INTERVIEW: Hub Moore
- Chelsea Spear
Hub Moore can't sit still. His lanky frame is slouched over in the pink vinyl chair opposite me in London Records' meeting room, and his arms snap to attention, gestures illustrating or underlining points of interest. However, this fidgety nature is at odds with his speaking manner, which is low-key and free-floating. This is an apt metaphor for the singer/songwriter's debut album, Hub (Slash/London). Moore's intelligent, observant lyrics and dreamy melodies collide with bristling, ambient production to create atmospheric pop that suggests a cross between Luna and Paul Westerberg.
Born into a family of architects, Moore drifted away from his famillial trade to pursue music at a young age. "My father bought me a ukelele when I was a kid, and then I got a guitar when I was in fourth grade or something, and just got into it right away. I'd kind of known that I wanted to do that ever since then. I think I started young enough that I didn't consider -- well, no kid considers 'what the hell am I getting myself into?' I was just like, 'this is what I want to do.' I had bands in high school, and just continued doing this forever. I never wanted to do no architecture!"
Cutting his teeth on the local music scene in Boston, he eventually moved to New York City, where his literate songs found an enthusiastic audience in the form of renowned filmmaker Hal Hartley. "A friend of mine, a roommate at the time, was working on his first film. This was before he was the renowned guy that he is now -- this was his first thing. She was working in the props department or something. It came the end of the movie and he said, "do you have any ideas and suggestions?" Basically he was looking for music for this film that he could use for free, that was unknown. She gave him a tape of mine, and he used a song in his first film, and it went from there."
Hartley continued to use Moore's songs in his films, eventually writing an on-screen role for him in Surviving Desire. " I called him after Trust had come out and done pretty well ... just to say thanks, and he said, 'I wrote a part for you in my next movie.' I was like, 'Jeezus!' It was just gonna be a guy and a guitar, but he changed the idea to this whole band, as if you'd bring a whole band to serenade this girl. This is a very Hartley-esque idea. Originally it was gonna be this strummy ballad for this guy, but then he changed it." Though the director's usage of Moore's songs suggests a Greek chorus in the way the tunes commented on the action in the movie without intruding on it, the songwriter was never commissioned to write anything directly for the films. "With Trust I gave him a bunch of songs, and he just picked what he liked. What happened with that was that we had a four-track recording, which in the world of recording is pretty crude -- although it was good for a four-track recording, and he really liked a few of the songs. We went into a bigger studio to re-record them, and he ended up liking the first ones better, and that's what he used in the film." Though Moore describes his present musical output as being "entirely too cerulean" for the edgy atmosphere Hartley favoured in his next few films, he found himself collaborating with the director on the music for his latest film, Henry Fool. "He's been doing incidential music for his own films -- he plays guitar, and he wrote little things that would tie scenes together, like little guitar riffs, but not quite songs. I guess he'd always wanted to try turning some of these ideas into songs, so he got together with me and this singer, Lydia Kavanaugh ... and Jim Coleman. He brought us in to help him flesh out the ideas and perform these songs. He was sort of directing us, like we were in his film, and how he wanted these songs to be shaped. But he had never really done that, so he needed some people who actually had experience playing more chords than him."
Hartley didn't use Moore's songs for his previous three films. During that down time, Moore contacted his friend Chris Herford and started work on what was to become his solo debut. "Just when we started this project, I'd called him up and asked him if he'd be interested in producing something. I hadn't worked with him collaboratively since then, though we'd played together on and off. We came up with the whole sound of it -- it's murky and sort of strained."
Herford's background in production gave the project an unusual, dreamy sound. "It wasn't a conscious descision to be unique or anything, it was more like Chris was trying to bring out the best in my voice. It wasn't a conscious descision to be unique or anything, it was more like Chris was trying to bring out the best in my voice. How to surround my voice with the right sort of stuff that's going to complement it. ... We started out with voice and a guitar, and started building around that. He had some really good ideas, just sonically. I'd produced my stuff beforehand, and I always felt there was more to it there was more to it than what I was able to bring out. He was saying things like, 'your voice takes up a certain amount of room on the tape.' That's interesting -- I never really thought of it that way. Usually you play some guitar, you play some drums, and you put a voice on there. He was like, 'your voice is going to take up this much space, so you only have this much to put the other stuff in.' If you start with the voice, you know how much space is left, as opposed to putting all those instruments on and then putting a voice on top, and there might not be much room left for the voice. It's a concept I hadn't really thought of, but when I started doing it -- the voice just had so much more breathing room than it ever did before. That's what I think made the whole thing come alive and sound the way it does."
Lyrically, much of the album, particularly the lovely "Sane", with its observation that "the foundation is crumbling all around us," seems to have been inspired by the urban landscape surrounding him. "There's so many problems (in New York) that you really have to block out, like homelessness. I live across the street from a project of some sort, it's like three big buildings and lots of activity. You'll be sitting in your room, and you'll hear a child screaming, but you can't be like, 'what is it? let me save you!' -- because this is New York City. You can't get involved with everything that happens. I don't know if it's a question of thinking you're going to get shot or something, but if you followed up every lead of everything that happened, you'd be frazzled."
The initial pressing of Hub was self-released, and interest quickly spread through the music industry. When the flurry of interest arose, Moore decided to sign with Slash, the stalwart punk/alternative arm of PolyGram records. "I'd say the reason we went here was because of the people, obviously. Bob Viggs has such great history to him, and all the bands he's worked with -- mostly Slash and Warner Brothers, but it was all his vision and his taste. The main thing that struck me about that was looking at all those bands and where they sit in the world of music. They're kind of like -- highly accessible but not right up the middle. They're kind of left of center. A lot of his bands have had long careers and put out a lot of records. Los Lobos, X, Violent Femmes -- even the new bands, like Soul Coughing. It's just a lot of great music. ... The main thing was that Bob ... he was like, 'I know how I can make this work'. The other labels would say, 'I like it!' This guy's talking on a whole 'nother level. The things he's done in the past lead you to believe that he can make these things work. They're not obvious, they're kind of unusual -- it's a little stranger than Hanson."
The release of his self-titled debut finds Moore coming full circle with his background in movie music. "One of the guys in the Great Outdoors, and he was the contact person for them, so he's been getting all sorts of email over the years. 'We're looking for this music in the record stores! Where is it? Nobody's heard of it.We've reached an impasse!' I've compiled all these emails from over the years, of these people looking for this band that didn't exist ... I've been sending information on this out to all these people, all over the place. Got an email from a guy in London who bought it as an import just the other day. (mock British accent) 'I've finally found your CD! It was a bit more expensive, but well worth it.'" Indeed.
