The Song of the Day is:
Moby – “God Moving Over the Face of the Waters”
From the album Everything is Wrong (1995)
I almost considered playing something else today, mostly for the reasons that Moby has recently said some boneheaded things regarding actress Natalie Portman that makes him come off as pretty creepy. To be honest though, I’m celebrating musicians on this blog and Moby certainly isn’t the creepiest we’ve encountered. I’m playing “God Moving Over the Face of the Waters” today because it is just so evocative and ambient. Hollywood has been known to enlist Moby’s music on many occasions and this song happens to be featured at the end of Heat, the De Niro/Pacino crime epic released the same year (Moby also performed a cover of Joy Division’s “New Dawn Fades” for the film… Oh, and the film also stars the aforementioned Natalie Portman). His music can also be heard in films such as Seabiscuit, The Devil Wears Prada, Permanent Midnight, and his “Extreme Ways”, or a variation of it, has been played over the credits of every “Jason Bourne” film. This song is minimalist and repetitive (like all good ambient music), and the song’s title really sets the imagery of waves crashing in the ocean as the orchestral backing swells. At that point in his career (three albums deep), Moby was an underground artist known for his dance-oriented club hits, but the positive reception of songs such as this showed that he had a wide palate. In another four years, Moby would reach a commercial peak with his album Play. Moby famously agreed to license any song from the album for media use and marketing, which made the album the highest selling electronica album ever. These days Moby is just as popular for his many charitable causes as he is for his musical career (which is 16 albums deep). And while it’s been told a thousand times previously, it bears repeating: Moby, born Richard Hall, is a distant relative of Moby Dick author Herman Melville.
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*spoilers for Heat
Hear Today, Grown Tomorrow 