Born Richard Melville Hall on September 11th, 1965 in Darien, Connecticut, Moby was raised by his mother – his father died when he was a child. Moby was raised as a devout Christian, and embraced vegan and environmentalist beliefs.

Punk music fan as a teenager – highly influenced by Mission of Burma, whose song “That’s When I Reach For My Revolver” he would cover on his punk and ambient album “Animal Rights”. He sang and played instruments in several New England Punk outfits, including The Vatican Commandos and Flipper.

After a brief stint in college in the mid 80s, Moby moved to New York and took up the then fledgling art of DJing house and techno music at raves and clubs. He quickly moved into composing techno tracks, and became connected to the label Instinct, who in 1991 released his song “Go”, a remix of the theme to the David Lynch TV series “Twin Peaks”. “Go” was extremely well-received in Great Britain, where electronic music and the rave movement had broken several years before they would hit the United States. The next year he released his first full-length album, the self-titled “Moby”. It featured the track “Thousand”, a song that was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as containing the fastest recorded beat, 1000 beats per minute.

But 1995 was when Moby released the album that would in part define mid-90s electronic music, entitled “Everything Is Wrong”. The album contained music that was up to that point some of the most complex and engaging in the field of electronic music, with tracks that flirted with gospel samples, fast breakbeats, Jamaican MCing, and sweeping soundtrack-style pieces, all wrapped in a package containing liner notes referencing Moby’s vegan, Christian, and environmentalist beliefs. This was a huge departure from the seemingly inscrutable and cold air that was associated with techno, and was just as far from the hedonistic club-culture that was and is house music. The album received almost universal critical success, but sold only moderately, despite Moby being a hit performer with crowds during the Lollapalooza tour in 1995.

Despite his success with Everything Is Wrong, Moby temporarily stepped away from the hard synthetic beats he was beginning to be recognized for in favor of releasing 1996’s “Animal Rights”, an album that was half ambient, half punk, and featured a cover photo of Moby’s father holding him as a child – a father he functionally never knew. An interesting aspect of the album was the fact that Moby exerted his considerable studio knowledge and skill to play every instrument on the punk songs – first recording the drum track, then listening to it while he recorded the bass guitar, then the guitar, and so forth. The results are impossible to distinguish. The single “That’s When I Reach for My Revolver”, the Mission of Burma song Moby covered on Animal Rights, met with moderate radio play, but also confused his electronic music-fan base. Moby released a side project the next year, under the alias Voodoo Child, entitled “The End of Everything”. Voodoo Child was one of Moby’s monikers from his early days at Instinct Records, and he recorded some of his more solidly techno-sounding tracks under the alias. “The End of Everything” certainly reflected this, and was filled with 4/4 beats in place of the guitars and live drum work on “Animal Rights”.

1999 is when Moby moved from moderately popular to pop superstardom, with the release of the album “Play”. Songs like Porcelain, Bodyrock, Natural Blues and South Side are all immediately recognizable as high-exposure singles from the album, and cuts from Play were used in scores of commercials, films, and compilations. Moby’s creativity reveals itself in his amalgamation of blues vocal samples and piano melodies with breakbeats and hip hop drum work, resulting in a unique sound that seemed to catch itself in pop music’s craw. The popularity that Moby garnered from this album and Everything is Wrong resulted in fellow musicians requesting remixes of their songs, Michael Jackson, Pet Shop Boys, Brian Eno, Depeche Mode, Erasure, the B-52’s, and Orbital.

In 2002 Moby released “18”, which had a strong start due to exposure of the single “We are all made of stars”, but the album disappointed many of Moby’s new fans who wanted a sequel to Play. The songs were mostly along a more introspective vein, and the album lacked a distinct club hit along the lines of Play’s South Side or Bodyrock. It met with mixed critical success.

In March of this year Moby released the album “Hotel”, to resoundingly negative reviews. The first half of the album seems to warrant them, with weird and muddle quasi-pop-rock songs that don’t have much oomph. The second half harkens back to Play, with distinctly more techno-infused songs.

Moby has long been the most recognizable face of American electronic music, and deserves credit for his creative work in a genre oft-dominated by our British brethren. During the apex of his career he was releasing music that was simultaneously pulling the strings of electronic music’s US popularity and crafting songs and tracks that were wonderfully unique. His music has found its way into movies almost from the beginning of Moby’s career, beginning with Cool World, and most outstandingly as the score to two of the most intense scenes in the Al Pacino/Robert DeNiro crime epic Heat. The Everything Is Wrong track “God Moving Over The Face Of The Waters” punctuates the climactic ending of the film, and is perfectly suited for the grandeur and tragedy of it’s story.