Moby

selected Moby TShirTS, PosTerS & Prints

Moby (born Richard Melville Hall, September 11, 1965), is an American songwriter, musician and singer.

Moby was born in Harlem, New York, and raised in Darien, Connecticut. After eight UK Top 40 singles in the 1990s with techno music, Moby's biggest success was his more mainstream album Play, released in 1999, which sold 10 million copies worldwide. He continues to record and release music today.

His parents nicknamed him Moby soon after birth, partly after the novel Moby-Dick, which was written by Herman Melville, his great-great-great-great uncle. He plays keyboard, guitar, bass guitar and drums. Moby has also released music under the names Voodoo Child, Barracuda, UHF, The Brotherhood, DJ Cake, Lopez, and Mindstorm. Moby has received a lot of attention for his political, environmental and religious beliefs.

After a decade's worth of music, Moby's breakthrough album was 1999's Play. The album has 18 tracks and was the first album in history to have all of its tracks commercially licensed. The album's tracks eventually were accepted in various radio formats, but because of Play's extensive licensing, the album could have been financially successful even without radio play. In addition to fame garnered through its licensing, Play is also notable for its extensive sampling of old blues recordings collected by Alan Lomax. In a 2005 posting on his web site, Moby theorized that his eagerness to license his music is a result of "growing up in poverty".

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