Friday, September 12, 2008

Moby, "Where You End"

I should know better than to be blown away by the things that Moby does, but I woke up this morning with this song in my head, and it hasn't escaped my head yet.

Moby, "Where You End"


The lyrics are here. Here's how they begin:

Some things fall apart
Some things makes you whole
Something that you find
Are beyond your control

I love you and you're beautiful
You write your own songs
What if the right part of leaving
Turned out to be wrong?

If I could kiss you now
I'd kiss you now again and again
'Til I don't know where I begin
And where you end


The rest are here.

I couldn't find an official Moby video for the song, but I did find a live acoustic MTV performance.

I guess the part that hits me is that this is actually, of all things, a song. I own the "Play" CD, which consists more of soundscapes and Eno/Byrnesque found objects than traditional verse/chorus/verse stuff. I'm sure that Moby has written a lot of real songs, but I'm just not familiar with them.

Music OMH addressed the differences between "Play" and "Hotel" (the album from which "Where You End" is taken):

Play and 18, Richard Hall's last two records (under the Moby name), sold millions of copies. Inventive use of gospel-tinged samples married to synth loops formed what became a tried and tested formula that brought Moby enormous success. Tracks from both records peppered TV ads across the world, and Extreme Ways even became the theme for a Matt Damon movie franchise. Moby's coffers swelled.
So it comes as a surprise that with his latest record, Hotel, Moby waves goodbye to sample land and opts instead for entirely original compositions. Could this be the start of a shift in direction?


Moby briefly referred to the song in an interview with Amnesty International's Music for Human Rights (what, you were expecting Tiger Beat?).

A preponderance of somber songs, like "Raining Again," "Slipping Away," or "Where You End" might erroneously lead you to conclude that Moby is in a state of emotional despondency. "No, no, no," he insists, "a lot of these songs are just based on my last two serious relationships, where there was a lot of love and caring, they just didn't work out." Moby wrote over 250 songs for Hotel, which he narrowed down to his fourteen favorite, which do have a recurring theme of love and sadness.

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