Work is sober. Play is not.

Moby:  How do I balance work and play?  Well, my flippant but actually kind of relevant answer is like work is sober, play is not.  I guess one of the downsides of being self-employed is you never have anyone to tell you to stop working, and I love being self-employed, I love the autonomy of it, and I like being able to do what I love, but when friends of mine who have 9 to 5 jobs, when the weekend rolls around, you know, it’s 5:00 o’clock on a Friday and they are done for two days, and the liberation that comes with that.  Like I don’t want to have a 9 to 5 job, but I do envy that freedom, or when they go on vacation and they take two weeks with nothing to do and just that, you know, with no pressure and I do envy that because the last real vacation I took was 14 years ago, I went to Hawaii for five days.  So I don’t know, I think I need a life coach to sort of teach me how to have a life outside of work, because even when I am not working I’m thinking about work or if I do try and take some time off, then that old sort of like Calvinist WASP-y guilt creeps in and I start feeling guilty about the fact that, you know, I’m in a canoe instead of in my studio.

Question: Do drugs and alcohol play a part?

Moby: I love drugs but they are so bad for me that I can’t take them.  I mean, it does sort of bother me that we can map the human genome and we can put a man or a person on the moon, but we cannot invent recreational drugs that are good for you.  Why can’t some scientist, I guess there was Alexander Shokhin [ph?] he was a drug researcher, so he did sort of invent some different I guess chemical isotopes that were intense psychedelics that weren’t that bad for you, because I love drugs, I just can’t deal with the hangover and the long-term sort of like cognitive impairments.  I feel the same way about alcohol, you know, I love to drink and if I didn’t ever get hung over I would drink every night because, you know, especially living in New York, New York is such an easy city in which to be a drunk because the bars are open until four, you don’t drive anywhere, you can walk from place to place, meet tons of interesting people, so, but unfortunately, I tend to like alcohol and drugs a lot more than they like me. 

Question: Do you compose under the influence?

Moby: I have never made any music under the influence of drugs or alcohol.  I tried, and it was terrible.  I remember one night 10, 15 years ago, I came home and I was drunk, and I was like I’m gonna write a song and see what it is like to write a song while drunk, and it was just bad.  So, strangely enough, for me, like liquor and/or drugs used to be a release, but not something I ever used like performing, I have never, at least during my own shows I have never performed drunk and I have never been in the studio drunk.  I envy people who can do that because, I mean, you look at the history of music, and like a lot of phenomenal records have been made while people are under the influence.  Unfortunately, I am not capable of doing that.