A weak vocal he almost left off the record
The strings move backwards, or seem to, a smear of film music under a voice that does not try to be large. Moby sings Porcelain as if the microphone were a confidence he does not quite have. The words are jealous, dreamlike, a person loved and already known to be the wrong person. Nothing in the arrangement insists. Piano, a cello line, a drum machine that keeps its distance, a tempo that could be a walk home. In 1999 this was not how hits announced themselves. The hits were louder, better funded, mixed by people who had not been hungover over a cheap desk. This one sounded like a room.
It was a room. He wrote and produced Play in his apartment on Mott Street, in Little Italy, and mixed the songs, he told PopMatters later, on inexpensive equipment, hungover, with a desk that cost about what a boy band spent on a day’s catering. The vocal is his. He thought it weak. He thought the production mushy. He could not imagine anyone wanting to hear it, and had to be talked into leaving Porcelain on the album. The lyric, he explained to Billboard in July 2000, came from a woman he loved and knew, in the heart of hearts, he had no business being with. Love, and the knowledge that love was a bad idea. A reversed string from Ernest Gold’s music for Exodus sits in the bed. Pilar Basso adds a voice. The rest is the bedroom. Play appeared in 1999, expected by its maker to be a goodbye. It was not.
The song’s second life was licensing, films, ads, a quiet record that turned out to be usable in every room a picture needed a feeling. Moby has lived with the contradiction, a track he disliked becoming the one strangers use to name him. In Britain it charted in 2000 and helped drag the album into a success no electronica record of that modesty was supposed to have. Live, he plays it gently, the weakness he hated now the point. The Mott Street building, he has remembered, was a strange stack of mafia neighbors and rehearsal rooms. Iggy on the step, Sonic Youth with a stroller. The fragile single came out of that noise, which is a joke the song does not tell.
I was involved with this really, really wonderful woman, and I loved her very much. But I knew deep in my heart of hearts that we had no business being romantically involved.
(Moby, Billboard, 2000)
What the prettiness conceals is the argument inside the affection. He is not celebrating a love. He is describing one he intends to end, or knows he should. The reversed strings make time feel slightly wrong, which suits a relationship that is already late. Radio heard ache and played the ache. The ache is accurate. The decision inside it is colder, and it is why the vocal refuses to swell. A bigger voice would have lied about the size of the man in the bedroom.
What remains is the almost-cut. Porcelain is the song a doubtful mixer left on because someone else insisted, and the insistence turned out to hear better than the maker. The bedroom is still in the vocal. The woman is not named. The strings keep running backward, as if the take could still be undone, which is the feeling he wrote down and then, luckily, did not erase.
