and puppies and immune systems and the unredacted Mueller Report and et cetera. So, that's a huge, that's, that's where I get a lot of comfort from.

• 53:46Alec Baldwin?

  What's music in your life now? You continue to write?

• 53:48Speaker 06

  Yeah. I mean, I, I work on music mainly for the love of music. I refuse to tour. I hate touring, unless it's going to do orchestral things. I had this wonderful realization, I guess it was about 11 years ago, the first time I met David Lynch, and we've since become pretty good friends. L.A. has that going for it. I live around the corner from David Lynch. But when I first met him, he was being interviewed at BAFTA in London. And he said something so reductive and simple, and it really struck me. As he said, very simply, he said, creativity is beautiful. And all of a sudden, I was like, oh, my God, he's right. Like, why am I compromising my creativity in the interest of like, commercial gain?

• 54:30Alec Baldwin?

  And forsaking the beauty.

• 54:30Speaker 06

  And for worldliness. I was like, as we know, like, music is that ineffable beauty. Like, it can communicate love and transcendence and beauty. That should be my goal. Not that I'll ever reach it. Not that I'll ever make beautiful, ineffable, wonderful music. But like, if every day I wake up with that as the goal, and not in the interest of worldliness.

• 54:52Alec Baldwin?

  And what, and other people, I mean, you've written a book. You, at points in your life, have conquered the music business. Have you ever wanted to try other media? Have you ever wanted to make films?

• 55:01Speaker 06

  Yeah, I'm actually, I have a weird production company. I feel like I use the word weird too much. But I have a production company in L.A. We're working on some documentaries. We've got some scripted features, an animated feature that we're trying to develop.

• 55:13Alec Baldwin?

  You have your hand in that, too. Do you like making films?

• 55:16Speaker 06

  I love it as long as I have, to your point, the recourse of autonomy. Meaning like, some of the projects we're working on, like, sure, it would be great if we have financing, if we get people attached to it. But we also have projects that we can do 100% ourselves. And because, as we know, like, how much time have our friends spent waiting? You know, waiting for the financing, waiting for this to be greenlit.

• 55:42Alec Baldwin?

  The approval.

• 55:43Speaker 06

  And with the production company, again, my goal is to never make, personally never make money from it. So if money is generated, it goes to my foundation, or it goes to causes I work with.

• 55:53Alec Baldwin?

  If you say upfront, I'm going to be involved in projects in the film business, and I never want to make money with them, you're not going to have a lot of meetings in L.A. You're not going to get in a lot of meetings.

• 56:03Speaker 06

  I want other people to make money from it. Like, the guy who runs my production company, and my head of development, and some of our partners, I want them to be fabulously wealthy. I would rather be, like, live in a shitty apartment in Hollywood, or, I don't know, in Bed-Stuy, and work for causes that I care about. I just don't, I don't want to personally benefit from it.

• 56:26Alec Baldwin?

  I would like to do a documentary film and I'd like to put you together on a project. I'd like to couple you on a film project with someone equally maniacally creative and independent as you. I'd like to do a film where like we get you in a, in a studio and you're gonna do like a little project with Coppola. Two people who don't wanna collaborate with other people really, and you force them to, they agree to collaborate for this one time and see what the result would be.

• 56:51Speaker 06

  I'd watch that.

• 56:52Alec Baldwin?

  Yeah. I, I, I wanna produce that. And by the way, you don't have to make any money. My kids are expensive. I'm keeping all the money. Are you cool with that?

• 56:59Speaker 06

  I'm a hundred percent fine with it.

• 57:00Alec Baldwin?

  I think we're done then. We have a deal. Thank you.

• 57:21Alec Baldwin?

  Moby, composer, musician, recovering addict, and proud ex-celebrity. Didn't you think he's cool with that? I do. You did? Okay.

• 57:37Alec Baldwin?

  Moby's new book is called Then It Fell Apart. It's very funny and very sad. I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the Thing is brought to you by iHeart Radio.

• 58:29Speaker 01

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 58:57Speaker 05

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• 59:25Speaker 06

  Hey, it's Lunchbox from the Bobby Bones Show. Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability, and it starts with a great deal on an all-wheel-drive Camry, Corolla Cross, or a Corolla Sedan with the latest features in tech. Or test drive a spacious Grand Highlander or an adventure-ready RAV4. And with so many hybrid models available, you can enjoy longer trips without all the stops, while Toyota's legendary resale value means you could get more at trade-in. Get a deal today and great value tomorrow. Shop toyota.com for deals and details. Toyota, let's go places.

• 1:00:04Speaker 03

  Hello? Hey, it's me, your wallet. Oh, hey. I was just wondering if we could maybe take it easy this week? Absolutely. Really? Yep, I'm shopping at Food Lion. Wait, you mean low prices? And MVP savings. Oh, you do care? Obviously. Okay, I feel better. Good, now let's go get some snacks.

• 1:00:25Speaker 02

  At Food Lion, low prices and MVP savings make it easier to shop for what you need without spending more than you have to. When your wallet needs a little TLC, head to your local Food Lion or shop at foodlion.com.

• 1:00:40Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.