Moby

Moby is the stage name of Richard Melville Hall, a musician, producer, and photographer born in 1965 in New York City. One of the most commercially successful electronic musicians of all time, he became a household name in the late 1990s with an album that reshaped the relationship between electronic music, blues, gospel, and mainstream pop, and whose licensing to films and advertising made it one of the most pervasive sonic presences of its era. Having released records throughout the early 1990s that drew on Detroit techno, hardcore, Ambient, and house — including the 1992 rave hit 'Go,' built on a sample from Twin Peaks — Moby established himself as a versatile and restless producer. *Animal Rights* (1996), a guitar-driven industrial metal album, deliberately alienated his dance audience and demonstrated his willingness to confound expectations. *Play* (1999) was the transformation: a record built largely around samples from vintage field recordings of African-American folk, gospel, and blues singers, processed and looped beneath electronic beats and melodic overlays. Initially greeted with modest commercial interest, it became the best-selling electronic album in history After all 18 tracks were licensed for use in films, television, and advertisements, including 'Porcelain,' 'Natural Blues,' and 'Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad?' — all of which became era-defining pieces of music. *18* (2002) and *Hotel* (2005) continued in an accessible atmospheric vein, and *Wait For Me* (2009) and *Destroyed* (2011) returned to more introspective, ambient modes. Later albums like *Beautiful-and-nothing-hurt">Everything Was Beautiful, And Nothing Hurt* (2018) incorporated more confessional songwriting. A committed vegan activist since the 1980s, Moby has also authored memoirs — *Porcelain* (2016) and *Then It Fell Apart* (2019) — candid accounts of his rise to fame and subsequent struggles with addiction and depression.